Right but a secondhand thinkpad is not a laptop you find in the travel context of the thread.

(I dispute the main point, too — I spent flipping hours trying and failing to get trackpad speed right on a Surface Go in GNOME/Wayland. Ended up having to abandon that combination.)

> Surface Go

Avoid.

Lenovo only, T or P series. At least in the samples I've had, all the drivers have been in-kernel upon release of the hardware.

On the contrary it (faster Surface Go 2) was one of the most practical little machines I’ve ever used, and was really impressive in Windows 11.

I am totally happy to lay the blame for the poor trackpad performance in Gnome/Wayland on the software, because the hardware was super. Absent that problem I would have used it for almost anything and I loved taking it on trains and to coffee shops; Apple has no equivalent machine at all.

But you’re making the point for me. Success in Linux involves either tinkering or constrained hardware choices, even now. That’s fine but I think the Linux world pretends the situation is better.

> But you’re making the point for me. Success in Linux involves either tinkering or constrained hardware choices, even now. That’s fine but I think the Linux world pretends the situation is better.

Have you heard of this new Windows thing that everyone's going on about? Almost nothing supports it out of the box and it's just all tinkering - and that's for something you have to pay a lot of money for.

You're equally hardware-constrained with Apple too. Can you find me an Apple laptop with four "proper" USB ports, a Displayport socket, and swappable battery?

> You're equally hardware-constrained with Apple too. Can you find me an Apple laptop with four "proper" USB ports, a Displayport socket, and swappable battery?

This is now a circular argument.

As I said, a Mac is a Mac is a Mac. Nobody is arguing it is otherwise.

That's the whole point of the thread I was replying to.

> As I said, a Mac is a Mac is a Mac. Nobody is arguing it is otherwise.

Okay, and a Mac is no use. You're locked into a software ecosystem that no-one uses and you have exceptionally limited hardware.

"Success in MacOS” also has constrained hardware choices :)

> That’s fine but I think the Linux world pretends the situation is better.

The only thing comparable is Microsoft. Nothing else comes close to trying to support the variety of hardware and software from different places.

Of course it does! I'm exactly suggesting that those constrained hardware choices have value in the context discussed (agreeing with an earlier poster) and that in fact, if you're out on the road or you're under pressure and something fails, the Mac does have that advantage: you'll easily find one and there is no setup time to speak of.