21 ms·

From macOS to Arch Linux

147 points by joelittlejohn 5y ago

otar 5y ago
Haha... I've used Ubuntu and then Arch prior to switching mac. If you have enough time and nerves to do OS/desktop env stuff yourself, then go ahead... In the end I decided to use my time for more effective things and stop geeking around.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  This is HackerNews, not PracticalUserNews! :-)
- dainiusse 5y ago
  Yeah. Sounds like geeking around. 20 years ago we had this cult of "living in the console" and ignoring X servers at all. It was fun for some time - even watching some video stuff using mplayer's aalib, playing mud.... But then again - this is not about productivity - it is just fun, while if you need to do work, family, etc... There's rarely time for that.
  - zibzab 5y ago
    If using Ubuntu is "living in the console" for you, then something is seriously wrong with how you use it. I mean, you sure _can_ do it. But that's not what you are supposed to do.
    - stinkytaco 5y ago
      "supposed" is a strong word here. I don't know that you're supposed to do anything except get done what you want to get done.
    - nix23 5y ago
      He installed ubuntu server and had no clue how to install gnome ;)
- flippinburgers 5y ago
  Mac can never come close to xmonad + any linux distro.
samarthr1 5y ago
I am personally facing up to make the opposite switch. 2 days of battery life is very attractive for me. I am thinking of keeping my current laptop as my "desktop" and carrying a Mac around. Since most of my tools are cross platform, (jetbrains ides), my work can just continue Grimm one place to another using GitHub for synchronisation.
fsflover 5y ago
> There are still many things I need to set up on the new laptop, for example: suspension/hibernation on closing the lid doesn’t always work Sounds like a problem of hardware not designed for Linux. Everything has been working out of the box for me on a Librem laptop.
- blinkingled 5y ago
  Ditto on most non Nvidia equipped ThinkPads. Typically Dell also does a good job at Linux compatibility but sometimes things take time to be worked out on newer hardware.
  - nicolaslem 5y ago
    My strategy when picking hardware to run Linux on with 100% success so far: 1. Wait about 6 months before purchasing newly released hardware (new generation of GPU, network adapter...) to let drivers trickle down from the manufacturer to the kernel and then to the distribution. 2. If it has an Nvidia logo on it, leave it on the shelf.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      Alternatively, simply buy preinstalled Linux. Worked for me.
    - blinkingled 5y ago
      Exactly - I have had great success with this strategy for many years now. Sometimes I take chances with #1 by running rolling release distros like Arch or Tumbleweed.
- slowmotiony 5y ago
  To be fair, I've had those with all Dell laptops on Windows too. In fact I've never had a Windows laptop that could reliably wake up from sleep every time.
  - tssva 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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Kalanos 5y ago
Getting your custom stack tuned feels great, but maintaining that entire stack across updates is daunting. You can't join meetings because your headphone/ mic/ video drivers aren't working? yikes. i trust apple to handle hardware and os for me. I've switched to: macOS > brew (basic cli utils & gui apps) > some basic zshrc (not ohmyzsh) > docker (not environment managers) > done. ^ but i've lost trust for them to handle dev tools for me.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  > You can't join meetings because your headphone/ mic drivers aren't working? yikes. I really don't know where you're getting this from. This isn't 2004 and you don't have to screw with ALSA drivers to get basic audio functionality on Linux. On both PulseAudio and Pipewire, I've never had this problem and I know many others who haven't had issues either, and I really just don't think audio input/output is a gigantic issue on Linux (other than, obviously, if you have niche hardware, but I still haven't had audio issues other than when I tried to install Linux on a Chromebook using the MrChromebox coreboot UEFI firmware). Audio drivers failing is something that people like to throw out there even though it's not very common. I've literally never had my audio drivers suddenly fail on me. The only mic issues I've had are the ones I'd have on any other system, like choosing the wrong input device and wondering why no one can hear me. > maintaining that entire stack across updates is daunting I've had Arch installs for long, long times. IME and in many other people's experiences, Arch doesn't really break that much (read: at all for me) through updates compared to other distros (eg. Ubuntu). It's a good example of a distro that you'd want to use on a desktop for this exact reason.
  - Kalanos 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing your experience
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    It’s way better than it was before (though not 2004, I used Linux for a long time and even ~ 2012 BT audio was finicky), but it’s not as plug and play an experience as on windows and macOS. For example, see this issue where BT headphones drop to extremely bad audio when you want to also use the inbuilt mic: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/616973/use-high-quality-codec-and-microphone-simultaneously-with-bluetooth-headset https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/616973/use-high-qua... The solution to this is basically to remove pulse and install pipe wire, which is definitely not the default on most distros and not something you can do without technical skills and the time to manage the setup.
gbrown 5y ago
Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf? I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed, but for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates. From the wiki: > Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list Like… why?
- jimjimjimjim 5y ago
  Sometimes there are some manual interventions that you may have to perform.
  - gbrown 5y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Why?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - nvarsj 5y ago
      It's the philosophy of Arch to stick to vanilla as much as possible and keep things simple. It's a rolling distro too with no fixed release cycles. When you upgrade fedora, ubuntu, etc. they perform various scripts to migrate existing configuration. In Arch, it just simply installs the vanilla packages whenever you tell pacman to update. Very rarely there is some breaking change, maybe once or twice a year, that requires manual intervention. Yeah they could automate it all but such stuff takes effort and breaks in other ways.
    - doubled112 5y ago
      Because many of the changes are large enough that it will break, and that's expected. The KISS principle applies here. If a config file format changes in a service between version 3 and version 4, should the package manager be responsible for it? Or the admin? Sometimes it's not just merging changes in. In a non-rolling release distribution, you only need to worry about those changes during major upgrades. In a rolling release distro, they can change at any time. It's no different than a user reading the release notes for Debian 11 while upgrading from 10, except the upgrades are constant.
Sayrus 5y ago
If I may suggest, take a look at autorandr [1], it saves your monitor configuration and automatically enables it when a set of monitor is detected. It's a small thing, but it improves the experience and will replace your home alias. [1] https://github.com/phillipberndt/autorandr https://github.com/phillipberndt/autorandr
sunaurus 5y ago
I just completed my migration in the opposite direction after using Arch Linux as my daily driver for ~10 years. I think Arch Linux is by far the better OS for pretty much all power users, but when using multiple devices, the benefits of the "Apple Ecosystem" outweigh the benefits of an amazing desktop OS for me, which is why I ended up switching to Mac OS. Some key points which I believe are much worse on Mac: * No great package managers. Nothing is super-integrated with the core system like pacman is in Arch, and even when heavily using some package manager, there will always be a bunch of software that can only be updated using their own auto-update mechanism instead of a central package manager. * Docker in general is just much slower compared to running directly on Linux. * Setting up ergonomic custom keyboard shortcuts is painful and requires (multiple?) third-party applications to do well.
