6 ms·

I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

97 points by yberreby 1y ago

alexeiz 1y ago
For some time after the introduction of the M1 CPU Macbooks provided the best battery life experience. So it would make sense to use a Macbook if you wanted your laptop to work more than 4-5 hours unplugged. But now Intel Core Ultra series 2 and AMD Strix Point laptops are almost as good. Sure you won't get 20 hours of battery life, but you get about 10-15 hours and it's already good enough. Performance of Intel/AMD CPUs are also good enough: about M2 performance-wise. Sure they are a couple of generations behind Apple, but for most tasks it doesn't matter. Linux compatibility is also getting there. You can choose a Thinkpad if you want to be sure that Linux runs on it. But even many consumer-grade laptops are supported but Linux thanks to recent kernel updates. Essentially what I'm saying is that if you want a good laptop experience and you like Linux, you don't have to settle for Macbook anymore.
bigyabai 1y ago
Nix is downright awful on MacOS, even with the DetSys installer. Almost worse than Homebrew. If you ever sit down to play with a native NixOS install, the difference in functionality is night-and-day.
- yberreby 1y ago
  Care to elaborate on what you've found most painful? Since `nix-darwin` is anything but officially supported, I am expecting trouble, but it would be nice to know if there are specific things I should look out for. I'd love to use NixOS itself, of course, but it's not a native option on this machine due to the missing M4 support in Asahi. For now, I'm trying to see how much package/configuration management discipline I can reclaim on macOS, and familiarize myself with Nix in the process. I could have just used a set of Ansible scripts and Homebrew, but that didn't seem quite as interesting as trying Nix out.
  - tymscar 1y ago
    I am running nix darwin and its a dream. Don’t have any issues and things just work. Setting everything up just the way I like it took ages but thats because I wanted to play with it. I use most of the same configuration on nixos too
  - indemnity 1y ago
    Not sure what issues they are facing but I use Nix flakes to manage my command line and UNIX env for two Macs, a Linux desktop running NixOS, a Windows WSL environment and two Linux home servers using NixOS. I used to use a dot file manager (home grown and later yadm). But once I got over the learning curve I much prefer using Nix. My machines are now effectively immutable and I wipe them without worrying I will lose anything. Can still have machine or role specific configs (e.g. one of the Linux servers is my firewall, so it has no desktop environment or GUI apps). Btw, you should Ghostty a try too. I was a long term Alacritty and WezTerm user, but Ghostty in 1.0 form already replaced everything I used those for, and has better native platform integration.
st3fan 1y ago
> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system. Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage. What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...
- yberreby 1y ago
  Interesting that you had such a smooth experience. I was mainly using Homebrew on the daily between 10 and 14 years ago, so I couldn't give you specifics. My experience at the time was poor; maybe I was using it wrong. My impression from looking at recent user reports was that Homebrew's stability has continued to lag behind pacman's, but I agree that my assertion in the latter part of the excerpt you quoted was insufficiently substantiated, so I'll remove it.
  - sroussey 1y ago
    I also had a bad time with brew back then. On new machines these days no issues at all.
    - timcobb 1y ago
      Every time I need to update anything on brew, I end up updating thousands of packages and it goes on and on for a long time.
      - crabique 1y ago
        The trick for smooth experience is to treat it like `pacman -Syu`: brew update && brew upgrade && brew autoremove && brew cleanup && brew doctor Running this every few days and fixing everything that it explicitly complains about kept me issue-free for the last 10 years or so.
        1y ago
reactordev 1y ago
>The macOS package management story is not great. Ummm... Homebrew has been around for at least a decade.
- intothemild 1y ago
  I think what you might be missing here is that compared to the package management in Arch, the package management in MacOS appears not great in comparison.
- detaro 1y ago
  and can reasonably be described as "not great".
jasoneckert 1y ago
For the same reasons, I prefer Linux - but also like Apple Silicon platform. As a result, I use Fedora Asahi Remix natively on the hardware. It's a few generations behind in support (M1- and M2-based systems right now), but I can't tell you how good it feels to be able to use Linux natively on Apple Silicon hardware. In my workflow, Fedora Asahi Remix runs at least twice as fast as macOS on the same hardware for any task (and 4-6 times faster for heavier tasks).
