By default Gnome doesn’t let you choose any fractional scaling in the UI because it has some remaining TODOs on that front. So from the UI you choose 100% or 200%. But the code is there and it works if you just open a terminal and type a command to enable this “experimental” feature.

Now whether or not this feature should have remained experimental is a different debate. I personally find that similar to the fact that Gmail has labeled itself beta for many years.

Best you can do is build a high end desktop at home and access it remotely with any laptop you desire. The laptop performance then becomes mostly irrelevant (even the OS is less relevant) and by using modern game streaming protocols you can actually get great image quality, low latency and 60+ fps. Though, optimizing it for low bandwidth is still a chore.

Have that desktop be reachable with SSH for all your CLI and sys admin needs, use sunshine/moonlight for the remote streaming and tailscale for securing and making sunshine globally available.

I did some investigation into this the other day. The short answer seems to be that if you like MacBooks, you aren't willing to accept a downgrade along any axis, and you really want to use Linux, your best bet today is an M2 machine. But you'll still be sacrificing a few hours of battery life, Touch ID support (likely unfixable), and a handful of hardware support edge cases. Apple made M3s and M4s harder to support, so Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable.

Beyond that, Lunar Lake chips are evidently really really good. The Dell XPS line in particular shows a lot of promise for becoming a strict upgrade or sidegrade to the M2 line within a few years, assuming the haptic touchpad works as well as claimed. In the meantime, I'm sure the XPS is still great if you can live with some compromises, and it even has official Linux support.

I don't have an x86 laptop at the moment so sticking with Macbook for now. My assumption is Mac laptops still are far superior given M-series chips and OS that are tuned for battery efficiency. Would love to find out this is no longer the case.

Works well if the laptop has hardware designed to support Linux. Framework stuff is great, for instance.

I love Linux, it was all I ran for years. But, unfortunately, I needed the better hardware more and haven't been able to find a viable way back.

>Apple laptops are top notch.

Not working with Linux is a function of Apple, not Linux. There is a crew who have wasted the last half decade trying to make Asahi Linux, a distro to run on ARM macbooks. The result is after all that time, getting an almost reasonably working OS on old hardware, Apple released the M4 and crippled the whole effort. There's been a lot of drama around the core team who have tried to cast blame, but it's clear they are frustrated by the fact that the OEM would rather Asahi didn't exist.

I can't personally consider a laptop which can't run linux "top notch." But I gave up on macbooks around 10 years ago. You can call me biased.

Again, I've had two 4k monitors on Linux for about ten years, and it has worked well the whole time. Back then I used "gnome tweak" to increase the size of widgets etc. Nowadays its built into mate, cinnamon, etc.

What issues? I’m running Mint on a 4k monitor and haven’t had any issues in years

Not the OP, but I have a 2015 Macbook Pro and a desktop PC both running Linux. I love Fedora, so that's on the desktop, but I followed online recommendations to put Mint on the Macbook and it seems to run very well. However, I did need to install mbpfan (https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan) to get more sane power options and this package (https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd) to get the camera working. It runs better than Mac OS, but you'll need to really tweak some power settings to get it to the efficiency of the older Mac versions.

I switched to a new x86 machine. Running Linux on Mac just made things unnecessarily complicated and hurt performance. Im still open to using docker on Mac to run Linux containers but once you want a GUI life was simpler when I switched off.