From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent
(ssp.sh)77 points by articsputnik 3 days ago
77 points by articsputnik 3 days ago
I’d say it’s barely 3 things :
- The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it)
- The screen : at an equivalent price point (and even more), nothing comes close to Apple screens. The cheapest MacBook have a better screen than most high end PCs.
- The audio : Apple truly did some sorcery to get such an awesome sound from machines that are flat as sheet. It’s so good that you can watch a movie on your MacBook without earbuds and don’t be bothered.
Everything else like build quality is overall better than most other alternatives but a few other manufacturers are also good at it.
I say this as someone who uses a MacBook for work despite loving Linux and who hates what macOS have become. The hardware is really that good.
Some of the Apple integrations are so great. Copy and paste between devices, airdrop, call handling and messaging, the notes app, preview app. PDF handling (my god is the windows default hot garbage in comparison).
Yes, other apps and companies do this, but out the box there are some pretty great options from Apple.
> So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good".
I doubt they are dead after 5 years - I have a number of decade+ old MacBooks kicking around the family, and they work just fine.
It's more that anyone in software is going to need to upgrade around the 5 year mark anyway, because too much shit has changed in the outside world (for example, Apple's transition to ARM processors, or Windows 11 requiring recent TPM support).
I believe there is a similar situation in the mobile space with iphones, at least here is Europe where they are not ubiquitous.
Most people use cheaper android phones, that are slower and with a much shorted timespan. then they try a 1k€ iPhone and it is great and conclude they prefer the iPhone to Android: it is not an apple to apple comparison, you should compare it to a 1k€ android lol.
Same things happens on laptops. If you try to use a 500-600€ laptop as work main machine for multiple years it will fall apart. Than you try a MacBook and it feels great because after 5 years is still usable.
You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference.
Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices.
I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.
I really wish Linux were as good as macOS, I really do. I'm pushing myself to use it even though I experience frustration every day, but this simply isn't the case. It's easy to optimize the system and applications for one specific hardware configuration (like Apple does), but it's very hard, if not impossible, to do this for every possible hardware combination available today. That's why Linux and Windows can't win this performance battle.
Well, yeah, and my mom was using my old 2012 MBP until it was a decade too. Main reason to upgrade to an M1 Air was the battery and the performance improvement that comes with a decade of processor and efficiency improvements. And I bet that’ll last another decade. I sold my previous two work MBPs back to family members as well, which they’re still using.
And btw a used M1 Air, at almost 5 years old now, is still a great budget choice for anyone.
Author should have just put in a longer time frame.
MacBooks are great laptops until the day they break and you are out of warranty; or you are in warranty and Apple in its infinite wisdom and power decides they are not going to honour that repair. So MacBooks are laptops which you use with the constant hope that it doesn't break.
So are MacBooks just another level? Of course not! If you have to use something with the constant fear of it breaking down (and then the only options remaining buying a new one or repairing at the cost often as much or sometimes more than the cost of laptop itself) then that's anything but great. But what infuriates me is people asking "but how many times has that happened?", well, enough times in about half a lifetime! And their extra warranty (which are for + or +2 years, not sure) now cost a lot more than it cost the last time (w.r.t device price) I bought their extended warranty in 2012.
The problem is other than repair bankruptcy, other laptops, esp. at the lower segment of macs (Air et al), there really are not many good laptops in those prices. X1s are costly laptops. But if they offer comparable features then I'd say for repairability alone they will be great replacements.
> and don't have any issues either.
It's very different from something being great. While I absolutely hate Apple making their devices impossible to repair and fact more so making it an unwise decision to even try to repair for the cost, their laptops are actually quite good. But it stops there. Their phones are like ages behind competition and they have a business because of a captive/hostage user base :)
> 8-10h battery life
If you think that's even close to good, then it's you who lives in a reality distortion field. But so are all of the PC laptop manufacturers, reviewers and buyers. I don't get it.
