I have a similar story. I built a Linux workstation running Mint when apple’s laptops were bad. I love / hate it. The machine (amd x5800) is insanely fast and responsive compared to the laptop it’s replacing. But so many niggles:
- I use an apple trackpad and everything is weird with it. Sensitivity is all wrong and I still get spurious taps and clicks. FF doesn’t have smooth scrolling working by default. Intellij doesn’t support it at all. Driver is buggy too - sometimes after waking from sleep I have to power cycle my keyboard / trackpad for them to work.
- There don’t seem to be any consistency around keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+C sometimes copies and sometimes sends SIGINT. What’s the shortcut for “move cursor forward one word” or “move cursor to end of line”? On macos those shortcuts are consistent in every app. On Linux? Nope! I can’t even configure intellij to use the shortcuts I’m used to because it doesn’t let you use the meta key as a modifier.
- Hibernate and sleep is buggy. Sometimes the machine just doesn’t come back up.
- I sometimes have a duplicate mouse cursor, just hovering over all my windows for no reason. I can’t get rid of it. Apparently it has something to do with hidpi but who knows what.
And so on. There’s so many little interactions where something is half broken and I roll my eyes and move on with my life. For all its flaws, I didn’t realise how good macos is until I switched to Linux. Linux is definitely better than it was - all my hardware more or less worked out of the box. But I’m still keeping an eye on apple’s rumoured M1X laptops.
Check out Elementary. I won't suggest switching distros entirely, but maybe you can get your hands on the trackpad parts?
I just switched and both the Dell trackpad and Magic Trackpad worked flawlessly at a macOS quality level. Superior to Windows, but really macOS (and now Elementary) is the quality bar.
Just to clarify, are you saying that there is a Linux distro out there which you can install on a 2019+ model MBP which will not ruin the touchpad with multitouch and battery experience?
- I use an apple trackpad and everything is weird with it. Sensitivity is all wrong and I still get spurious taps and clicks. FF doesn’t have smooth scrolling working by default. Intellij doesn’t support it at all. Driver is buggy too - sometimes after waking from sleep I have to power cycle my keyboard / trackpad for them to work.
- There don’t seem to be any consistency around keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+C sometimes copies and sometimes sends SIGINT. What’s the shortcut for “move cursor forward one word” or “move cursor to end of line”? On macos those shortcuts are consistent in every app. On Linux? Nope! I can’t even configure intellij to use the shortcuts I’m used to because it doesn’t let you use the meta key as a modifier.
- Hibernate and sleep is buggy. Sometimes the machine just doesn’t come back up.
- I sometimes have a duplicate mouse cursor, just hovering over all my windows for no reason. I can’t get rid of it. Apparently it has something to do with hidpi but who knows what.
And so on. There’s so many little interactions where something is half broken and I roll my eyes and move on with my life. For all its flaws, I didn’t realise how good macos is until I switched to Linux. Linux is definitely better than it was - all my hardware more or less worked out of the box. But I’m still keeping an eye on apple’s rumoured M1X laptops.