Yup. The last Mac I ran Linux on was a 2016 MBP. And even then, audio and suspend/resume didn't work (well, suspend was fine, resume... not so much), and battery life was terrible. When I first installed it, the keyboard and touchpad required an out-of-tree driver.
That driver has been upstreamed, but I hear the 2017 and onward touchbar MBPs still require and out-of-tree driver, and a similar level of things don't work.
In 2019 I finally gave up and got a Dell XPS13. It's... basically perfect? The keyboard doesn't suck like recent MacBooks, though the touchpad isn't quite as nice (though really, it's perfectly fine). The only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader, but I knew that going in and didn't care. And subjectively the hardware isn't as pretty, but... oh well. On the plus side, I really do like the "soft touch" palm rest better than the harsh aluminum of the MacBook.
I'm definitely interested in the Linux-on-M1 project's progress from an intellectual curiosity standpoint, but I'm expecting long-term as a user it'll be just as -- if not more -- frustrating as running Linux on any Intel MacBook from the last 5 years, which means I won't bother.
My last Mac running Linux was a 2011 MacBook Air 13". My Linux (work) laptop is an XPS15. Now that optimus on Linux is completely transparent (merged into Xorg in April '20). Sleep doesn't seem to work well though. Fans keep spinning and it drains about 10% of the battery per hour. If anyone knows how to get around that "active sleep" mode I'd appreciate it.
My personal laptop is an HP Envy X360 with a Ryzen 5 2500U. That was rough when it came out. Windows update updated the bios on the laptop which installed a new GPU firmware that wasn't supported by the Linux driver for a few months. It's been solid since kernel 5.0 came out.
IMHO, the Linux experience on the AMD APUs is better than the Windows experience due to how rough the AMD windows drivers can be for the APUs. The fans are always shrieking at me under Windows but at idle they are off in Linux and the battery lasts significantly longer.
> And even then, audio and suspend/resume didn't work (well, suspend was fine, resume... not so much)
The computer never woke and needed to be hard-rebooted if it was ever allowed to suspend? I ran into this after installing Linux on a MacBook, downgrading the kernel to an old LTS release eventually worked.
Yep. The issue was that the NVMe controller wouldn't wake up properly. Downgrading the kernel wouldn't have helped, as support for that NVMe controller itself had just recently been added.
That driver has been upstreamed, but I hear the 2017 and onward touchbar MBPs still require and out-of-tree driver, and a similar level of things don't work.
In 2019 I finally gave up and got a Dell XPS13. It's... basically perfect? The keyboard doesn't suck like recent MacBooks, though the touchpad isn't quite as nice (though really, it's perfectly fine). The only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader, but I knew that going in and didn't care. And subjectively the hardware isn't as pretty, but... oh well. On the plus side, I really do like the "soft touch" palm rest better than the harsh aluminum of the MacBook.
I'm definitely interested in the Linux-on-M1 project's progress from an intellectual curiosity standpoint, but I'm expecting long-term as a user it'll be just as -- if not more -- frustrating as running Linux on any Intel MacBook from the last 5 years, which means I won't bother.