- qudat 1y ago
  Why not just run an OS in a VM and full screen it?
  - mmcnl 1y ago
    Because it's very cumbersome. Managing with multiple audio devices and displays must be done in the host OS. Keyboard shortcuts might not work correctly. Gestures might not work correctly. Suspending and resuming is a pain, basically need to login twice. It's a lot of friction.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
      Do you even need to 'login' on a system which only you, personally is running in a VM? I'd disable that as one of the first things. Just autologin with no password. For the thing running in the VM, not the host.
  - sarlalian 1y ago
    That’s what Mitchell Hashimoto does.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  What about support for graphics? Does it work?
jmtulloss 1y ago
[deleted… my disagreements about time allocation aside, there’s no reason to argue on the internet about it]
- tfpgh 1y ago
  Did you actually read the article? Multiple times, they talk about how they're just trying to find a smooth, comfortable workflow and don't need every detail perfect (at least initially).
  - jmtulloss 1y ago
    Yes, but they’re over indexing on that imo. The smooth comfort they’re looking for is costing them multiples of how much time it will actually save
    - tfpgh 1y ago
      A few days of work doesn't matter over years.
      - jmtulloss 1y ago
        Yes it does
        do_not_redeem 1y ago
        Even if it takes you a full 2 days, that's literally 0.1% of your time over the 5-year life of a machine. Sharpen your axe before you go into the woods.
    - yberreby 1y ago
      The core initial setup here took about 2h30 from getting the laptop out of its packaging to being able to run and develop my main project's code within the environment I described.
- do_not_redeem 1y ago
w10-1 1y ago
I wouldn't try to make macOS into Arch, if Arch is what works for you. Just run Arch in a VM on the mac, using Apple's virtualization framework [1]. (No need for other wrappers; the framework is often easier to use directly.) I find no significant performance issues; a lot of software actually runs faster in a Linux VM than when I compile and run it on the mac. The limitations are that the Linux VM's don't support save/restore of state (i.e., you have to shut down to stop the VM) and the graphics and device support is limited. You might get more performance if you compile your own Arch distribution with all the flags necessary to enjoy modern CPU features in M-series (particularly M4+ with SME extensions). With M4-Pro memory should run 273GB/second for JAX and PyTorch. However, AFAICT, PyTorch supports vectorization on Apple silicon by delegating to Apple's Metal API's, and that wouldn't be available from the Linux VM, so you might prefer running those on macOS directly. To me the biggest draw of the M4 processor is that it supports CPU tracing (at least for Xcode-run code): actual, direct (not sampled) data about CPU internals like branching, cache misses, etc. If you're into performance, this will take you from working with a black box to seeing exactly what's up. [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Virtualization/running-gui-linux-in-a-virtual-machine-on-a-mac https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Virtualization/run...
- c-hendricks 1y ago
  I would love to use Arch in a VM on macOS, but Arch ARM is pretty bad. From the installation experience, the frequent stops in updates because something is compiling, to Chromium being broken for months.
  - WhyNotHugo 1y ago
    Consider Alpine, if it fits your needs. The ARM support if first class.
    - lrvick 1y ago
      But Alpine does not even attempt reproducible builds, maintainer signing, etc. Running Alpine means anyone with access to the git repo or build server can push any code they want to your system. Alpine is a musl research/hobby distro at best.
Sytten 1y ago
My homebrew story is always something along the lines of: Me: Please install software A. Homebrew: In order to install it I will also install 20 libraries (some need to be built from source), update openssl, update Python and wreck all virtual environments. Also since its been a while I decided it must be time to upgrade your other unrelated packages. Enjoy!
- wyager 1y ago
  I remember when homebrew first came out it was pretty snappy and didn't do a bunch of extraneous nonsense. A remarkably precipitous decline in software quality
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Or the rose-tinted glasses have come off. Homebrew is simultaneously a very impressive "my first package manager" experience as well as a chronically deficient packaging solution.
    - subjectsigma 1y ago
      I use “normal, mainline Homebrew as well as Bundles and I’ve never had a major issue. I’m not sure “chronically deficient” is the right word
  - thiht 1y ago