I desperately want to move to a Linux laptop (I run it on every desktop PC I own, and I hate that I have to deal with a locked-down system). I've tried more laptops than is probably financially healthy for me. There's no price point that buys you even close to what an entry-level Macbook Air offers, not only in terms of battery life, but also weight, screen quality and keyboard.
I don't know if anyone else agrees, but for some reason no one can replicate the smoothness of the Apple trackpad. And now with that PLUS the heatless apple silicon - I don't think I could go to another OS and the x86 hardware world. I would just feel like I'm in clunky-land. Now don't get me wrong, I like a lot about Linux desktops, but Mac gets a lot of things right. I don't want to take anything away from people migrating from Mac, but the PC didn't kill Desktop Linux, Mac did.
> no one can replicate the smoothness of the Apple trackpad
There are newer trackpad for Windows, and the Surface line had pretty good trackpad as well (not Magic Trackpad levels, but perhaps 80% there ?
The more surprising part to me when I gave up on the Magic Trackpad moving to windows is I was over it in a week. I only ever used trackpads for a decade, but mouse's just work that much better on Windows/Linux, especially getting the extra buttons actual physical click helped a lot. The paradigms are just different enough that the Trackpad makes less sense than on macos.
A few years ago, I compared the trackpad on a ThinkPad T14 and a T14s and found that while on paper they are similar, the T14s has noticeably less friction with better tracking accuracy. I'll put blames on the PC vendors for playing around with their trackpad to sell higher end machines.
And even the T14s (gen 1) has a "cheap" trackpad with a plastic foil on top instead of a glass surface. The day before yesterday I did the upgrade from foil to glass on my T14s and it isn't the big leap I was hoping for. Sure, friction went down a bit but precession and gesture detection were good before already. The same upgrade on a T480s was a bigger improvement. Compared to my MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) the trackpads of my ThinkPads are always worse. Overall I'm in the same situation as the author of the article (if you substitute Arch for pop!_os with Cosmic) and totally agree with him.
> the heatless apple silicon
To this day I still dont know why people worship Apple Silicon. Before it was even named and was mostly used by iPhone as A10, A11 and A12, when I stated these CPU are Desktop grade all I got was being laughed at. But then when it was put into usage by Mac using the same chip now known as M1, M2 etc. All of a sudden they are gold.
Apple did at one point has the leadership of PPW ( Performance per Watt ), but since then competitors have catch up. Qualcomm Oryon and ARM Cortex A930, even exceeding Apple if you look at other metrics. ( We will see what A18 has to bring us ).
-> the smoothness of the Apple trackpad
Because no other PC manufacturer is willing in invest into it and pay for it. For example speakers, it wasn't until Laptop reviewers paying attention and start saying how awful all the PC Laptop speakers were when compared to a MacBook before they started to improve. While Speakers were easier as it is low cost item. Trackpad isn't. But it got much better when Microsoft decided to invest into the PC ecosystem and Surface Laptop, so other PC manufacturers can take advantage of it. It still isn't quite as good as the one on MacBook. But Surface Laptop is pretty close, or may be just different as some would argue. Similar to Keyboard where Surface has the old MacBook 2015 scissors keyboard with better Key Stability, I value that as better than every keyboard that is currently with Apple.
What the fuck are you talking about. A current high end laptop CPU is the AMD 9955HX3D, with Geekbench 6 of 3161/19080 geekbench. M4 Pro is 3812/20076.
Why do I worship apple silicon? Because it’s literally the best performing processor for a laptop on the planet. I can use it for a full day of work from the couch on battery, no performance hit, RAM maxed out, containers running, the fans never turn on, and it barely even gets warm. Or yeah, I can plug it in like a desktop and run multiple 4k high refresh rate monitors. And it’s not even that heavy or bulky.
all of that in one package was unheard of in a laptop before Apple silicon.
If you’re saying that desktop processors are still better, ok, but that’s a different story with different requirements. My MacBook is smaller than just the PSU and cooler I need for my nice desktop CPU.
