Hi everyone,

I wanted to ask for some advice because I feel stuck between operating systems.

Over the past year I really tried to switch fully to Linux. I started with Fedora Workstation, and finally used Fedora KDE Plasma (versions 42 and 43).

Overall, I really loved Linux. The system felt clean, customizable, and much nicer to work with than Windows 11. However, I ran into some issues that eventually forced me back to Windows.

Biggest issue: random system freezes

My laptop is a Lenovo Legion Pro 5 with:

• Intel Core i9-13900HX
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU
• 32GB RAM

When switching to the dGPU, I would occasionally get complete system freezes with no recovery except a hard shutdown. From what I understand, this is related to NVIDIA driver support on Linux.

My workflow

In my work I build a lot of ML models using Python.

Many of my models (especially scikit-learn) run on the CPU anyway, but frameworks like PyTorch run extremely fast on my NVIDIA GPU. When I can use the GPU, the training time drops massively.

Laptop battery issue

Another problem is that my laptop is very power hungry. On battery it barely lasts around 2 hours, and performance drops significantly.

Windows issues

I eventually went back to Windows 11 Pro, but honestly I really dislike it already as I always did :):

• ads in the OS
• privacy concerns
• instability over time (sleep issues, weird bugs)
• I often end up reinstalling Windows after a while

Linux software limitations

Two things also made Linux difficult for me:

1. I still need Microsoft Office (Word and PowerPoint). Alternatives like LibreOffice and OnlyOffice unfortunately don’t work well enough for collaboration.
2. Running Windows in a VM using GNOME Boxes on Fedora was quite slow and had poor resolution.

Considering a MacBook

Because of all this, I am now considering switching to a MacBook Pro with the upcoming Apple M5 Pro chip.

What attracts me is:

• macOS being Unix-based
• better battery life
• better laptop efficiency
• a more stable OS

But I’m unsure about one major thing.

My concern

If I move to macOS, I would lose access to NVIDIA GPUs.

So if I need GPU acceleration for ML (especially PyTorch), I would probably need to run models on:

• a remote GPU server
• cloud GPUs
• or some online VM

My question

For people who work in ML or development:

• Would switching to macOS make sense in my situation?
• How do Mac users handle GPU workloads?
• Do most people just use remote GPU servers?

Btw I don't game anymore so gaming is not an issue for me at all.

I’d really appreciate hearing your experiences.

Thanks!