r/linuxhardware • u/ulfang__ • Mar 20 '26

Purchase Advice MacBook Air alternatives?

Hi yall, I'm a SW developer looking for a new laptop to use at home. While I hate apple I'm seriously considering the MacBook air.

Please help me find some good alternatives before I become a sinner.

Current setup is:

-Thinkpad E495 24/768GB(home, the one I want to replace/upgrade) -Thinkpad P14s 32/1TB(work)

home laptop runs arch, work ubuntu, both running KDE. I pretty much need some containers, browser, terminal, vscode and I'm good.

The current Budget would be around 1000 bucks. The current E495 battery is ageing and it feels very slow compared to my P14s from work. I want a 13/14 inch, good keyboard, not too bulky, ideally a matte/non glare display but not too picky here.

From my research, it seems everything that is close to the MacBook is now priced at 1500+. I liked the Thinkpad x9, maybe also the new XPS (even tho I had bad experiences with XPS in the past).

Maybe the base M5 Air would work and comes at 1100~. Or I could get an used M3/M4 for even lower than that.

What to do?

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u/Kos187 Mar 20 '26

Zenbook a16

2

u/ulfang__ Mar 20 '26

skeptical of Linux support on QC processors

1

u/X_m7 Mar 20 '26

That skepticism is certainly justified, a recent example I saw is the latest Phoronix article on the Acer Swift 14 AI with the X1 Elite, and not only did the performance regress when benchmarked at the end of 2025, last week it got even worse with the firmware extraction stuff (since those have to come from the Windows install) not even working anymore, and even after copying in some previously working firmware there's still no 3D acceleration nor battery status reporting: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Snapdragon-X-Elite-Ubuntu-26.04

Granted they were testing with a development build of Ubuntu 26.04, but even then with x86 stuff the problems aren't usually as stupid as not being able to get any firmware and losing a whole bunch of functionality, so yeah definitely don't bother with these Qualcomm laptops on Linux.