I do agree that Apple Silicon is way, way more energy efficient and comparable to some top desktop x86 chips, but.. From reading different reviews and tests apparently it's normal for the CPU/SoC to reach a temperature of up 100C at full load, with the case being around 45-50C. Do you mean "heatless" as in specifically the outside case temperature - so those x86 laptops heat up the case way more than that?
My M4 Max under full load for audio transcode required manual fan curve changes to get the temperature down from 110º C (yes, it really got that hot) to 95º C (much better).
It doesn't even get that hot with LLMs running with max fans, where the SoC is about 80º C.
Aside from those use cases, the M4 Max runs 43º C or less even in summer conditions.
As the owner of an M4 Pro and an Intel Ultra 7 laptop, the M4 pro is uncomfortably cold most of the time. The ultra 7 is uncomfortably hot.
The Mac sucks in the winter. The PC sucks in the summer.
The PC is however entirely unusable due to that without plugging an external mouse and keyboard in which is the problem.
I actually hooked up my magic trackpad to Linux at some point because I got so frustrated with the crappy touchpad on my Samsung laptop. I also have a logitech wireless mouse for it. Anything is better than that crappy touchpad.
The point is that Apple's magic trackpad actually works great on Linux too. Smooth, responsive. accurate, multi touch and gestures, and all the rest. Just works. More or less exactly like it does on a mac. Too bad the blueooth stack on Linux is a bit unstable. Lots of issues with stuff randomly not connecting. Which of course isn't great with a trackpad.
The issue is that trackpads from other manufacturers just seem to be universally really, really bad in comparison to Apple's hardware. Particularly anything produced by Synaptics that I've had the displeasure of using is just mediocre shit in comparison. And they seem to dominate the market. It seems like they just gave up even trying to pretend to compete. If you see somebody using a wireless mouse, 9 out of 10 times they aren't using a mac. I work in a lot of co-working spaces. Lots of macs. Almost exclusively being used without a mouse. Just not a thing. The trackpad that comes with it is fine. If you see somebody using a mouse, it's usually with a windows/linux laptop.
That Samsung laptop was something I used in between two macs. My old intel mac died weeks before the M1 was supposed to come out. I used it for about half a year. I still have it and it runs Manjaro. From a software point of view, I can do anything I need to do on it that I would normally use a mac for and I'm actually completely fine with using it for work.
But the reason I went back to the mac is the hardware. Intel/AMD laptops are so completely miserably dreadful these days. Apple makes great hardware. Great screens, keyboard, trackpads, CPUs, etc. You always end up compromising on at least a few of these. It will have a great CPU but a shit screen. Or it will be overheating all the time and have a loud fan. Or weigh 10 kilos. Or have a lot of blinking leds and a fugly formfactor. It's always something.
I have considered putting Linux on my mac a few times. I'm pretty sure I could kind of make that work but the thing is that mac OS works well enough and I have no technical need to switch. And I can't really justify spending a lot of time trying to get things like GPUs. sound, touchId sensors, etc. to work. And I would expect having issues with all of that.
But in a pinch, I can live with a decent Linux laptop. I'd probably go for something a bit more premium if I had to go there these days. But Arch/Manjaro are great and do everything I need and I vastly prefer that over Windows.
Power management in all aspects is one big thing that I wish was better in all distros. Hibernate/fans/shorter battery life are real usability things. I only use windows when I am at risk of being fired for not using it and macos is 'acceptable' but there are soooo many little things that make me cringe about it (.DS_Store littering every drive I touch is close to the top) but if I knew I could get mac hardware, including MPS backend working well in pytorch and battery life, with a solid distro guaranteed to work I would definitely buy that over all the pc hardware out there.
Linux is more likely to have to deal with something like poor/nonexistent drivers that mean a device consumes extra power compared to Windows. But,
* cpupower is pretty nice for manual control of your clock speeds
* the diversity of window managers allows you to have something like a mostly-black UI, which can help on OLED screens. You can even invert the screen color in X, if your programs insist on rendering black-on-white.