    Except that’s just your opinion, not everyone agrees that it’s "in decline" or does "nonsense". Homebrew is exactly what I want from my desktop package manager: I want everything I install from Homebrew to always be in an evergreen state, I’m ok with everything being in latest and Homebrew forcing package maintainers to work with the latest of their dependencies. This ends up being remarkably stable, and I actually get a looot less of version incompatibilities than when I used Linux (easy because I don’t get any with Homebrew). If I want a specific version of something I don’t mind using a specific version manager (eg. asdf or mise)
- NERD_ALERT 1y ago
Liquix 1y ago
aerospace is nice, but also consider checking out yabai [0] + sketchybar [1] for an i3/hyprland style tiling setup. more customizable (IMO) and perfectly suited for a terminal based workflow :~^) [0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [1] https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar
- ChristianJacobs 1y ago
  I switched to AeroSpace from Yabai because I had to disable parts of SIP for certain functions (such as switching workspaces with keybindings from SKHD), and that didn't feel right. Updates are also smoother since I don't need to update the sudoers file allowing the Yabai CLI to run without requiring password. Been happy as a clam ever since.
bee_rider 1y ago
Those apple chips are really quite impressive. But, AMD has those fancy APUs now, maybe it is possible to stay in x86 land a bit longer?
- appleaday1 1y ago
  what apus?
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Strix Halo
  - TiredOfLife 1y ago
    All the zen 5 based ones. https://manuals.omamix.org/3/omacom/74/good-linux-hardware https://manuals.omamix.org/3/omacom/74/good-linux-hardware
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago
  Why do you prefer x86? If another architecture offers better performance with the same hardware support, isn’t that good enough?
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    If Linux runs fine on it, sure. The blog post linked seemed to indicate that Linux wasn’t 100% on the M4 yet. If that’s wrong, then that’s good news.
    - microtonal 1y ago
      Asahi only supports M1 and M2 Macs well (and you will still miss support for some functionality, like Thunderbolt or USB-C DP-Alt mode displays). Ryzen APUs have indeed narrowed the gap and if you want to run Linux, it's probably much better to get a recent Ryzen ThinkPad than a Mac (or get a Strix Halo Ryzen once it lands in the good ThinkPad models). (I am a longtime Mac user, but I recently got a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 and all the hardware works out-of-the-box and very well on Linux.)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
SanjayMehta 1y ago
I use macOS for day-to-day work on a laptop, but all serious business is conducted on Linux workstations. I can’t be bothered with Docker et al, so each workstation is configured for one special set of tools, and nothing else. Updates are tightly controlled, to avoid breaking build configurations. In the long run, hardware is cheaper than your time.
appleaday1 1y ago
thats cool been to mila before, anyway OP we need to get CachyOS on Mac Os immidiately
xelxebar 1y ago
This couldn't have come at a more opportune time. My 11th gen Framework just gave up the magic smoke last night, which was a frightening experience. The Framework has given me a bewildering litany of issues over the years, and I now just want something solid, light, and reasonable battery life, so just I threw down for an M4 Air today. Having used Linux exclusively for 25 years and an unaBashed CLI junkie, I'm a bit nervous about workflow friction. How does experience with nixos-darwin compare against just VMing on top of MacOS? Also, is there any reason for mucking about with Apple's bootloader etc?
- McAlpine5892 1y ago
  > How does experience with nixos-darwin compare against just VMing on top of MacOS? Kinda depends what you want. Both work. With Nix Darwin you’ll sometimes run into packages that aren’t compatible with your system. It’s not an ND problem really - some software was just never built for Mac. Running a VM works great too. I’m a big fan of Orbstack as it’s fairly transparent with the system. It’s nice to hop inside a real Linux box but feel like you’re working ON the actual system. You’ll take a battery hit compared to on-metal as macOS puts VMs on P-cores, but it’s not that bad.
moribvndvs 1y ago
As someone who’s been a heavy apple daily driver since the Intel Macs arrived on the scene, I can feel myself grinding my teeth while reading this. Watching Apple commit to eroding macOS’s previously-lauded user-centric freedom, simplicity, and reliability year after year in their quest to turn it into another iOS black box appliance that you just rent not own makes me wonder what happens when the author approaches similar categories of problems from different directions vis a vis Linux.
fernandojose 1y ago
