The desktop is back on Windows.
Not a defeat, exactly. More of a honest accounting. The Intel AX211 Bluetooth chipset has poor Linux support. The Xbox controller connects and drops. The Hyprland crash on monitor power-off is a known bug with no clean fix. These are not configuration problems. They are gaps in driver support that exist whether or not you want them to.
The MacBook experiment is a different story. The MacBook 12” is running Arch Linux and Hyprland, and it is largely working. The keys do what you tell them. The workflow is clean. The machine is stable.
Why the difference
The MacBook 12” is a fixed hardware target. Every unit shipped with the same components. The Linux community has had years to document every quirk, write every workaround, and argue about every driver parameter. When you install Arch on a MacBook 12” in 2026, you are the beneficiary of that accumulated work.
The desktop PC is a lottery. A specific chipset revision, a specific firmware version, a specific combination of drivers. Someone may have solved your exact configuration. Someone may not have.
The stability difference is not Linux being better on Apple hardware. It is that someone already solved all the MacBook 12” problems before you arrived.
The honest position
Linux gives you freedom from something more than freedom to something.
Freedom from forced updates. Freedom from ads in the Start menu. Freedom from Recall, from telemetry you cannot fully disable, from software you did not ask for and cannot cleanly remove. That is real. It is worth something.
But the “you can do anything” promise has an asterisk. You can do anything if someone has already written it, or if you can write it yourself. For most people, that is the same ceiling as any other OS. Just with different walls.
The MacBook has no sound through the built-in speakers. The driver does not send the initialisation sequence the hardware expects. The fix requires reverse-engineering vendor-specific commands from the macOS driver. That is not a configuration problem. It is a feature that does not exist yet, waiting for someone with the time and the hardware to write it.
The speaker will probably never work. Or it will work in two years when someone with the right motivation gets around to it. Either way, it is not in your hands.
The irony
Apple ships machines running a Darwin kernel, with a terminal, with clang installed by default. Then spends considerable engineering effort making sure you can only run their OS on it. They build the best Unix hardware and make it the hardest to run Unix on.
The whole point of this experiment was the Linux ethos: the hardware you own should do what you tell it. That is why the desktop issues sting more than the MacBook ones. The Bluetooth drop and the kernel panic are the hardware fighting back against the principle. The MacBook working is almost accidental.
What Linux is, honestly
For what the MacBook is (lightweight daily driver, terminal work, browser, a window manager that does exactly what you tell it), it is a good fit. The freedom from Microsoft is real. The control over your own environment is real. Hyprland is genuinely the best window manager available on any platform.
But local LLMs need RAM and GPU compute. Games need HDR and a working controller. Peripherals need drivers that may or may not exist for your hardware.
The honest version of Linux is: you trade one set of constraints for a different set of constraints, and you lose the advertising. For the right use case, on the right hardware, that is a worthwhile trade. It just requires being clear-eyed about what you are actually getting.
Freedom from. Not freedom to.