Someone correct me if I am missing some nuance here but I think the two MacBook options aren't contenders for best laptop running Linux. The drivers simply don't support basic things like the touchpad or wifi (at least not without extensive reworking and a modified kernel). Perhaps in some years Asahi Linux will be functional as a daily driver on the newer ARM/Apple Silicon but it's definitely a hobby laptop right now, and not close to being "best laptop for Linux".

I haven't any major issues running Linux in a VM on an M1. Not my first choice, perhaps, but it's certainly functional.

piyh

How do you do this? I'm relatively new to mac, tried UTM and everything was stuck in QEMU modes and had terrible performance.

pram

I've been using vftool with arm64 Ubuntu server cloudimg. Directly uses the virtualization framework, easy to work with once you get it going.

https://github.com/evansm7/vftool

my command: vftool -k vmlinuz -i initrd -d disk.img -p 4 -m 2048 -a "console=hvc0 irqaffinity=0 root=/dev/vda"