- foobarian 5y ago
  The Alt-Tab behavior on MacOS across multiple screens is really annoying. Also window resizing behaviors. If there was a way to override those it would be an unmatched system/environment.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    I haven’t tried it so I can’t vouch for it, but AltTab[0] may meet your window switching needs. What specifically would you prefer to be different for window resizing behaviors? If it’s something akin to Aero Snap on Windows there’s a multitude of options, including Moom[1], Rectangle[2], and Magnet[3] among others. [0]: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ [1]: https://manytricks.com/moom/ https://manytricks.com/moom/ [2]: https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/ [3]: https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/ https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
  - wyclif 5y ago
    I've said this many times on this forum, but the fact that macOS doesn't natively allow users to snap windows to the edge is incredibly annoying, and is one of those indications of the wrong and stubborn choices made in the design of the OS. Most Linux distros don't assume they know how users want their windows arranged. macOS says, "We, in fact, do know better than users how large windows should be and where they should be placed."
another-account 5y ago
Reading the netstat source... yeah, there's freedom.
anschwa 5y ago
Arch is great, although I think fedora does a much better job at providing a no-nonsense Linux workstation and would make for a smoother transition from macOS.
tanjiro 5y ago
Its not just the initial setup that's painful with Arch, the whole rolling update model means things break often and I no longer have the patience to patch them. But I do agree that linux provides a better env for development compared to macOS. On Ubuntu atm and works like charm with flexibility to extend it as I like.
- jatone 5y ago
  rolling updates isn't actually a problem in practice. the maintainers do test the applications before releasing the updates. i encounter usually 2-3 bugs (and almost always they are minor) per year due to rolling updates and usually its in the software I'm developing relying on old behaviors. and a simple package downgrade fixes it almost every time.
- blux 5y ago
  "...means things break often..." Citation needed. I can provide some anecdotal evidence to the contrary; I've been running Arch both privately and professionally now for about 15 years and sure there were some issues initially but the last decade or so I've been updating my systems fearlessly on a regular basis.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    I've only been running arch on my laptop for a year, and it hasn't broken once, unlike Ubuntu which I constantly had issues with.
rbut 5y ago
Not Arch, but macOS to Linux related. As a developer, used macOS for 13 years. Switched to Ubuntu after Apple went to M1. It's been pretty much flawless and required no more tweaks during setup than a typical macOS install would. Developing on the same environment as our servers is a massive plus. The key is choosing the right hardware from the start. For my desktop, I chose an Asus TUF gaming motherboard that had everything Intel. For my laptop, I chose a laptop that is supported by the manufacturer, in this case a Dell XPS 13. (Selecting the correct hardware is no different to creating a Hackintosh setup, but the hardware support is infinitely better)
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  Not only is the hardware support better, but even with good hardware support, you have to do more on Hackintoshes (manually download and copy tens of kexts, edit a very, very long plist file for OpenCore, screw with the serial number if you want iMesasge, etc., etc.). Linux usually "just works."
  - bigmadwolf 5y ago
    True. For a Hack as with Linux, using compatible hardware is the key. However once that configuration process is done (and done right) from then on its typically a rock solid experience until the next major Mac OS version upgrade. In some ways it is superior to an actual Mac since you have the ability to inject kexts without having to stuff around with reboot to recovery mode, disabling SIP to install and so on. OpenCore is an impressive piece of software.
    - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
      > OpenCore is an impressive piece of software. 100% agree with this in every way possible. Cannot detract from how many features it (Audio support for boot chimes? Full graphics support? How many Linux bootloaders have that?). Tons and tons of configuration options and settings that you'll need to get a working Hackintosh. Yes, OpenCore is an extremely impressive piece of software. It would be nice if Linux bootloaders even approached the featureset and level of polish that OpenCore has.
RistrettoMike 5y ago
This really doesn't sound like an article written as a "Linux newbie" ~ but props to them for finding solutions to their various workflow needs and learning. That's a big part of what Linux is all about :)
stevencorona 5y ago
I made a similar jump over the past few years out of frustration with stagnating apple hardware (pre-m1). I spent a year with a hackintosh, which worked pretty well, but became disenchanted by the continued locking-down of the OS. For the most part, daily driving Linux as my desktop has been great - no small thanks to Electron. Slack, Spotify, VSCode, etc. all just mostly work. Going the arch-route took extra upfront work since you're effectively building a desktop environment from scratch, but the benefit is knowing exactly how -everything- works. If I press my "volume up" shortcut and the overlay volume bar isn't displayed, I know exactly which sway config and executable to look at. It's refreshingly simple. The downsides are that upgrading is a bit anxiety producing (will I break anything?). HiDPI on Linux is still (in my experience) a bit of a mess. If you run wayland, you need to patch xwayland/sway/wlroots if you don't want blurry x11 apps. And there are some quirks- like, I can't drag files into Slack. Maybe it's fixable, but at some point you become satisfied with "good enough".
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  >The downsides are that upgrading is a bit anxiety producing (will I break anything?). I don't understand why Arch users put up with this. There are plenty of distros that you can build your DE on your own with, but that have regular releases, and are extremely stable.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    arch users don't really "put up" with this. every computer i run (besides my work windows machine) is arch and they have broken exactly 0 times. i update once a week, 0 problems.
  - pkulak 5y ago
    For what it's worth, when one of my Macs upgrades, and starts rebooting 8 times over the course of an hour, I get pretty damn anxious too. At least with Arch it's just a bunch of packages being replaced and then a reboot. Plus, if you run a snapshotting filesystem like btrfs, you can always just roll your whole system back a few hours if things are really borked; though I've never personally had to do that. No option like that on Macs. If you upgrade and something important stops working, you're shit outta luck.
popey 5y ago
"There are still many things I need to set up on the new laptop, for example: suspension/hibernation on closing the lid doesn’t always work" For me, this is one of those things that should work out of the box. I appreciate Arch is one of those distros you configure manually, and can thus choose whether to implement this or not. But I'd rather not have my laptop burn out in my bag because the system didn't suspend properly. I'm sure everyone has experience of this happening on any distro, and probably even on Windows and MacOS. But it should at least try out of the box in my mind.
- vurudlxtyt 5y ago