* not randomly cranking up the CPU for some windows whatever scan thing saves some power
Oh darn, I thought they'd gotten Arch running on an M1 but they actually switched to a ThinkBook.
I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.
Same, I have a Mac at work and can suffer the horrible window management by just having more physical monitors (3 + the built in screen).
I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.
I think it is just us getting old. I used Linux since high school in the 90's, through all the way to the late 00's. I switched to OS X (long before it was macOS) because that's where all the and coming developer tools were, and I got tired of being sysadmin to my own Linux install as things break.
Now I'm the opposite of you. I WANT to run Linux, and I have both a recent Framework and Lenovo laptop at home that I bought for this purpose. But I have some issue with Nvidia drivers, or just stuck down a rabbit hole trying to configure a GUI the way I want, or whatever, and I give up and go back to macOS where everything is familiar and works out of the box. I'm too old and/or busy to deal with that shit, but it probably reflects my age more than it does macOS vs Linux.
I never have MacOS a chance, I have only used it for some quick safari debugging sessions, but in the last decade+ whenever I see a UI trend that really bothers me, makes things worse and harder to use invariably after some time I discover that they were copying Apple's UI/UX.
So I suspect I would not like using apple devices
It was not super difficult to get Gentoo running on an m1 MacBook with the (unsupported) instructions some of the Asahi folks left around. I guess Arch might be a bit more difficult in some ways, given the weird status of arm64 being a different project from core Arch?
I can't figure out how to set a shortcut that moves the current window to my other monitor. Always have to go into the toolbar to do it.
Edit: And oh! Why do I constantly have to (painfully manually) maximize windows. Preview is constantly choosing a different size, for example. Why is this not remembered.
I can't recall the last time an application in linux forgot its size after restarting.
You might like https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
Considering that macOS is popular among even actual tech-illiterates, it is safe to say that their system is probably pretty logical and easy but since you are a power user on something else you will have to unlearn you previous ways of doing things. At some point it will click and you'll be fine.
> It just works. One thing I noticed lately is that sometimes a shortcut breaks, or something is not working anymore. This is also because Omarchy is just brand new, and I’m inexperienced running Linux as my main OS. But for the last 5 years with the M1, hardware-wise, things just worked.
My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort. I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above.
I think the ‘out of the box’ Linux desktop experience has improved a lot. To me the difference is in the long tail of software. On Linux the variety of toolkits historically available means depending on what software you’re using you may encounter a lot of inconsistency- I certainly do. On the Mac far less so.
I used Ubuntu for some time, then Mint. I'm mostly settled on Fedora, and have been for a long time (aside from Raspbian on some Raspberry Pi's). It has a balance of progress and stability that I've been comfortable with.
In my current job, we're using Ubuntu for our development machines. It's a solid system.
> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.
Is it this or that you have the Linux skills to tinker so just do. Giving Linux laptops to non-techies yields self-sufficiency in people I've not seen with other OS platforms.
My experience is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux.
Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.
Public service announcement: those "forum posts" are mailing list announcements. You can subscribe to that mailing list (arch-announce): https://lists.archlinux.org/mailman3/lists/arch-announce.lis...
And it's almost always something you need to do at system upgrade time. It's not like your system doesn't boot all of a sudden.
I have been on an M1 macbook pro since launch and while I love the hardware, easily my favourite device I have ever owned but MacOS has just always been the thing to be the faustian bargain coming from being a linux person. I spend a lot of time SSHed into more GPU capable linux machines for most of my work and thus get an escape but after driving a friend's linux machine I started looking for a way to daily drive a linux machine. I tried Asahi Linux and also tried to find some non apple machines including with Snapdragon X Elite ones but so far I haven't found anything with good battery life and a decent linux driver support. So far Asahi linux with the reduced battery life seems to be the best bet. I don't mind tinkering. I love tinkering. I am not looking for "just works" but something which I could get to work after putting in the hours. If someone has suggestions please share. Edit: Sorry to go somewhat off topic.
