I'm assuming you're using Asahi Linux on your Macs (though you said you wouldn't touch it..). The lack of hardware diversity should make comparability easier, even if everything need to be reversed engineered.
I get 6 hours or so on my machine. Its pretty much silent, unless I push it. Its a Ryzen 7 5700u. We do a lot of parallel compute and genetics code tends massively parallel and x86 optimized. Mostly run on cluster though. I haven't done any maintenance and have had not hardware issues.
I don't link I could ever go back to macos, or windows.
The negative experiences with the thinkpad are typical of all the intel laptops I have recently used, preloaded OS (including Windows, and to a lesser extent, Linux and MacOS), or not.
Whenever I look for an AMD laptop, it has a low resolution (1080p) display, and/or an off-center keyboard/trackpad (or has some other obvious fatal flaw).
I'm typing this on an M2 macbook. I do 100% of my work in an "8 core" arm Linux VM that can only use one core for userspace stuff (according to top), but that still kicks the pants off my previous laptop.
I'm strongly considering dual booting into asahi.
>Whenever I look for an AMD laptop, it has a low resolution (1080p) display, and/or an off-center keyboard/trackpad (or has some other obvious fatal flaw).
yup it has both of those. But the screen is only15", and I'm old so it doesn't matter. It not glossy which I really like though.
If you love the mac hardware, give Asahi a try. My understanding its the best linux for the M-series macbooks. Linux is great for developing on and they seem to be making great progress.
Laptop displays are also a common frustration, though this has been improving lately. Still too many models stuck on 16:9 aspect ratio though, which is suboptimal for anything but watching movies due to lack of vertical real estate. By the time you've factored in all the taskbars, titlebars, toolbars, menubars, tab bars, and status bars you've got a keyhole left to peer through. This is less of a problem for those using something like i3 or Sway where half of those bars are hidden but tiling WMs just aren't my thing.
And then it needed some fractional scaling factor. Wayland apps worked ok with that scaling (though rendering was perceivably jankier), but some X11 apps would just be blurry. At the time there was no solution for there apps and looking at an extremely blurry CLion all day is no fun. The only solution was to run the whole desktop environment in 1x scaling and use this GNOME option to use larger fonts and widgets. Which worked ok-ish, but many things are sized in a funny way.
I just couldn't tolerate so much brokenness.
(And don't get me started on sharing a screen in Zoom conference calls.)
Now waiting for the Ryzen 7840U configured to 15W to be available with 64GB ram.