  FWIW I've had this work out of the box for several years. Could be a case-by-case thing, but I've only ever had to configure it to my preferences rather than surprise-discover that it didn't work.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  I tried Manjaro the other day and had to try 3 kernel versions before I found one that woke from sleep without crashing, the display wouldn't hold its resolution through display sleep, bluetooth wouldn't connect without writing a custom config file, and CUPS auto-detected the wrong drivers. I went back to Ubuntu and it all Just Worked. My conclusion: yeah, the Debian stale package problem sucks, but it doesn't suck as badly as the rolling release instability problem.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    I had several issues with waking from sleep on Ubuntu based distros as well, and had to wait ages for updates that would fix it. It’s not all green on the other side!
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Me too, but that was 15 years ago. Manjaro was a trip back to the Bad Old Days. I'm sure we're deep in YMMV territory, but I gave Manjaro a spin based on the recent hype wave so whenever I see an echo of that wave I feel obliged to share my experience. Shrug.
zibzab 5y ago
I don't get why people go from osx to arch. Why not something that just works, and updating is not Russian roulette?
- vurudlxtyt 5y ago
  People like to parrot this but I've literally never had a breaking change from an upgrade in ~5-6 years of Arch usage. At least, if I did, it didn't take more than a couple minutes to fix, because I honestly don't remember having issues. On the other hand doing a dist-upgrade on Ubuntu has burned me more than once. I fear having to do it on one of my home servers, and should really get off of it. I'd argue that updating more often is more safe, since anything that goes wrong will be incremental and likely easier to deal with if it does. (Not appropriate for a production server though, you don't want things to change on that unless it's deliberate and likely infrequent)
  - Comevius 5y ago
    Same experience here with 15 years of Arch usage, a few major issues before systemd, none since, except having to migrate the boot loader, network manager and so on to systemd and from time to time having to use a workaround from the latest news at archlinux.org. I have also migrated to pipewire a month ago with a single command and no issues. It's quite stress free, because the whole operating system is basically the kernel, systemd, x11 or wayland, pulseaudio or pipewire, the nvidia driver and pacman. Not much can go wrong.
    - zibzab 5y ago
      Actually, I tried arch again last month after unfa's video on pipewire support. Couldn't even revert back to PA when PW failed, the entire system had to be reinstalled. Can you make it work? Absolutely. Can it fail catastrophically if you make one little mistake? Absolutely.
      - Comevius 5y ago
        PipeWire is basically the files pacman installed, and systemd user services. This command would have been able to remove it: pacman -Rsn pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-alsa And this disable it: systemctl disable --user pipewire pipewire-media-session pipewire-pulse A common mistake when installing it is forgetting to install pipewire-pulse and pipewire-alsa. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire
nmstoker 5y ago
Was interested in the idea of Arch in a commercial environment. Presumably this only works in a certain kind of place: one with motivated individuals and without the "oh my God people might do what they think is sensible" types from an overactive Compliance group. Personally this would be a very satisfying kind of place to work because the single biggest challenge I face in my company is the endless fiddling that the desktop team do breaking things, as it's is often done wrongly or should be left well alone. I don't begrudge the people in the team as they're actually decent but they're stuck having to juggle various demands and roll out a steady stream of MS changes faster than they appear to have capacity for.
- paco3346 5y ago
  This is what my org does. Devs are allowed to pick their own OS as long as they can support it when IT doesn't know about the particulars. We've even contemplated running it on production servers instead of Ubuntu so that we don't have to wait 18 months for Canonical to publish the next version of a package.
j7ake 5y ago
Interesting, but no discussion about the touchpad? I imagine one downgrade from moving away from Mac is the touchpad experience.
- donio 5y ago
  I guess it comes down to personal preferences but for me the touchpad on the X1 Carbon is so much better than the Mac ones. It's just the right size (why does the Mac ones need to be so huge?), lovely physical buttons and the trackpoint is nice to have. Works perfectly on Linux.
calferreira 5y ago
Arch is like the IKEA version of Linux. Thanks to their WIKI, i feel that i can troubleshoot most issues by myself despite not having huge linux experience.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  Arch Wiki is useful even if you're using a different distro.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    In many cases I think the Arch wiki is superior even to the official documentation. Which I think says a lot about the state of most documentation.
obiwan14 5y ago
> I started on Slackware a long time ago, then used Debian for some time and Ubuntu over the years when I needed a virtualized environment. I consider myself a Linux newbie and I’m sure I’m about to make many questionable choices. Somebody who started with Slackware, then to Debian and Ubuntu does not really fall into the "newbie" group in my opinion.
extr 5y ago
I currently run a dual boot with Arch and Windows 11 on an XPS 13. There are positives to each: * Windows has much better support for handling the Hi/Multi DPI setup that is my laptop + 2 4K screens. Wayland gets there, but unfortunately the font rendering is annoying bad, and the fractional scaling doesn't quite look right. And of course it's a very "just works" experience if you stay on the happy path. The Windows OneDrive + Office integration is great, and I have some photo software I run that is Windows-only. * Arch gives a much better "pure laptop" experience. Hotkeys make everything easy, tiling WMs are just infinitely superior if you're working off one small screen. Also I get BETTER battery life on Arch, the laptop runs totally cool (and fans never spin up), and closing the lid puts it into true S3 sleep. It's very snappy and I use less RAM. Also, I think people have this idea that if you use Arch the only "right" way to do it is to spend a million hours setting up a whole universe of CLI apps and becoming a wizard with hotkeys. I only use the CLI if it's truly easier than a GUI or something I don't use often. I basically just install the regular google-chrome-stable binary from AUR and then do everything on the web. Email? I set up a desktop link to fastmail. Spotify? Don't bother with native linux app, just set up a desktop link to the web player. Need to use Excel and don't feel like switching to windows? Just go use the web version, etc...Seriously, the move to webapps is doing more for the linux desktop experience than anything else.
- bsnnkv 5y ago
  Just gonna plug my bspwm-esque tiling windows manager for Windows 10 and 11 here since I know how hard life on Windows is without one: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/ https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/
  - extr 5y ago
    Small world! I use this and submitted issue #22 about the Electron/Chromium frozen window problem. Despite that issue, really fantastic software, by far the best linux-like tiling WM solution for Windows at the moment (and I've tried them all). Fantastic work!
belthesar 5y ago
