The other night. I picked up my 2019 MacBook Pro 15 from where it was charging with the lid closed. I noticed (once again) that it was unreasonably warm for being off, unplugged it and took it with me to the other room so that I could mess with it later. I got distracted having fun for a while but eventually wanted to use it, at which point I found it completely drained and showing the firmware “charge me” graphic.
This inspired a new moment of weakness in me where I started pricing out M4 MacBook Pro models. I have a M2 from my employer and the reliability and battery life are exquisite. If it weren’t for the declining OS and the hardware lock-in (T2 Linux is hard and while I admire the work on Asahi for the M-series, I wouldn’t bet money that any hardware will become (or stay) compatible with it) I would be quite interested in getting a new one.
What I want to know is if anyone has found a great solution for scratching that MacBook itch in a Linux laptop. I mainly want reasonable size/weight, a large screen, and all-day battery life for thin-client usage. I also want to run Linux (Bazzite/SilverBlue would be good, but I can wrangle whatever), and I want the hardware to work with the OS for decent power controls (sleep states, not burning the battery out when the lid is closed, reasonable wake times, whatnot). If I could get broad-spectrum capabilities like a Ryzen AI Max setup, that would be great, but I can remote to my desktops or homelab for that stuff, so it doesn’t need to be more than a good keyboard and screen with battery life and a browser.
Do such things exist? Or is it too much to ask without being shackled to Windows/MacOS?
I have two framework laptops. A 13 with a core ultra 7 155h and a 12 with an i5- 1334U. Both have been great and very reliable. The 13 has Fedora 42 and the 12 has Fedora Silverblue (trying it out). Performance they are not even close, but battery life is very different. My 13 lasts 3-5 hours in the performance mode. Balanced does not make much of a difference maybe an hour. I have not done the eco as it just feels wrong to limit it to 15 watts. My 12 lasts 6-10. I have only used it in performance mode. The screens are different, but both are good. My 13 has the higher res 120hz display. The 12 is the touch enabled 1920x1200 at 60hz. Both look great. On paper they are very different but to my eyes they are both great.
I have not used the 16 inch laptop so I can not compare. Just giving you some info on my experience with framework. I loved my MacBooks when I have them and almost got one again, but I really wanted Linux. I also looked at Dell, Lenovo, HP, and lots of gaming laptops. Several trips to Best Buy and MicroCenter were done in the search. My framework 13 total cost ~$2000 (pre-tariff woes). I did the DIY and acquired my memory (64GB) and ssd (4TB) on my own. The two MacBooks I was looking at were $2999 and $3499.
If you have any other questions feel free to ask. I will try to answer them.
Framework was one of the laptops I would consider, but your reports on battery life are pretty disappointing to me. I’ve wandered around the house with my work laptop for 8-10 hours, and still had a huge amount of battery meter left. I get a lot of anxiety trying to work on a laptop and wondering when the power is going to abruptly fail. I end up just running my Intel MacBook on wall power all the time, unless I’m taking it to a coffee shop and only planning on it being able to run for an hour. Less than 8-10 hours of guaranteed life feel like a luggable, rather than a real portable experience to me.
How is the sleep/wake experience on your frameworks? Do they ever end up running hot in your bag?
Wait, so you think MacOS is declining, too? The last time I used MacOS was High Sierra on a 2015 MBP. Since buying a MacBook Air M4 with MacOS Sequoia, I have hated how unstable it seems MacOS has become. I have lost count with how many times I’ve reset or reimaged this piece of shit.
I have never noticed them running warm in a bag. I have never had any issues with sleeping/waking. Sleep time on battery is not MacBook levels but its would take 3-4 days to drain the whole battery.
I can increase the battery life of my framework 13 by changing the power setting to Eco. That would limit the CPU to 15 watts. I keep mine set on performance which is 35w with boosting allowed to 60 watts. In theory it would make a big difference. I have also never changed or adjust the power mode settings, so you could gain some time there as well. The average I see with performance mode is 25-30 watts. I also use 15 Gnome Extensions, a few automation’s, and some customization’s. None that helps my battery life. I am far from a normal user. There are AMD CPU’s available as well and I have heard they are more efficient and perform just as well. If it would help I can change the power mode and see what difference it makes. I would need a few days to numbers.
Just as a contrast I had a Lenovo from a previous job that only got ~2 hours on battery and it was brand new. It would also overheat and drain itself if you put it in a bag, even if it was asleep.
I have not used the last few versions so I can not give an up to date opinion but I did notice a decline from anything after Snow Leopard. Mountain Lion was good too. Looking back though I have learned a lot over the years and at some point it only made sense to switch. Lots of little things led to the change.
FWIW my current work Lenovo gets something like 6 on RDP from a full charge, though it drains the battery from ~70% in 24 hours when sleeping and not plugged in. I did upgrade the memory to 96GB, which probably had a quiescent power of about 2W all by itself from the refresh. Draining the battery is all but expected with that kind of leakage.
Have not had Linux on it, though I do not expect too much problems. I might be wrong though.