> If someone has suggestions please share.
Stay away from ARM laptops and SoCs, they aren't there yet when it comes to Linux. If you like to tinker, go for it, but expect hardware to just not work, or worse, you'll get stuck on a kernel fork that never gets updated.
If you want a good Linux machine, buy one from a vendor that explicitly sells and supports machines with Linux on them.
IMO you can tinker as much as you want without forcing hardware compatibility issues upon yourself in order to have something to tinker with.
The Thinkpad x13s is more-or-less there. I've been using it as my primary machine (and laptop) for the last month, and it 'just works'. All day battery life, fanless so it's dead silent, and a crisp screen with decent DPI. KDE and Vivaldi run as fast as my i7-13700 desktop.
That seems to be the conclusion I have been avoiding to reach. With graviton and other arm based linux server machines being a good bulk of my work I hoped I wouldn't have to worry about multi architecture docker builds. Ah well.
Any suggestions for something well built but lightweight and that one could figure out how to get 8+ hours of actual daily usage battery life on?
Others have mentioned thinkpads and in my experience the better ones all get 8h+, just stay away from the X1 carbon (my current work machine) with hybrid nvidia graphics. Those have problems of not turning off the external GPU and sucking the battery empty, but that isn't just a Linux problem it seems from lots of forum posts.
I've had a great experience with my Framework 13 (AMD), although I usually get 4-5 hours of battery life, so not quite the full 8 hours you're looking for.
ASUD ProArt P16. I never want another machine. Slender, stiff, machined out of something expensive feeling. Everything works on 6.16, 4k OLED display, wonderful keyboard. Solid RDNA unit, NVIDIA card alongside.
With a clean hyprland setup, light as a feather, battery lasts forever unless you run it hard.
Makes M4 Macs feel bloated and cheap.
The Framework 13 Linux support is fantastic, and the hardware is pretty great too.
Battery is good enough (5-6hrs) for me on the AMD model (Ryzen AI 5 340) but definitely not Macbook territory in that regard.
I run Fedora and have coworkers who run Ubuntu and Arch as well without issue.
> If someone has suggestions please share
A recent ThinkPad with one of the latest AMD Ryzen U CPUs should have a very decent battery life. You just need some custom udev rules to set the right power saving states for different devices. Powertop should make this straightforward. IMHO, this is a great compromise, because you stay on x86_64 and Linux, you get within 3/4 of ARM's power efficiency, and hardware support is perfect. I've squeezed more than 11 hours from some models.
One thing that is often discounted is that Safari is marvel of power efficiency, which adds up to the efficiency of Apple M chips. IMHO, there should be dedicated Chromium and Firefox builds with compile flags and options that optimize efficiency. To counter that, running a barebones Linux setup is a good option. Keeping your CPU wakeups/s low lets you cross the 10 hour barrier.
x86 Thinkpads + Fedora work great. Hardware support out the box is almost perfect (I would say perfect because I don’t recall anything not working, but I may be missing something). In fact, Thinkpads used to have Fedora as an OS option, which is why I think the support is so good.
Outside that maybe something like system 76. They advertise 14h for one of their models.
What IMHO is more interesting than the article itself - what is this little cyberdeck-style mini notebook on the left in this picture that is part of the article? Does anyone have a link?
https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/arch-b...
Looks like a MicroJournal Rev 2: https://www.tindie.com/products/unkyulee/micro-journal-rev2-...
It's a distraction free typewriter (https://www.ssp.sh/brain/distract-free-typewriter/). That particular model is a MicroJournal Rev. 2 with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 in it.
Check it out here: https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal/blob/main/micro-jo...
Thanks a lot for the hints - the Micro Journal Rev.2 seems to be quite a nice device!