I enjoyed reading the post and maybe will try following some part of it, such as the nix-darwin setup. Thanks for sharing, it is well written. I have used Arch in a couple of personal laptops during a handful of years and macOS at job for the last year. I love using Arch, even though it is sometimes painful qua drivers and issues with non-essential hardware. In macOS I don’t recall having issues with homebrew, however I am more familiar with pacman on Arch and therefore prefer it. Before starting to use it, I set up alacritty on macOS building it from source.
shmerl 1y ago
I'd stick to Linux/KDE.
seec 1y ago
It's interesting and all but in typical "Apple switcher" fashion, a preposterous comparison is/will be made: the M4 Pro MBP is around 3K€, replacing a laptop that seems to go for around 1K€ at best. When something costs 3 times as much, it should be better. It's a bit like comparing an entry level Ford to an S class Mercedes. I think the best "feature" of Apple computers is that it prevents cheapskates from making bad choices they will regret. In my family, they use iPhones and I'm glad for it because if they would use Androids, they would just buy the cheapest garbage they could find and the experience would be miserable. It's funny how a corporation greed is actually useful to prevent some people being fucked by their own greed (stinginess is a form of reverse greed, particularly true when you actually have money).
- zuhsetaqi 1y ago
  Well a 1k MacBook Air has the same build quality as the 3k MacBook Pro. It just has less performance. I have a HP ZBook from work and for 3k you don’t get the build quality of a 1k MacBook Air. In my experience when you only compare on build quality of laptops there’s nothing that’s on the level of current MacBooks.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    Beyond just build quality too. The $1k air has phenomenal speakers for a laptop, a great display (albeit, no 120hz), and a touchpad that is unmatched on any other laptop. Plus, it's silent. For $1k in the WinTel world you're lucky to get 1920x1200, or even worse, 16:9 1920x1080 as the standard. I switched to Mac the day the M1 came out, and haven't looked back despite how much I miss Linux. macOS grew on me, and I can't stomach paying $3k+ for a machine that is still substandard to a $1k MacBook Air. The only laptop that comes close is the new arm Surface Laptop 7, but - no Linux on that for now.
Szpadel 1y ago
> quite impressed with the smoothness of the UX on this relatively cheap machine. I recently tried installing cachyos kernel on fedora I tried sched_ext with it (scx_lavd specifically) and to my suprise changing CPU scheduler resolved all UI stuttering for me (even dual 360hz + laptop screen on 3y old laptop with integrated intel gpu) I occasionally use M1 apple mini and right now I can confidently say that now my Linux machine works smoother.
- microtonal 1y ago
  I recently moved from a 60Hz 5k Apple Studio Display to a 120Hz 4k Dell display for my main work desk. I was surprised that on macOS (on an M3 Pro), the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is barely noticeable (mostly in the control center slide animation), whereas my ThinkPad with GNOME is super smooth at 120Hz. Window dragging, browser scrolling, etc., are all much smoother on the 120Hz display.
mmcnl 1y ago
I don't really understand the comparison with a cheap Asus laptop. Ofcourse the MBP will win. But a decent Lenovo ThinkPad or HP EliteBook/ZBook will have flawless Linux support with a rigid and robust chassis.
- grumpyprole 1y ago
  The vast majority of which unfortunately still come with Intel processors, especially the premium models. I handed my work issued Lenovo X1 back to my employer as being unusable due to overheating and excessive thermal throttling. The M4 Macbook Pro I now have is such a huge positive difference, I have adjusted to macOS and enjoy Intel outside.
  - mmcnl 1y ago
    X1 is Intel only, but the new Lunar Lake is quiet and cool. And T14(s) comes with AMD. Mac hardware still is #1, but kernel panics because holding it wrong is definitely not normal.
disintegrator 1y ago
I know this won’t apply to everyone but I’ve been able to, relatively successfully, stick to the constraint that most of my dev tools are static binaries: zoxide, fzf, eza, btop and so on. There is one glaring exception which is docker but I let it pass. By sticking to this I’m able to avoid Homebrew’s mess and Nix’s complexity. I use mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/ https://mise.jdx.dev/) to manage the binaries and languages I have on my machine. It handles installing multiple versions and is directory-aware.
cweagans 1y ago
> Currently using alacritty. Also considering WezTerm. Highly recommend wezterm. That’s what enabled me to do this: https://cweagans.net/2023/09/application-specific-terminals/ https://cweagans.net/2023/09/application-specific-terminals/ You might also be interested in Hammerspoon! Lua-based customization and scripting of many macOS features.