I'm super pleased with my Linux desktop. I'm now full time Linux on the desktop, having run Windows, dual booting Windows/Hackintosh, and then Windows/Linux for quite some time. I still have a Windows partition, but I haven't been in it in half a year at this point. The experience on my desktop hasn't been flawless, but it has been pretty nice on the whole. I can't say the same for my laptop, which has been a 2 year experiment at this point. When I was using it predominantly to do light work in the office, it worked out well, but I find it more and more difficult to use from a non-coding productivity standpoint. When I do work, I generally remote into my desktop via VSCode anyway at this point (and I really like this workflow tbh), but because I don't daily drive the laptop, there's less time spent to improve the tooling, and the ratio of time spent working to time spent fixing a weird issue is much lower than on my desktop. With some of my work potentially benefiting from the new Apple SoCs, the reversal in direction back to good sane defaults in hardware layout, and the far greater likelihood that my ratio of work to fix ratio would significantly increase, I'm pretty sure that an Apple Silicon laptop is in my near future.
wooque 5y ago
As a former i3wm user, just install KDE or GNOME and get on with your life, using only window manager is pointless masturbation
jagrsw 5y ago
I also use Iosevka on my Linux desktop since a couple of days. Subjectively a very aesthetically pleasing monospaced font. My aesthetics skills are 2/10, and I usually don't care about UI feel much, but for some reason I really dislike "not nice" (R) fonts. But recently I switched to the combination of the default Windows 11 font (Segoe) for desktop, and Iosevka for consoles, and this feels good.
jefc1111 5y ago
I tried for years to switch away from Mac OS to Linux. I tried Ubuntu a few times as I am familiar with it from a server perspective. It finally clicked when I tried Manjaro. The killer app for me is i3 Window manager (which you can of course use on other distributions). In general though I just like there being 'less'. I use Thinkpads and yes - have had issues with audio, and with sleep etc, but all solvable.
- culopatin 5y ago
  With Thinkpads I rather have Bluetooth working than onboard audio. The speakers are so bad I don’t even want to hear them beep.
awill 5y ago
For my personal desktop, I use Arch linux, and I'm perfectly happy. However, for a work laptop, I am pretty sure I'd take a new M1 Macbook Pro over a Thinkpad/XPS w/ Arch Linux. A MBP can get 15+ hours of battery life, supports suspend/resume, and in the case of the Intel models, smooth GPU switching between dedicated and onboard. Linux does none of that well. On a desktop, none of that matters, but I wouldn't take those tradeoffs on a work laptop.
- lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm sad we're still seeing comments like this in 2021: "I normally work using an external monitor, so I started looking at my options to configure the external display including the external keyboard and mouse." Trying to use linux on a laptop is how I ended buying my first Macbook a decade ago.
  - TacticalCoder 5y ago
    People are having lots of issues too with external monitors and Mac laptops. xrandr on Linux ain't complicated and it works well. I've got a M1 running on OS X and it's a sweet machine. I've got a beefy LG Gram laptop (24 GB of RAM, wider screen, much lighter than the M1) running Linux and it's a very sweet setup too. The LG Gram running Linux is for the serious stuff, the M1 running OS X is to watch YouTube vids and overall surf from the couch. Now of course the real work is done on my desktop/workstation (running Linux too but whatever).
    - awill 5y ago
      What battery life does the LG get? I'm guessing less than half your Mac
    - lowbloodsugar 5y ago
      That is a sweet LG laptop you have. I daily a 2018 i9/32GB Intel MBP for work, with an eGPU and three 27" monitors. "Setup" was just plugging them in. I've got an M1 Max 64Gb for myself, and at 4.7lbs it's just light enough given its raw power (cpu and graphics). It also handles that many monitors without resorting to the eGPU (which is a good job, since it can't use one!) Had an M1 Air before that and mostly used it with old Thunderbolt 27" display and external keyboard/mouse. But I could (and did) play factorio on it for several hours on the couch on battery. I've always wanted to try a System76 laptop, on the basis that they'd have all that laptop-linux stuff sorted out, but Apple started making nice laptops again... It's easy for me now to drop $4k on a laptop. A decade ago, when I switched to a MacBook I was working for myself, and "it just works" was worth it so I could concentrate on making money rather than knob twiddling. It was a stressful time, so maybe I'm still carrying that experience with me.
flippinburgers 5y ago
If they are using an XPS everything should already be working on linux.
kureikain 5y ago
I used Fedora/Ubuntu at works and Arch Linux at home exclusively to 2012 when I started to get into Ios dev. Nowadays I used Mac exclusively for all of my work + personal setup(except Server of course). And I'm convince that the only reason for me to use it is due to iOS dev. If I can get away with it I will go back to Linux. Some points: - No more dealing with homebrew and its bizarre upgrade policies. You don't know when a package will be break. You run `brew install python` and every thing broken. - No more dealing with the weirdo of its disk image and the locked of system volume - No more dealing with junks stuff in a few place such as `/Library` or `/System/Library` and `~/Library` - No longer has to run docker in a VM - Fuse just works - No more buggy file watchers. For some reasons the file watcher (fsnotify package I belive) on Mac sometime works, sometime not and sometime just had CPU up to 100% - No more custom syntax to work with fslimit - No more plist file that also gzip and encrypt - No more installing software by going to a website and download a stupid xip file. - No more reverse engineering how a certain thing works and script it out. But due to iOS works, not just iOS development I also help with CI/CD for mobile app and having access to a mac locally is handy, I have to keep using it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bengalister 5y ago
After almost 2 years running Arch I switched back to Windows last summer on my home laptop (Dell XPS 13 9380). The pipewire update needed by pulseaudio effects broke the sound output to my bluetooth headset. Also at the same time a Gnome update made my desktop environment unstable. I did not want to spend time on freezing dependencies, reverting some of them etc. Got tired at the time of these occasional maintenance operations, and not optimal hardware support. To be honest most of the update issues were related to Gnome major updates. I think an update only broke once my system, I could not login (pam configuration upgrade issue). I was running the LTS kernel. I think I had better battery life on Linux thought. It must have improved with Firefox/Chromium hardware acceleration. Arch is still my preferred distro for a dev machine thought. Back to Windows, I just updated to W11 today, I very much like the changes in the UI. Also the ability to run some Linux GUI apps without starting a X server, exporting the DISPLAY, etc directly from the a WLS2 vm is nice. Even thought I think I'll keep my development environment in a VM (arch) mainly because of docker. I found docker for desktop on Windows really too slow. Security wise I also prefer that, I install too many tools that I don't trust. The drawback of using a VM is of course performance but that is not that an issue for the kind of dev/work I do (NodeJs/Typescript/Vue/Python/Cloudformation/Terraform). Also sometimes I have an idea or something I'd like to test quickly and I don't want to start the VM and I just give up. I'll probably stick to that 1 or 2 years, when I'll think about replacing my laptop. If I had to today, I'll probably go for a Macbook air m1.
- vereis 5y ago
  I just forego docker desktop and run docker on the command line in wsl2 instead. Have you considered trying that?
  - bengalister 5y ago
    You mean install docker in the WSL2 installed distribution directly ? I run a Ubuntu 20.04 WSL2 vm. It does not seem very easy to install it directly in the vm, for instance there is no systemd. There is the reddit post about it and most recommend to install docker desktop.
emrah 5y ago
I know it's not Arch Linux but PopOS is a great pragmatic alternative. Everything worked out of the box on the old laptops I installed it.
vjancik 5y ago
Just wait until he finds out his battery life has been slashed in half after he installs Nvidia drivers. Spoiler: No Optimus :)
StefanKiss 5y ago
“Look at how easy it is to do half of the setup in those 35 steps”. Meanwhile in macOs world everything is already setup. So … why?