There are two points I feel are worth focusing and I’ve experienced similar:
- Linux is fast. Few years ago I wanted to run Linux and used my MacBook Air 2013 (one of the best machines I’ve had). It was amazing how Ubuntu ran so sleek especially comparing to the MacBook Pro 2018 with macOS.
- x86_64 feels less portable than arm. Since I got MBP from my work I’ve also got another machine for Windows. I’ve went with 13” MSI Perstige with 125H which was the latest back then offering hybrid cores (performance + economy). It’s 1kg is amazing and the OLED is also nice. But in order for the machine to actually compile and be snappy I need to ensure it’s not dropping to 0.4-0.8Ghz and then it easily gets warm and noisy.
The MBP 2021 also shows age. But even with more frequent fans and 80% of original battery it outperform the younger MSI since day one.
TL;DR
* Unless you need specific software, Linux distros are great and fast. Much more joy (imho) than Windows.
* SoC/ARM is still rare but it would be much more interesting comparison to current Macs in terms of portability (fans, battery life)
How confident are people that Omarchy will be well maintained in the future?
I'm considering making that same switch from MacOS to Arch, but I'm not sure if I should have confidence in something like Omarchy which is relatively new.
If we look at how involved DHH has been with Rails since its inception, I trust Omarchy will follow the same path. This is his daily driver, and I don't think that will change after what happened with 37Signals vs. Apple.
I think the biggest takeaway from this blog post is that developers and other professionals should take more note of the tiling window managers available on Linux like Sway and Hyprland - they are insanely fast and customizable to exactly what we need to be more productive.
I'm a Sway user (ironically on Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac) and I won't have it any other sway... er... I mean way.
I switched from MacOS (from a 12 year old first generation retina MBP) to Arch and started out with hyprland. It was really nice initially while I mostly used terminals, a browser or launched Steam. But when I needed to do some paperwork (taxes, stuff involving wide spreadsheets) I often ran into trouble, e.g. when I needed to read some numbers off a pdf quickly. Rearranging the tiling to have everything in appropriate size was rather slow. I often use overlapping windows in such cases, where I only need to see parts of a document and the floating tiles in hyprland just didn’t work for me (not as easy to arrange and so it felt clumsy). I moved on to KDE and that has been working great for half a year now. Maybe I‘m missing some functionality or just didn’t take the time to get used to it - stuff needed to get done ;)
If you want to have tiling but don’t like windows being automatically resized or having to do any resize at all, try niri. It’s a scrolling tiling window manager based on PaperWM. It is in the Arch repository and a KDE plugin called Karousel also exists on the same PaperWM paradigm.
I swapped from Linux to MacOS when the M1s came out, and I love the integration with all the iCloud stuff (particularly Messages). Occasionally I miss being on Linux, as somebody who did so for 20+ years before making the switch. But on Mac, stuff actually does Just Work.
Reading this makes me a little misty-eyed and I miss my solid old Thinkpads from 10-20 years back.
Why I ditched my M1 MacBook for a $1000 ThinkBook running Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Distro.
For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.
That was years ago and I'm still on it.
Hardware support in the last years has really improved significantly. I was using arch a lot back around 2016, and it was a nightmare. On every kernel update had to recompile a kernel driver cause my laptops chipset was something bizarre, nvidia drivers were mostly half working and it all just felt like a fragile card house.
Ubuntu was by far the best option to actually use my system rather being constantly distracted by another little piece that fell out the wall
I run multiple arch systems and multiple Debian systems in my house.
Debian is great if what you want to do, is something that has been easy for 5 years. You set it up and forget it.
Debian breaks down whenever you try to do something new that requires some new dependency. Oh you want to run a Go program written in 2023? Now you have to download and install the new version yourself because the latest version in apt is 1.19. On arch stuff like that is generally not a problem. It's the best supported distro after the Debian based ones.
Trixie now has go1.24 - including the upstream default GOTOOLCHAIN value to automatically download new compiler versions straight from go.dev if the go.mod wants them.
