Hardware
I really don’t think buying a priced laptop for Linux is good choice, as there is not much hardware company optimising for Linux. Most Linux distros are all designed for generic hardware. Another reason for me to buy a fair price laptop is I want to be minimalist based on my usage like coding and webbing.
I finally got one bargain laptop with fair decent hardware, Lenovo ideapad s 530 81WU, it only cost me around 455 US$ which has i3 10gen CPU and 8G RAM, also it has what I expected performance according my geekbench5 test.
Linux
I made a brave choice not to use Ubuntu.
Firstly I am not an experience Linux desktop user even I has been using Linux as server for years. To me almost all distro are likely same to me as terminal is main thing I would use however I do use some UI.
Here is my journey of selecting distro of Linux:
- Ubuntu: I prefer lite UI and newer kernel.
- Arch Linux: I still prefer staging kernel and considering myself not experience Linux user.
- Linux Mint: I almost go with it if I didn’t choose Mx Linux.
- Mx Linux 19.1 AHS: Xcfe made me feels like MacOS , debian 10, Linux 5.4 kernel.
I go MX Linux almost blindly, surprisingly with its advance hard support (AHS) version and Linux 5.4 kernel almost all my laptop hardware including Bluetooth,WiFi,speaker, all function keys specially keyboard light as well as display are supported out of box. Only thing I still didn’t get it working is fingerprint scan. however I managed to get the driver issue subscribed so I can make it once the issue addressed.
Tools
Reason I switch to Linux is I do need a Linux kernel in local rather any kind of VM. Most people didn’t release docker in Mac runs in a tiny VM , it makes me so annoyed to addressing network problem even I know it can be solved in most cases.
ITerm2 is the most thing I missed after switching to Linux , fortunately I found a Linux alternative tool terminator 2.0 . I know someone will mention tmux, however as I am a iterm2 user , terminator is more suit for me, plus a right click paste.
Tools porting without difference from Mac , love it
- vscode
- atom
- ohmyzsh
With fresh Linux laptop I also did a few plays on my kubernetes project https://github.com/yikaus/k3s-cicd , tried on machine learning with anaconda3, python extension on vscode. All this made me a day.
Games
I barely play game especially online games. Only for curiosity I tried starcraft which I played almost 22 years ago , still not good at it.
I follow the most Linux user installing wine to run games, however I feel my laptop struggled on it, probably the hardware and video or wine itself, even a 22 years old game.
Conclusion
I feel successful when switching from Mac to Linux on my purpose.
- I don’t use any photo or video editing even it might have some good tool out there on Linux , I have not tried those.
- I didn’t feel much difference from macos to xcfe on my daily use.
- Choosing Linux distro can be tricky as it might cost you huge amount of time to try out. I personally stick to debian family as I use it for many years.
- No Support for Linux? Of course you will get some unexpected issue while using it , However I feel Linux improved a lot on those hardware support. Find a place to raise question also important.