147 points by joelittlejohn 5y ago

otar 5y ago

Haha... I've used Ubuntu and then Arch prior to switching mac. If you have enough time and nerves to do OS/desktop env stuff yourself, then go ahead... In the end I decided to use my time for more effective things and stop geeking around.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
This is HackerNews, not PracticalUserNews! :-)
dainiusse 5y ago
Yeah. Sounds like geeking around. 20 years ago we had this cult of "living in the console" and ignoring X servers at all. It was fun for some time - even watching some video stuff using mplayer's aalib, playing mud.... But then again - this is not about productivity - it is just fun, while if you need to do work, family, etc... There's rarely time for that.
- zibzab 5y ago
  If using Ubuntu is "living in the console" for you, then something is seriously wrong with how you use it. I mean, you sure _can_ do it. But that's not what you are supposed to do.
  - stinkytaco 5y ago
    "supposed" is a strong word here. I don't know that you're supposed to do anything except get done what you want to get done.
  - nix23 5y ago
    He installed ubuntu server and had no clue how to install gnome ;)
flippinburgers 5y ago
Mac can never come close to xmonad + any linux distro.

samarthr1 5y ago

I am personally facing up to make the opposite switch. 2 days of battery life is very attractive for me. I am thinking of keeping my current laptop as my "desktop" and carrying a Mac around. Since most of my tools are cross platform, (jetbrains ides), my work can just continue Grimm one place to another using GitHub for synchronisation.

fsflover 5y ago

> There are still many things I need to set up on the new laptop, for example: suspension/hibernation on closing the lid doesn’t always work Sounds like a problem of hardware not designed for Linux. Everything has been working out of the box for me on a Librem laptop.

blinkingled 5y ago
Ditto on most non Nvidia equipped ThinkPads. Typically Dell also does a good job at Linux compatibility but sometimes things take time to be worked out on newer hardware.
- nicolaslem 5y ago
  My strategy when picking hardware to run Linux on with 100% success so far: 1. Wait about 6 months before purchasing newly released hardware (new generation of GPU, network adapter...) to let drivers trickle down from the manufacturer to the kernel and then to the distribution. 2. If it has an Nvidia logo on it, leave it on the shelf.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Alternatively, simply buy preinstalled Linux. Worked for me.
  - blinkingled 5y ago
    Exactly - I have had great success with this strategy for many years now. Sometimes I take chances with #1 by running rolling release distros like Arch or Tumbleweed.
slowmotiony 5y ago
To be fair, I've had those with all Dell laptops on Windows too. In fact I've never had a Windows laptop that could reliably wake up from sleep every time.
- tssva 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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Kalanos 5y ago

Getting your custom stack tuned feels great, but maintaining that entire stack across updates is daunting. You can't join meetings because your headphone/ mic/ video drivers aren't working? yikes. i trust apple to handle hardware and os for me. I've switched to: macOS > brew (basic cli utils & gui apps) > some basic zshrc (not ohmyzsh) > docker (not environment managers) > done. ^ but i've lost trust for them to handle dev tools for me.

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
> You can't join meetings because your headphone/ mic drivers aren't working? yikes. I really don't know where you're getting this from. This isn't 2004 and you don't have to screw with ALSA drivers to get basic audio functionality on Linux. On both PulseAudio and Pipewire, I've never had this problem and I know many others who haven't had issues either, and I really just don't think audio input/output is a gigantic issue on Linux (other than, obviously, if you have niche hardware, but I still haven't had audio issues other than when I tried to install Linux on a Chromebook using the MrChromebox coreboot UEFI firmware). Audio drivers failing is something that people like to throw out there even though it's not very common. I've literally never had my audio drivers suddenly fail on me. The only mic issues I've had are the ones I'd have on any other system, like choosing the wrong input device and wondering why no one can hear me. > maintaining that entire stack across updates is daunting I've had Arch installs for long, long times. IME and in many other people's experiences, Arch doesn't really break that much (read: at all for me) through updates compared to other distros (eg. Ubuntu). It's a good example of a distro that you'd want to use on a desktop for this exact reason.
- Kalanos 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  It’s way better than it was before (though not 2004, I used Linux for a long time and even ~ 2012 BT audio was finicky), but it’s not as plug and play an experience as on windows and macOS. For example, see this issue where BT headphones drop to extremely bad audio when you want to also use the inbuilt mic: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/616973/use-high-quality-codec-and-microphone-simultaneously-with-bluetooth-headset https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/616973/use-high-qua... The solution to this is basically to remove pulse and install pipe wire, which is definitely not the default on most distros and not something you can do without technical skills and the time to manage the setup.

gbrown 5y ago

Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf? I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed, but for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates. From the wiki: > Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list Like… why?

jimjimjimjim 5y ago
Sometimes there are some manual interventions that you may have to perform.
- gbrown 5y ago
  Yeah, exactly. Why?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nvarsj 5y ago
    It's the philosophy of Arch to stick to vanilla as much as possible and keep things simple. It's a rolling distro too with no fixed release cycles. When you upgrade fedora, ubuntu, etc. they perform various scripts to migrate existing configuration. In Arch, it just simply installs the vanilla packages whenever you tell pacman to update. Very rarely there is some breaking change, maybe once or twice a year, that requires manual intervention. Yeah they could automate it all but such stuff takes effort and breaks in other ways.
  - doubled112 5y ago
    Because many of the changes are large enough that it will break, and that's expected. The KISS principle applies here. If a config file format changes in a service between version 3 and version 4, should the package manager be responsible for it? Or the admin? Sometimes it's not just merging changes in. In a non-rolling release distribution, you only need to worry about those changes during major upgrades. In a rolling release distro, they can change at any time. It's no different than a user reading the release notes for Debian 11 while upgrading from 10, except the upgrades are constant.