I have not updated my only (x86) MacBook past Mojave to retain 32-bit compatibility.
I wonder if there is anything I had missed out, other than that almost nothing new still supported anything older than Catalina or Big Sur now.
I had a pretty serious outlier experience with my 2019 MBP where it was very unreliable out of the box and after a motherboard replacement. It took me weeks and three repair depot cycles to get a replacement that worked. I’ve had various OS/kernel issues across the Intel models as well as a bunch of userspace issues of various sorts.
My experience with the M-series hardware has been rock solid from the hardware/software level (although there are lots of application and SDK defects).
I’ve always been a big proponent of the Apple ecosystem because I like hardware and software that is end-to-end integrated and locked down to protect and empower me. Last OS, Apple removed the ability to run unsigned software that provides remote access services and that tore it for me. They have, for a long time, had the ability to lock me out of my systems for their own purposes, but they also had not previously did that in a way that offended me (the difficulty running kernel-level sound-processing extensions for a while was a red flag, but you could work around it reasonably and they did eventually fix it). A $3k-10k professional grade Mac is not a disposable appliance and I expect it to work well for a long time and be re-purposable when it no longer is my main computer. If Apple was maintaining first-class Linux support it would be one thing, but with the way they are going, I’m no longer confident that I won’t find some essential (to me) edge case of computing nerfed during the lifetime of my system. Windows is a tire fire, but at least you can put on steel-toed boots and kick it until it works mostly the way you want. You can’t even downgrade MacOS, and I just don’t trust Apple with that much of my pocket money anymore.
There’s snapdragon laptops with apparently great battery life. Some people are running Linux on them with some success. Might be worth a look. Lenovo, ASUS, both have snapdragon models
I like good old AMD64 so have not looked into ARM options myself.
I use the Zenbook S16 (UM5606) with Linux. Everything works just fine, and the battery life supported my job (code monkey) through an entire day away from an outlet. 16in OLED display, face recognition via Howdy, large trackpad, good keyboard, decent performance (I can do light gaming), and very thin (much thinner than the 16in macbook my new company saddled me with). Might be what your looking for.
I can give you more details about my linux experience if you’re interested.
There’s snapdragon laptops with apparently great battery life
I was seeing those and really liking the sound of the battery life. Seems like some of the hardware functions are buggy/bleeding edge for Linux, but the real question for me would be how well the power management works. No sense in losing x86 capabilities while also having same-same battery life because the components can’t power down and back up. (I already run my server with many power-management features disabled for stability, who wants a crashy/warm laptop). I’d love to hear from people who are using snapdragon laptops and happy with them under Linux.
I saw this one mentioned other places. It looks like it might be just what I’m looking for. Does all the hardware work? Is it reliable in sleep/wake/suspend?
Also make sure the OS and stuff isn’t writing to storage every couple of seconds. Keeping the SSD at low mW power states saves a lot of battery. Also pick DRAMless SSDs and check available power states before purchase. High-performance DRAM NVMe are a bad choice for battery.
And Linux has provisions with writeback caching in RAM. I use ZFS with tuning to let the SSD only ever write once per minute in one “big” chunk.
If you have the choice of RAM, 1x DIMM uses less power than two. Won’t get you dual channel, but saves battery. Soldered LPDDR is best for power, but obviously limiting in capacity and for upgrade considerations.
Display and CPU use most of the power. Cores and a CCD you only need 2% of the time still wants some degree of power 100% of the time.
Unfortunately this is not always possible! And this is for most linux laptops that I had experience with the biggest hurdle to battery life. I’ve seen laptops with this option in bios (some older thinkpads), but others don’t…
The second one is badly implemented hybrid graphics. I had a Dell precision 5570 (XPS 15 business equivalent) with 12th gen Intel and Nvidia ampere GPU), and I could never get the GPU to properly go to idle modes or to enable ASPM. Edit: To be fair, with this specific laptop my colleagues on windows had the same issue…
Probably avoid discrete graphics unless you absolutely need them and find out if the model you’re interested in supports S3 sleep on linux. Other than that both AMD and Intel’s modern offerings should provide pretty good battery life when configured well on a modern distro.
Those both look like solid and powerful options, but they seem to be sacrificing overall battery life for power and DGPU. Do you think either of them can get the 12-20hr battery life possible with the Apple or Snapdragon options? Or even close?
Just an update on putting the Intel Core Ultra 7 155h into Eco/Battery Saver mode. It does improve the battery life by about 50%. If I go off of how I use the laptop it would not last 10-12 hours, more like 6-8. The system does idle down to 3.2 watts and the estimate goes to like 14-16 hours, but that is with nothing open.
The Framework 12 with the i5 can definitely do it, but the screen is smaller 12.2 16:10 vs. 13.5 3:2.
It will be really tough to match Apples battery life on MacBooks. They can do it as they control the software and hardware. Even before the M processors they were doing it with Intel CPU’s. My old Core2Duo MacBook lasted 8-10 hours back in college. My previous HP/Compaq laptop got 2 on windows and 3.5 on Linux.