Linux on the Mac — state of the union

I think they've mostly just been incremental changes - newer CPU generations, different wifi cards, etc. And Dell puts effort into officially supporting Linux and upstreaming patches, and can select hardware that's going to work okay, and can fix BIOS bugs properly instead of hacking kernel workarounds for them, so there should be less need for volunteers to waste time on model-specific hardware support than for most other brands.

Also they seem to be using fairly standard components, so any effort spent supporting them is likely to help a lot of other devices that happen to use the same components, whereas it sounds like Apple innovates so much that a lot of the work needed is not just Apple-specific but is specific to a single Apple model.

(I got an XPS 13 recently, partly to support companies that support Linux, partly so I didn't have to worry about compatibility, and partly because it sounds like one of the best small laptops regardless of OS. There are still bugs on Linux (e.g. the official USB-C-to-HDMI adapter is apparently fine on Windows but only appears to work at sub-1080p resolutions on Linux) but generally it seems pretty nice.)