Sayrus 5y ago

If I may suggest, take a look at autorandr [1], it saves your monitor configuration and automatically enables it when a set of monitor is detected. It's a small thing, but it improves the experience and will replace your home alias. [1] https://github.com/phillipberndt/autorandr https://github.com/phillipberndt/autorandr

sunaurus 5y ago

I just completed my migration in the opposite direction after using Arch Linux as my daily driver for ~10 years. I think Arch Linux is by far the better OS for pretty much all power users, but when using multiple devices, the benefits of the "Apple Ecosystem" outweigh the benefits of an amazing desktop OS for me, which is why I ended up switching to Mac OS. Some key points which I believe are much worse on Mac: * No great package managers. Nothing is super-integrated with the core system like pacman is in Arch, and even when heavily using some package manager, there will always be a bunch of software that can only be updated using their own auto-update mechanism instead of a central package manager. * Docker in general is just much slower compared to running directly on Linux. * Setting up ergonomic custom keyboard shortcuts is painful and requires (multiple?) third-party applications to do well.

foobarian 5y ago
The Alt-Tab behavior on MacOS across multiple screens is really annoying. Also window resizing behaviors. If there was a way to override those it would be an unmatched system/environment.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  I haven’t tried it so I can’t vouch for it, but AltTab[0] may meet your window switching needs. What specifically would you prefer to be different for window resizing behaviors? If it’s something akin to Aero Snap on Windows there’s a multitude of options, including Moom[1], Rectangle[2], and Magnet[3] among others. [0]: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ [1]: https://manytricks.com/moom/ https://manytricks.com/moom/ [2]: https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/ [3]: https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/ https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
- wyclif 5y ago
  I've said this many times on this forum, but the fact that macOS doesn't natively allow users to snap windows to the edge is incredibly annoying, and is one of those indications of the wrong and stubborn choices made in the design of the OS. Most Linux distros don't assume they know how users want their windows arranged. macOS says, "We, in fact, do know better than users how large windows should be and where they should be placed."

another-account 5y ago

Reading the netstat source... yeah, there's freedom.

anschwa 5y ago

Arch is great, although I think fedora does a much better job at providing a no-nonsense Linux workstation and would make for a smoother transition from macOS.

tanjiro 5y ago

Its not just the initial setup that's painful with Arch, the whole rolling update model means things break often and I no longer have the patience to patch them. But I do agree that linux provides a better env for development compared to macOS. On Ubuntu atm and works like charm with flexibility to extend it as I like.

jatone 5y ago
rolling updates isn't actually a problem in practice. the maintainers do test the applications before releasing the updates. i encounter usually 2-3 bugs (and almost always they are minor) per year due to rolling updates and usually its in the software I'm developing relying on old behaviors. and a simple package downgrade fixes it almost every time.
blux 5y ago
"...means things break often..." Citation needed. I can provide some anecdotal evidence to the contrary; I've been running Arch both privately and professionally now for about 15 years and sure there were some issues initially but the last decade or so I've been updating my systems fearlessly on a regular basis.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  I've only been running arch on my laptop for a year, and it hasn't broken once, unlike Ubuntu which I constantly had issues with.

rbut 5y ago

Not Arch, but macOS to Linux related. As a developer, used macOS for 13 years. Switched to Ubuntu after Apple went to M1. It's been pretty much flawless and required no more tweaks during setup than a typical macOS install would. Developing on the same environment as our servers is a massive plus. The key is choosing the right hardware from the start. For my desktop, I chose an Asus TUF gaming motherboard that had everything Intel. For my laptop, I chose a laptop that is supported by the manufacturer, in this case a Dell XPS 13. (Selecting the correct hardware is no different to creating a Hackintosh setup, but the hardware support is infinitely better)

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
Not only is the hardware support better, but even with good hardware support, you have to do more on Hackintoshes (manually download and copy tens of kexts, edit a very, very long plist file for OpenCore, screw with the serial number if you want iMesasge, etc., etc.). Linux usually "just works."
- bigmadwolf 5y ago
  True. For a Hack as with Linux, using compatible hardware is the key. However once that configuration process is done (and done right) from then on its typically a rock solid experience until the next major Mac OS version upgrade. In some ways it is superior to an actual Mac since you have the ability to inject kexts without having to stuff around with reboot to recovery mode, disabling SIP to install and so on. OpenCore is an impressive piece of software.
  - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
    > OpenCore is an impressive piece of software. 100% agree with this in every way possible. Cannot detract from how many features it (Audio support for boot chimes? Full graphics support? How many Linux bootloaders have that?). Tons and tons of configuration options and settings that you'll need to get a working Hackintosh. Yes, OpenCore is an extremely impressive piece of software. It would be nice if Linux bootloaders even approached the featureset and level of polish that OpenCore has.

RistrettoMike 5y ago

This really doesn't sound like an article written as a "Linux newbie" ~ but props to them for finding solutions to their various workflow needs and learning. That's a big part of what Linux is all about :)

stevencorona 5y ago

I made a similar jump over the past few years out of frustration with stagnating apple hardware (pre-m1). I spent a year with a hackintosh, which worked pretty well, but became disenchanted by the continued locking-down of the OS. For the most part, daily driving Linux as my desktop has been great - no small thanks to Electron. Slack, Spotify, VSCode, etc. all just mostly work. Going the arch-route took extra upfront work since you're effectively building a desktop environment from scratch, but the benefit is knowing exactly how -everything- works. If I press my "volume up" shortcut and the overlay volume bar isn't displayed, I know exactly which sway config and executable to look at. It's refreshingly simple. The downsides are that upgrading is a bit anxiety producing (will I break anything?). HiDPI on Linux is still (in my experience) a bit of a mess. If you run wayland, you need to patch xwayland/sway/wlroots if you don't want blurry x11 apps. And there are some quirks- like, I can't drag files into Slack. Maybe it's fixable, but at some point you become satisfied with "good enough".

thesuitonym 5y ago
>The downsides are that upgrading is a bit anxiety producing (will I break anything?). I don't understand why Arch users put up with this. There are plenty of distros that you can build your DE on your own with, but that have regular releases, and are extremely stable.
- flatiron 5y ago
  arch users don't really "put up" with this. every computer i run (besides my work windows machine) is arch and they have broken exactly 0 times. i update once a week, 0 problems.
- pkulak 5y ago
  For what it's worth, when one of my Macs upgrades, and starts rebooting 8 times over the course of an hour, I get pretty damn anxious too. At least with Arch it's just a bunch of packages being replaced and then a reboot. Plus, if you run a snapshotting filesystem like btrfs, you can always just roll your whole system back a few hours if things are really borked; though I've never personally had to do that. No option like that on Macs. If you upgrade and something important stops working, you're shit outta luck.

popey 5y ago

"There are still many things I need to set up on the new laptop, for example: suspension/hibernation on closing the lid doesn’t always work" For me, this is one of those things that should work out of the box. I appreciate Arch is one of those distros you configure manually, and can thus choose whether to implement this or not. But I'd rather not have my laptop burn out in my bag because the system didn't suspend properly. I'm sure everyone has experience of this happening on any distro, and probably even on Windows and MacOS. But it should at least try out of the box in my mind.

vurudlxtyt 5y ago
FWIW I've had this work out of the box for several years. Could be a case-by-case thing, but I've only ever had to configure it to my preferences rather than surprise-discover that it didn't work.
jjoonathan 5y ago
I tried Manjaro the other day and had to try 3 kernel versions before I found one that woke from sleep without crashing, the display wouldn't hold its resolution through display sleep, bluetooth wouldn't connect without writing a custom config file, and CUPS auto-detected the wrong drivers. I went back to Ubuntu and it all Just Worked. My conclusion: yeah, the Debian stale package problem sucks, but it doesn't suck as badly as the rolling release instability problem.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  I had several issues with waking from sleep on Ubuntu based distros as well, and had to wait ages for updates that would fix it. It’s not all green on the other side!
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Me too, but that was 15 years ago. Manjaro was a trip back to the Bad Old Days. I'm sure we're deep in YMMV territory, but I gave Manjaro a spin based on the recent hype wave so whenever I see an echo of that wave I feel obliged to share my experience. Shrug.