I was a bit surprised this is not a Debian Policy violation (and any Debian patches for security support may no longer apply), but at least the user experience will "just work". Cross-reference https://bugs.debian.org/1040507 .
That is both neat and surprising.
That said while my specific example perhaps is obsolete, the general class of problem I described is not.
Don't know if you responded to the right person since I didn't mention Debian, but I did try it and the other major distributions a long time ago. Honestly, distros mostly felt the same to me apart from their repositories. Debian soured me by keeping its repo perpetually out of date. It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.
> It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.
That’s stable for you, even the ‘less nice’ parts are a feature of the distribution if you’re running a fleet. On desktops people have been running testing or unstable for this reason since forever.
I’m waiting for the second hand Arm ThinkPads to drop. Fingers crossed.
Used ones, yeah. Companies used to sell off entire fleets when they upgrade, sometimes pretty cheap. I’ve bought a perfectly usable T420 for something like $50 about 10 years ago. (Naturally, it was 4 years old at that point, but still.)
Also curious about Windows on Arm, but my plan is to run Linux mainly (which hopefully gets better support at that point!)
Because some of us want that minimalism and a good “power user” default setup to tweak from there. I spent all of the 90s learning Linux deeply and custom tweaking everything and trying everything posted to freshmeat.net. I bootstrapped my own Linux from scratch before LFS was a thing.
Now I just want to get work down on an OS that feels like it belongs to power users and closely matches my deployment targets.
This is why I switched to Omarchy.
In that case it for sure makes sense, but for the user like the writer who is new to linux?
I'm very happy I went through the pain of setting everything up from scratch. It taught me how it all works. I just don't see how I'd get that same knowledge ever with Omarchy
It's just my experience, but it seems like nearly all younger people (<= 20s) don't want to deep dive on stuff like Linux or TCP/IP, they want to know enough to be effective (dangerous?) and move onto chasing basic competency in the next technology.
I can from a time when sysadmins were expected to know C and kernel and TCP/IP internals, but that world is no more. Blame it on education, blame it on the pace of technology, I don't know.
I'm not sure how I feel about that, especially thinking about when all the people who know and can build low-level stuff retire and die off. Maybe AI will save them. Who knows?
I think people like Arch because it serves the purpose of blank slate pretty well and doesn’t have ancient package problems. It’s easier to build something like Omarchy for Arch than it would be for more opinionated distros.
This is kind of a hard read. I'm no mac fanboy but at some point I decided to replace the frankenstein world of computing by something roughly coherent.
Clearly this person just wants hackability and tweakability, which Arch will give you in spades. All power to them!
I'd say this is a "fine" alternative, but not an upgrade.
+1 for using an ARM processor though. Once you leave x86 and the fan parade, there is no going back. Silence is bliss.
One thing I am concerned about is the water use involved in the development of Arch Linux. I think it's probably time to shut it down, especially in these terrible times of environmental crisis.
> I’m surprised with what all worked out of the box, like hibernating, external monitors/keyboards, media keys. Not sure how much is thanks to DHH’s Omarchy, and what’s native Arch Linux support
It's pretty much ALL Omarchy. If you install Arch by itself you get a tty prompt... and that's about it.
Omarchy looks super impressive. Haven't used it myself, but the scripts and dotfiles in the Github repo (https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy) have been inspiring
> But the quality of MacBooks is just another level. I had 3 or 4 so far since 2010, and each of them held at least 5 years. Crazy good.
When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave me 8-10h battery life and the only issue I ever had was that 1.5 years ago the battery was reaching end of life and capacity started dropping very fast.
That was just a 70$ repair I could easily do myself.
My youngest daughter just inherited my mother's x220 (?) (she has been running Linux) that I got for my mother in 2011 or 2012. That never received any work and still works fine except that I didn't change the battery so you have to run it of ac power.
My older daughter and my mother both just got some used thinkpads that are >3years old and don't have any issues either.
So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good".