Agree. It’s a shame the Linux community is so set in its ways. All I really want is decent, grown-up looking Arch Linux laptop with reasonable battery life and performance that boots to CLI and has retina resolution (>200ppi). People imagine retina must be all about graphics, but for me it’s 90% for sharp text. It doubles the amount of time I can use a computer before my brain starts flagging. I use a MacBook Pro because of retina. I wish the rest of the industry would get their shit together, it’s like they have a huge collective blind spot. It’s bizarre to me that PPI is almost never listed on spec sheets and I have to calculate it myself to find out if the screen is going to make my eyes and brain hurt. And they almost all fall short. Outside Apple, high PPI seems to be limited to ‘gamer’ laptops with flashing multicoloured lights for overgrown children. I wish someone would just make a decent plain aluminium laptop with a sharp screen. End rant. Sorry.
100% agreed. My dream machine would be an M2+ Air running a stable release of Debian with full hardware support. (And I mean full hardware support, including the fingerprint scanner, trackpad gestures, properly handling the notch where applicable, etc.)
Apparently Asahi recently published their first alpha release. Does anyone know how close it is to being usable as a daily driver?
Also, has anyone tried the Tuxedo laptop that came up in another recent thread? I'd be surprised if the trackpad entirely held up, and I'm personally against including USB-A or proprietary charging ports in any new hardware, but it is at least the first Linux laptop I've seen with a high-DPI screen. Inclusion of a Dvorak layout option is also a nice touch (Apple still forces me to pop out and rearrange the keys, which feels like a ridiculous kludge for such expensive devices). If Ryzen 7 is halfway competitive with M1's efficiency, I could see this being a very attractive option for a lot of people.
If all the apple hardware including their gpu (maybe except particularly proprietary things like Touch ID / Secure Enclave) were supported well on Linux and power management we’re sufficiently figured out to not bea total disaster, would that be ok or is it unacceptable that the thing came with nonfree software or to risk apple’s future hardware being unsupportable?
That would be more than OK. I have no hard rules about free vs non-free, I’m pragmatic. But I don’t see that happening. Apple don’t want to put time into helping support other OSes on their hardware, it’s not something they want to do and that’s their call. At least they design good computers. What frustrates me is that no one else in the industry gives the slightest f** about pixel density, even when Apple has demonstrated for years that people really value sharpness. Other manufacturers don’t even mention pixel density, it feels like they’re denying reality. Anyone who looks at an Apple screen can see the difference. My elderly mother said ‘wow’ when she saw her first retina laptop screen. It’s just a different experience. It’s weird how this has been the situation for so many years now.
> What frustrates me is that no one else in the industry gives the slightest fuck about pixel density, even when Apple has demonstrated for years that people really value sharpness.
It's not that they don't, it's that they can't. There's no way to make a high ppi laptop that's small and light and doesn't kill the battery in 3 hours of use.
GPUs that drive that many pixels are power hungry. Apple designs their own integrated GPUs now.