zibzab 5y ago

I don't get why people go from osx to arch. Why not something that just works, and updating is not Russian roulette?

vurudlxtyt 5y ago
People like to parrot this but I've literally never had a breaking change from an upgrade in ~5-6 years of Arch usage. At least, if I did, it didn't take more than a couple minutes to fix, because I honestly don't remember having issues. On the other hand doing a dist-upgrade on Ubuntu has burned me more than once. I fear having to do it on one of my home servers, and should really get off of it. I'd argue that updating more often is more safe, since anything that goes wrong will be incremental and likely easier to deal with if it does. (Not appropriate for a production server though, you don't want things to change on that unless it's deliberate and likely infrequent)
- Comevius 5y ago
  Same experience here with 15 years of Arch usage, a few major issues before systemd, none since, except having to migrate the boot loader, network manager and so on to systemd and from time to time having to use a workaround from the latest news at archlinux.org. I have also migrated to pipewire a month ago with a single command and no issues. It's quite stress free, because the whole operating system is basically the kernel, systemd, x11 or wayland, pulseaudio or pipewire, the nvidia driver and pacman. Not much can go wrong.
  - zibzab 5y ago
    Actually, I tried arch again last month after unfa's video on pipewire support. Couldn't even revert back to PA when PW failed, the entire system had to be reinstalled. Can you make it work? Absolutely. Can it fail catastrophically if you make one little mistake? Absolutely.
    - Comevius 5y ago
      PipeWire is basically the files pacman installed, and systemd user services. This command would have been able to remove it: pacman -Rsn pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-alsa And this disable it: systemctl disable --user pipewire pipewire-media-session pipewire-pulse A common mistake when installing it is forgetting to install pipewire-pulse and pipewire-alsa. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire

nmstoker 5y ago

Was interested in the idea of Arch in a commercial environment. Presumably this only works in a certain kind of place: one with motivated individuals and without the "oh my God people might do what they think is sensible" types from an overactive Compliance group. Personally this would be a very satisfying kind of place to work because the single biggest challenge I face in my company is the endless fiddling that the desktop team do breaking things, as it's is often done wrongly or should be left well alone. I don't begrudge the people in the team as they're actually decent but they're stuck having to juggle various demands and roll out a steady stream of MS changes faster than they appear to have capacity for.

paco3346 5y ago
This is what my org does. Devs are allowed to pick their own OS as long as they can support it when IT doesn't know about the particulars. We've even contemplated running it on production servers instead of Ubuntu so that we don't have to wait 18 months for Canonical to publish the next version of a package.

j7ake 5y ago

Interesting, but no discussion about the touchpad? I imagine one downgrade from moving away from Mac is the touchpad experience.

donio 5y ago
I guess it comes down to personal preferences but for me the touchpad on the X1 Carbon is so much better than the Mac ones. It's just the right size (why does the Mac ones need to be so huge?), lovely physical buttons and the trackpoint is nice to have. Works perfectly on Linux.

calferreira 5y ago

Arch is like the IKEA version of Linux. Thanks to their WIKI, i feel that i can troubleshoot most issues by myself despite not having huge linux experience.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
Arch Wiki is useful even if you're using a different distro.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  In many cases I think the Arch wiki is superior even to the official documentation. Which I think says a lot about the state of most documentation.

obiwan14 5y ago

> I started on Slackware a long time ago, then used Debian for some time and Ubuntu over the years when I needed a virtualized environment. I consider myself a Linux newbie and I’m sure I’m about to make many questionable choices. Somebody who started with Slackware, then to Debian and Ubuntu does not really fall into the "newbie" group in my opinion.

extr 5y ago

I currently run a dual boot with Arch and Windows 11 on an XPS 13. There are positives to each: * Windows has much better support for handling the Hi/Multi DPI setup that is my laptop + 2 4K screens. Wayland gets there, but unfortunately the font rendering is annoying bad, and the fractional scaling doesn't quite look right. And of course it's a very "just works" experience if you stay on the happy path. The Windows OneDrive + Office integration is great, and I have some photo software I run that is Windows-only. * Arch gives a much better "pure laptop" experience. Hotkeys make everything easy, tiling WMs are just infinitely superior if you're working off one small screen. Also I get BETTER battery life on Arch, the laptop runs totally cool (and fans never spin up), and closing the lid puts it into true S3 sleep. It's very snappy and I use less RAM. Also, I think people have this idea that if you use Arch the only "right" way to do it is to spend a million hours setting up a whole universe of CLI apps and becoming a wizard with hotkeys. I only use the CLI if it's truly easier than a GUI or something I don't use often. I basically just install the regular google-chrome-stable binary from AUR and then do everything on the web. Email? I set up a desktop link to fastmail. Spotify? Don't bother with native linux app, just set up a desktop link to the web player. Need to use Excel and don't feel like switching to windows? Just go use the web version, etc...Seriously, the move to webapps is doing more for the linux desktop experience than anything else.

bsnnkv 5y ago
Just gonna plug my bspwm-esque tiling windows manager for Windows 10 and 11 here since I know how hard life on Windows is without one: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/ https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/
- extr 5y ago
  Small world! I use this and submitted issue #22 about the Electron/Chromium frozen window problem. Despite that issue, really fantastic software, by far the best linux-like tiling WM solution for Windows at the moment (and I've tried them all). Fantastic work!

belthesar 5y ago

I'm super pleased with my Linux desktop. I'm now full time Linux on the desktop, having run Windows, dual booting Windows/Hackintosh, and then Windows/Linux for quite some time. I still have a Windows partition, but I haven't been in it in half a year at this point. The experience on my desktop hasn't been flawless, but it has been pretty nice on the whole. I can't say the same for my laptop, which has been a 2 year experiment at this point. When I was using it predominantly to do light work in the office, it worked out well, but I find it more and more difficult to use from a non-coding productivity standpoint. When I do work, I generally remote into my desktop via VSCode anyway at this point (and I really like this workflow tbh), but because I don't daily drive the laptop, there's less time spent to improve the tooling, and the ratio of time spent working to time spent fixing a weird issue is much lower than on my desktop. With some of my work potentially benefiting from the new Apple SoCs, the reversal in direction back to good sane defaults in hardware layout, and the far greater likelihood that my ratio of work to fix ratio would significantly increase, I'm pretty sure that an Apple Silicon laptop is in my near future.

