I love linux

I love linux. I discovered the world of linux around 2-3 years ago, and have since then bought an old ThinkCentre as my livingroom streaming PC, as well as a Thinkpad X201 (that I love!) for traveling. The combination of VoidOS and i3wm is hard to beat for me, at least in terms of productivity.

"Ok, so why do you use a macbook then?" you may be thinking. To answer this, I will share a little story...

A necessary evil

I was 18, I had just finished highschool and decided that I was going to study music production at a local folkhögskola (which essentially is the swedish version of community college, I suppose), and so I applied and got accepted. One minor issue though, the school used Logic Pro for music production (which is exclusive to the apple ecosystem). Since I was using a Thinkpad at the time, I emailed the tutors and they made it clear to me that if I was not going to convert to MacOS I could not attend. I surrendered, and rented a mac from the school for me to use (a 2020 Touchbar Intel MacBook). At this point I had been using Windows my entire life and so the first week with MacOS was pure misery, but after a few months I had grown accustomed to it.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the reasons why I had begun preferring MacOS over Windows after those first few months was not because of Apple's hardware or the fancy new programs I now had access to. There were two reasons; the first one was that every USB device I owned now didn't need proprietary drivers and bloatware in order to work anymore (as was the case with Windows), and this was stress-relieving for someone like me, moving from music-studio to music-studio and using all kinds of different audio, midi and dante interfaces interchangeably. The second reason was the unix filesystem and everything that came with it. I started to learn programming, started writing bash scripts, and playing around with the built-in automation systems. These are all things I never thought to do on my Windows machine... this macbook struck a chord inside me.

An awful predicament

Fast-forward to today - my main machine is a Macbook M3 Pro. I have started using linux daily (as I mentioned in the first paragraph) but I'm still stuck with a macbook as my main machine. This is the case for several reasons:

1. It is dead-quiet, all the time. This is critical for when I'm recording.
2. Power-effiency. I can take this machine with me to work or on a roadtrip and it can last an entire day without requiring a charge.
3. The display. The 16:10 aspect ratio is perfect for various productivity tasks.
4. The build-quality. The hinges are rock-solid and the thin metal chassi may make the machine look dainty but it also delivers a very rugged "built like a tank" kind-of-feeling.
5. Macbooks have the best touchpads, period. I will stand by this.

But that's where all the good things I have to say about Macbooks end. I hate MacOS. Sure, MacOS looks nice, but I'm a power-user. I've had to do a ton of configuration in order to make this machine behave like my VoidLinux/i3 thinkpad (a blogpost explaining my MacOS configuration is due in the future).

And of course, I have to mention the elephant in the room - the fact that a Macbook is not user-servicable nor upgradeable.

I've tried leaving MacOS before

The reasons I listed above for why I'm using a Macbook are not mere reasons, they are strict priorities. These are the things that I value the most in a computer, and they have been derived from a terrible experience.

At the end of 2025, I was going to do it. I was going to quit the Apple ecosystem. I had already phased Google and Microsoft products out of my life at that point, and so I thought that doing the same with my Apple products would be just as easy. I did some research and came to the conclusion that a reasonable linux upgrade to my M3 would be a Thinkpad P15 G2 (2023). On paper, it was a monster - 96GB DDR4, 13th gen i9, GTX4000 and 3TB of storage. I bought it.

A week later it arrived, and it was just as beautiful as I had imagined. First thing I did was replace the stock install of Windows with VoidOS and set up my config - this took two days. On the third day I was going to run one of my typical mixing projects on it to test performance under load (several gigabytes of audio, 150+ tracks, 30+ automation lanes as well as 100+ plugins), and then it happened... Fan-noise. This was the first time I had heard a computers fans kick in when running a mixing project for a couple years, actually. I was not happy about this, and honestly, I was stressed and anxious. This performance test had unexpectedly turned into a race against the clock: troubleshoot the cause of the fan-noise before the end of the computers return-window.

I tried everything. Updating the bios, lm-sensors, pwmconfig, thinkfan, trying different distros, cleaning the internals, replacing the thermal paste... It was all in vain. Following this anguish, I considered myself defeated and returned the computer. Since I had messed around with its software and hardware I was not eligible to get a full refund, so I had lost a good sum of money and had no computer to show for it.

After this ordeal had ended, I came to the conclusion that there currently is no aarch/x86 laptop that could meet my very opinionated requirements.

I want to use linux on my main machine, but 2026 is not the right time to commit to it. Perhaps my dream computer will be announced in due time, or it may already exist out there in the wild? But for the time being, I will keep living life as mac user.