97 points by yberreby 1y ago

For some time after the introduction of the M1 CPU Macbooks provided the best battery life experience. So it would make sense to use a Macbook if you wanted your laptop to work more than 4-5 hours unplugged. But now Intel Core Ultra series 2 and AMD Strix Point laptops are almost as good. Sure you won't get 20 hours of battery life, but you get about 10-15 hours and it's already good enough. Performance of Intel/AMD CPUs are also good enough: about M2 performance-wise. Sure they are a couple of generations behind Apple, but for most tasks it doesn't matter. Linux compatibility is also getting there. You can choose a Thinkpad if you want to be sure that Linux runs on it. But even many consumer-grade laptops are supported but Linux thanks to recent kernel updates. Essentially what I'm saying is that if you want a good laptop experience and you like Linux, you don't have to settle for Macbook anymore.

bigyabai 1y ago

Nix is downright awful on MacOS, even with the DetSys installer. Almost worse than Homebrew. If you ever sit down to play with a native NixOS install, the difference in functionality is night-and-day.

yberreby 1y ago
Care to elaborate on what you've found most painful? Since `nix-darwin` is anything but officially supported, I am expecting trouble, but it would be nice to know if there are specific things I should look out for. I'd love to use NixOS itself, of course, but it's not a native option on this machine due to the missing M4 support in Asahi. For now, I'm trying to see how much package/configuration management discipline I can reclaim on macOS, and familiarize myself with Nix in the process. I could have just used a set of Ansible scripts and Homebrew, but that didn't seem quite as interesting as trying Nix out.
- tymscar 1y ago
  I am running nix darwin and its a dream. Don’t have any issues and things just work. Setting everything up just the way I like it took ages but thats because I wanted to play with it. I use most of the same configuration on nixos too
- indemnity 1y ago
  Not sure what issues they are facing but I use Nix flakes to manage my command line and UNIX env for two Macs, a Linux desktop running NixOS, a Windows WSL environment and two Linux home servers using NixOS. I used to use a dot file manager (home grown and later yadm). But once I got over the learning curve I much prefer using Nix. My machines are now effectively immutable and I wipe them without worrying I will lose anything. Can still have machine or role specific configs (e.g. one of the Linux servers is my firewall, so it has no desktop environment or GUI apps). Btw, you should Ghostty a try too. I was a long term Alacritty and WezTerm user, but Ghostty in 1.0 form already replaced everything I used those for, and has better native platform integration.

st3fan 1y ago

> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system. Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage. What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...

yberreby 1y ago
Interesting that you had such a smooth experience. I was mainly using Homebrew on the daily between 10 and 14 years ago, so I couldn't give you specifics. My experience at the time was poor; maybe I was using it wrong. My impression from looking at recent user reports was that Homebrew's stability has continued to lag behind pacman's, but I agree that my assertion in the latter part of the excerpt you quoted was insufficiently substantiated, so I'll remove it.
- sroussey 1y ago
  I also had a bad time with brew back then. On new machines these days no issues at all.
  - timcobb 1y ago
    Every time I need to update anything on brew, I end up updating thousands of packages and it goes on and on for a long time.
    - crabique 1y ago
      The trick for smooth experience is to treat it like `pacman -Syu`: brew update && brew upgrade && brew autoremove && brew cleanup && brew doctor Running this every few days and fixing everything that it explicitly complains about kept me issue-free for the last 10 years or so.
      - 1y ago

reactordev 1y ago

>The macOS package management story is not great. Ummm... Homebrew has been around for at least a decade.

intothemild 1y ago
I think what you might be missing here is that compared to the package management in Arch, the package management in MacOS appears not great in comparison.
detaro 1y ago
and can reasonably be described as "not great".