wooque 5y ago

As a former i3wm user, just install KDE or GNOME and get on with your life, using only window manager is pointless masturbation

jagrsw 5y ago

I also use Iosevka on my Linux desktop since a couple of days. Subjectively a very aesthetically pleasing monospaced font. My aesthetics skills are 2/10, and I usually don't care about UI feel much, but for some reason I really dislike "not nice" (R) fonts. But recently I switched to the combination of the default Windows 11 font (Segoe) for desktop, and Iosevka for consoles, and this feels good.

jefc1111 5y ago

I tried for years to switch away from Mac OS to Linux. I tried Ubuntu a few times as I am familiar with it from a server perspective. It finally clicked when I tried Manjaro. The killer app for me is i3 Window manager (which you can of course use on other distributions). In general though I just like there being 'less'. I use Thinkpads and yes - have had issues with audio, and with sleep etc, but all solvable.

culopatin 5y ago
With Thinkpads I rather have Bluetooth working than onboard audio. The speakers are so bad I don’t even want to hear them beep.

awill 5y ago

For my personal desktop, I use Arch linux, and I'm perfectly happy. However, for a work laptop, I am pretty sure I'd take a new M1 Macbook Pro over a Thinkpad/XPS w/ Arch Linux. A MBP can get 15+ hours of battery life, supports suspend/resume, and in the case of the Intel models, smooth GPU switching between dedicated and onboard. Linux does none of that well. On a desktop, none of that matters, but I wouldn't take those tradeoffs on a work laptop.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago
Yeah, I'm sad we're still seeing comments like this in 2021: "I normally work using an external monitor, so I started looking at my options to configure the external display including the external keyboard and mouse." Trying to use linux on a laptop is how I ended buying my first Macbook a decade ago.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  People are having lots of issues too with external monitors and Mac laptops. xrandr on Linux ain't complicated and it works well. I've got a M1 running on OS X and it's a sweet machine. I've got a beefy LG Gram laptop (24 GB of RAM, wider screen, much lighter than the M1) running Linux and it's a very sweet setup too. The LG Gram running Linux is for the serious stuff, the M1 running OS X is to watch YouTube vids and overall surf from the couch. Now of course the real work is done on my desktop/workstation (running Linux too but whatever).
  - awill 5y ago
    What battery life does the LG get? I'm guessing less than half your Mac
  - lowbloodsugar 5y ago
    That is a sweet LG laptop you have. I daily a 2018 i9/32GB Intel MBP for work, with an eGPU and three 27" monitors. "Setup" was just plugging them in. I've got an M1 Max 64Gb for myself, and at 4.7lbs it's just light enough given its raw power (cpu and graphics). It also handles that many monitors without resorting to the eGPU (which is a good job, since it can't use one!) Had an M1 Air before that and mostly used it with old Thunderbolt 27" display and external keyboard/mouse. But I could (and did) play factorio on it for several hours on the couch on battery. I've always wanted to try a System76 laptop, on the basis that they'd have all that laptop-linux stuff sorted out, but Apple started making nice laptops again... It's easy for me now to drop $4k on a laptop. A decade ago, when I switched to a MacBook I was working for myself, and "it just works" was worth it so I could concentrate on making money rather than knob twiddling. It was a stressful time, so maybe I'm still carrying that experience with me.

flippinburgers 5y ago

If they are using an XPS everything should already be working on linux.

kureikain 5y ago

I used Fedora/Ubuntu at works and Arch Linux at home exclusively to 2012 when I started to get into Ios dev. Nowadays I used Mac exclusively for all of my work + personal setup(except Server of course). And I'm convince that the only reason for me to use it is due to iOS dev. If I can get away with it I will go back to Linux. Some points: - No more dealing with homebrew and its bizarre upgrade policies. You don't know when a package will be break. You run `brew install python` and every thing broken. - No more dealing with the weirdo of its disk image and the locked of system volume - No more dealing with junks stuff in a few place such as `/Library` or `/System/Library` and `~/Library` - No longer has to run docker in a VM - Fuse just works - No more buggy file watchers. For some reasons the file watcher (fsnotify package I belive) on Mac sometime works, sometime not and sometime just had CPU up to 100% - No more custom syntax to work with fslimit - No more plist file that also gzip and encrypt - No more installing software by going to a website and download a stupid xip file. - No more reverse engineering how a certain thing works and script it out. But due to iOS works, not just iOS development I also help with CI/CD for mobile app and having access to a mac locally is handy, I have to keep using it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bengalister 5y ago

After almost 2 years running Arch I switched back to Windows last summer on my home laptop (Dell XPS 13 9380). The pipewire update needed by pulseaudio effects broke the sound output to my bluetooth headset. Also at the same time a Gnome update made my desktop environment unstable. I did not want to spend time on freezing dependencies, reverting some of them etc. Got tired at the time of these occasional maintenance operations, and not optimal hardware support. To be honest most of the update issues were related to Gnome major updates. I think an update only broke once my system, I could not login (pam configuration upgrade issue). I was running the LTS kernel. I think I had better battery life on Linux thought. It must have improved with Firefox/Chromium hardware acceleration. Arch is still my preferred distro for a dev machine thought. Back to Windows, I just updated to W11 today, I very much like the changes in the UI. Also the ability to run some Linux GUI apps without starting a X server, exporting the DISPLAY, etc directly from the a WLS2 vm is nice. Even thought I think I'll keep my development environment in a VM (arch) mainly because of docker. I found docker for desktop on Windows really too slow. Security wise I also prefer that, I install too many tools that I don't trust. The drawback of using a VM is of course performance but that is not that an issue for the kind of dev/work I do (NodeJs/Typescript/Vue/Python/Cloudformation/Terraform). Also sometimes I have an idea or something I'd like to test quickly and I don't want to start the VM and I just give up. I'll probably stick to that 1 or 2 years, when I'll think about replacing my laptop. If I had to today, I'll probably go for a Macbook air m1.

vereis 5y ago
I just forego docker desktop and run docker on the command line in wsl2 instead. Have you considered trying that?
- bengalister 5y ago
  You mean install docker in the WSL2 installed distribution directly ? I run a Ubuntu 20.04 WSL2 vm. It does not seem very easy to install it directly in the vm, for instance there is no systemd. There is the reddit post about it and most recommend to install docker desktop.

emrah 5y ago

I know it's not Arch Linux but PopOS is a great pragmatic alternative. Everything worked out of the box on the old laptops I installed it.

vjancik 5y ago

Just wait until he finds out his battery life has been slashed in half after he installs Nvidia drivers. Spoiler: No Optimus :)

StefanKiss 5y ago

“Look at how easy it is to do half of the setup in those 35 steps”. Meanwhile in macOs world everything is already setup. So … why?