They’re fantastic on desktop and have been for more than a decade, once you get past a setup process which can be quite painful (although isn’t always).
But laptops are a lot trickier. You need drivers (or patches) for a lot of extra hardware (your trackpad, your battery-level-reader, the screen brightness controller, etc); you need sleep and cpu power management to work; you usually can’t just swap out the wifi card with a Mac-compatible one, etc.
It can absolutely be done, but you need to do a lot of research on compatibility beforehand. And as a result, you may discover your options aren’t really all that much better than they were in Real Mac land.
I would go for it (ie start doing research) only if there’s something specific you really want in a laptop that Apple simply doesn’t offer. A touch screen, for instance.
It's not necessarily finding drivers that's the problem so much as correctly patching the ACPI tables so drivers can find stuff, especially on laptops, excluding some stuff like wireless cards which often have sketchy to no driver support. Options are certainly better than in real mac land, but be prepared to spend at least a week working through every device one-by-one. Once it's working, though, it's stable.
It's not just finding compatible wireless that's a problem! You can also mostly eliminate:
• Any laptop with an nVidia GPU
• Any laptop that uses switchable graphics (unless you're okay with terrible battery life from the GPU being always on)
• Any AMD laptop (because even with custom cpu patches, the integrated graphics won't work).
That's a lot of laptops, particularly in the type of segments people would likely be most interested in, since Apple doesn't make them. Combined with the aforementioned wifi compatibility problems, you really need to do your research first!
But laptops are a lot trickier. You need drivers (or patches) for a lot of extra hardware (your trackpad, your battery-level-reader, the screen brightness controller, etc); you need sleep and cpu power management to work; you usually can’t just swap out the wifi card with a Mac-compatible one, etc.
It can absolutely be done, but you need to do a lot of research on compatibility beforehand. And as a result, you may discover your options aren’t really all that much better than they were in Real Mac land.
I would go for it (ie start doing research) only if there’s something specific you really want in a laptop that Apple simply doesn’t offer. A touch screen, for instance.