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It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to buy a Mac if you're not going to use Mac OS as your daily driver. A lot of the benefits (e.g. battery life, touchpad quality) are dependent on software as well as hardware, and are greatly diminished on Windows or Linux.


I've never been that impressed with the Mac Mini's battery life or touchpad :-)


Actually I had a Mac mini with the touchpad and the damn thing disconnected three times a day. All my input devices have wires now and the stick out of the right places.


Touché. But seriously, most people who want to run Linux on Mac want to do it because they like Apple's laptop hardware. If you want a compact Linux desktop then a NUC should probably serve you just as well. Or at least, this was the case while Apple was still using Intel chips. If Apple Silicon lives up to expectations then I suppose there could finally be a compelling reason for running Linux on a Mac desktop.

To be clear, I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly be any good reason for wanting to run Linux on a Mac desktop. But desktops are already a niche product for Apple, and people who want to run Linux on Mac desktops are arguably a tiny niche within a niche.


Mac Mini doesn't raise those issues.


libinput's touchpad support is pretty great recently. working on an xps 17, and the touchpad is - no joke - just like the touchpad on my previous MBP.


You can speculate but we will never know for certain.




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