I don't know about "best", but I'm very happy with my last few Lenovo ThinkPads (X1 carbon, nano, some T-series). Before that, I had some Asus Zenbook, and everything worked as well. All had 4-15hr batteries, more than I expected in their respective eras. I've heard Dell XPS were good too.
There is no black magic. The only trick is checking the amazing Arch Linux wiki [1]. It will tell you everything you need to know, things like avoiding the recent Intel MIPI webcams (Linux support is coming, but count a couple of years for out-of-the-box).
Regarding Desktop Environments, it depends on your taste. I don't enjoy Gnome, but OSX refugees tend to like it. I've used XFCE, LXDE, LXQt, and recently KDE, and I have only good things to say about all. And tiling DE aficionados are spoiled for choice.
Plus, exchanging low-level code with Windows (wsl2) and OSX (largely posix-compatible) has never been easier. The only remaining issue being if you go down to assembly (Aarch64-vs-x86_64), which only crops up if you depend on proprietary applications.
To summarize, the picture is quite good nowadays, has been for a while, and is only improving. Of course, the one problem is closed-source apps. If you rely on one, document yourself on its quirks. Otherwise, Arch Linux wiki for hw support, and you're golden.
> I’m done. macOS has drifted too far into locked-down mediocrity
Can you please share few examples that you faced that were related to "locking down" of macOS?
I don't know about "best", but I'm very happy with my last few Lenovo ThinkPads (X1 carbon, nano, some T-series). Before that, I had some Asus Zenbook, and everything worked as well. All had 4-15hr batteries, more than I expected in their respective eras. I've heard Dell XPS were good too.
There is no black magic. The only trick is checking the amazing Arch Linux wiki [1]. It will tell you everything you need to know, things like avoiding the recent Intel MIPI webcams (Linux support is coming, but count a couple of years for out-of-the-box).
Regarding Desktop Environments, it depends on your taste. I don't enjoy Gnome, but OSX refugees tend to like it. I've used XFCE, LXDE, LXQt, and recently KDE, and I have only good things to say about all. And tiling DE aficionados are spoiled for choice.
Plus, exchanging low-level code with Windows (wsl2) and OSX (largely posix-compatible) has never been easier. The only remaining issue being if you go down to assembly (Aarch64-vs-x86_64), which only crops up if you depend on proprietary applications.
To summarize, the picture is quite good nowadays, has been for a while, and is only improving. Of course, the one problem is closed-source apps. If you rely on one, document yourself on its quirks. Otherwise, Arch Linux wiki for hw support, and you're golden.
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org
Thanks! re: desktop environment, I am sooooo excited to get back to i3/sway. Peak desktop experience for me. :)
Maybe https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/ is of some interest to you.
Thinkpad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8
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