I wanted to post this myself because I swear by my Framework 13 and it's my workhorse. However, it doesn't hold a candle to my wife's M3 Pro on a number of metrics mentioned here such as: Battery life, screen quality, and overall performance.

The Framework (Intel 12th Gen) also has the added benefit of heating the house, particularly with graphics "heavy" workloads (lots of windows open in GNOME Mutter, VMs, etc).

Framework is nice but it's far from Apple's laptop hardware quality. The biggest draw of the Framework is its modularity.

Well limiting to specifically OP's example (M4 Mac), Asahi doesn't support it yet. :(

Is Asahi installed side by side on a mac? You pick it at boot? And how “install and just use” it is?

IIRC, there bunch of random things that still don't work -- no USB-C output, webcam, audio and if I've to guess suspend/resume is probably not rock solid either. The only benefit is that you get to use Linux, but then you may lose on actually getting work done without worrying about these issues. The new UI is inferior, but can still get things done.

Asahi Linux doesn't support the M3 or M4. That said, I'd be curious why OP doesn't consider Asahi on M2 to be a good option. AFAIK the only thing missing at this point is Thunderbolt and USB-C display output (HDMI out works fine).

Asahi is only supporting M1, and partly M2 I believe. M3 was enough of a change that there are no drivers for it.

I guess if you autostart the linux VM upon booting this should work. I am doing actually the same with BeOS but using a Linux as the hardware compatibility layer. Linux distro is configured to autologin to sway which starts a VM and run it fullscreen. The guest VM is configured to use all the laptop ram leaving only 1GB for the host. In the second virtual desktop the pulseaudio volume control, wifi and bluetooth management tools are automatically open so I can easily plug a BT headphone, switch network.

The linux distro automatically shutdown if I shutdown the VM. I am using swaylock to lock the screen when I am away.

I found that I’m missing the netbook era. I need some 11inch laptop when I’m on the go for email, writing, and coding. For more focused task, I’m not giving up my 2 monitors setup and my mechanical keyboard so the computer form factor matters less.

The ThinkPad X1 series usually have great linux support and you can option them with 2.8k@120Hz OLED panels, which at 14" lands between the Air and the 14" Pro in terms of PPI. I have a couple generations old X1 Yoga and all of the hardware worked out of the box with Manjaro and Debian, including the touchscreen and active stylus.

People usually buy them for the keyboards and trackpoint, but imo the touchpad is still pretty solid. It is a bit small on account of the trackpoint buttons taking up vertical real estate but its pretty responsive and multi-touch gestures work perfectly in my experience. I believe newer ones have larger trackpads than mine, though still not as large as a similarly sized mac.

The HP zbook g1a ultra is as close as you can get with Strix Halo. There are two screen options and the OLED one is high resolution. It's Ubuntu certified as well and can run LLMs nicely. The keyboard, trackpad, etc are all to notch. It's somewhere in between a mac pro and max.

I have one and love it but it's not close to my wife's mac on battery life.

HP ZBook Ultra G1a? It has Strix Halo, 14" 2880x1800 (242 ppi) 120 Hz VRR OLED, and Ubuntu 24.04 options.

Can't speak for the keyboard, but HP ZBooks/EliteBooks tend to be decent.

> retina resolution

That just means 3024x1964. With other laptops you can either go up a step to 4k or down to OLED 2880xsomething.

Razer Blade is my windows laptop. The hardware is great, MacBook nice, but it needs the chip efficiency.

Well, the highest resolution MacBook has less than 4K resolution and there's plenty of 4K laptops out there...

Most "business" centric laptops work great with Linux, as long as you use a well supported distro (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSuse). YMMV if you use other distros...

Your best option is framework IMO.

The 2.8k panels are overall inferior to Apple's across a number of metrics, but they have a higher pixel density than the Air 13, (and has the S-tier aspect ratio of 3:2).

The FW13 keyboard is objectively pretty decent but not perfect, and is much much better than any keyboard Apple has made in the last decade, could be personal preference but apple has been making some pretty bad keyboards for a while now.

Trackpad on FW13 is OK, no one even comes close to Apple, but it's pretty decent, nothing upsetting if you're comparing it to any non-apple trackpads.

Framework has excellent linux suppport, all hardware bells and whistles generally work out of the box on every Linux distro, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Bazzite are officially supported by Framework they QA against all three and work with maintainers to resolve issues and you can be totally confident that everything will just work. (At least work as well as it would on Windows!)

The other two downsides relative to a macbook are build quality and support. Although the FW13 is pretty solid in practice, I have dropped mine dozens of times and throw it in my bag and treat it overall rough and it has take on some dings and scratches but everything still works. But the frame is not very rigid, it flexes in lots of places, and it just does not feel as nice and solid as a macbook. And support can be hit-or-miss, like with any small manufacturer.

The G14 definitely matches in build or exceeds in build quality, keyboard, trackpad, speakers, and display. Battery life is shorter though. But it has a better GPU and supports Linux, which is way more important to me than an hour or two extra battery.

The Framework is also excellent, but with different compromises: that sweet display aspect ratio for instance, but no OLED.