jasoneckert 1y ago

For the same reasons, I prefer Linux - but also like Apple Silicon platform. As a result, I use Fedora Asahi Remix natively on the hardware. It's a few generations behind in support (M1- and M2-based systems right now), but I can't tell you how good it feels to be able to use Linux natively on Apple Silicon hardware. In my workflow, Fedora Asahi Remix runs at least twice as fast as macOS on the same hardware for any task (and 4-6 times faster for heavier tasks).

qudat 1y ago
Why not just run an OS in a VM and full screen it?
- mmcnl 1y ago
  Because it's very cumbersome. Managing with multiple audio devices and displays must be done in the host OS. Keyboard shortcuts might not work correctly. Gestures might not work correctly. Suspending and resuming is a pain, basically need to login twice. It's a lot of friction.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
    Do you even need to 'login' on a system which only you, personally is running in a VM? I'd disable that as one of the first things. Just autologin with no password. For the thing running in the VM, not the host.
- sarlalian 1y ago
  That’s what Mitchell Hashimoto does.
vouaobrasil 1y ago
What about support for graphics? Does it work?

jmtulloss 1y ago

[deleted… my disagreements about time allocation aside, there’s no reason to argue on the internet about it]

tfpgh 1y ago
Did you actually read the article? Multiple times, they talk about how they're just trying to find a smooth, comfortable workflow and don't need every detail perfect (at least initially).
- jmtulloss 1y ago
  Yes, but they’re over indexing on that imo. The smooth comfort they’re looking for is costing them multiples of how much time it will actually save
  - tfpgh 1y ago
    A few days of work doesn't matter over years.
    - jmtulloss 1y ago
      Yes it does
      - do_not_redeem 1y ago
        Even if it takes you a full 2 days, that's literally 0.1% of your time over the 5-year life of a machine. Sharpen your axe before you go into the woods.
  - yberreby 1y ago
    The core initial setup here took about 2h30 from getting the laptop out of its packaging to being able to run and develop my main project's code within the environment I described.
do_not_redeem 1y ago

w10-1 1y ago

I wouldn't try to make macOS into Arch, if Arch is what works for you. Just run Arch in a VM on the mac, using Apple's virtualization framework [1]. (No need for other wrappers; the framework is often easier to use directly.) I find no significant performance issues; a lot of software actually runs faster in a Linux VM than when I compile and run it on the mac. The limitations are that the Linux VM's don't support save/restore of state (i.e., you have to shut down to stop the VM) and the graphics and device support is limited. You might get more performance if you compile your own Arch distribution with all the flags necessary to enjoy modern CPU features in M-series (particularly M4+ with SME extensions). With M4-Pro memory should run 273GB/second for JAX and PyTorch. However, AFAICT, PyTorch supports vectorization on Apple silicon by delegating to Apple's Metal API's, and that wouldn't be available from the Linux VM, so you might prefer running those on macOS directly. To me the biggest draw of the M4 processor is that it supports CPU tracing (at least for Xcode-run code): actual, direct (not sampled) data about CPU internals like branching, cache misses, etc. If you're into performance, this will take you from working with a black box to seeing exactly what's up. [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Virtualization/running-gui-linux-in-a-virtual-machine-on-a-mac https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Virtualization/run...

c-hendricks 1y ago
I would love to use Arch in a VM on macOS, but Arch ARM is pretty bad. From the installation experience, the frequent stops in updates because something is compiling, to Chromium being broken for months.
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago
  Consider Alpine, if it fits your needs. The ARM support if first class.
  - lrvick 1y ago
    But Alpine does not even attempt reproducible builds, maintainer signing, etc. Running Alpine means anyone with access to the git repo or build server can push any code they want to your system. Alpine is a musl research/hobby distro at best.

Sytten 1y ago

My homebrew story is always something along the lines of: Me: Please install software A. Homebrew: In order to install it I will also install 20 libraries (some need to be built from source), update openssl, update Python and wreck all virtual environments. Also since its been a while I decided it must be time to upgrade your other unrelated packages. Enjoy!

wyager 1y ago
I remember when homebrew first came out it was pretty snappy and didn't do a bunch of extraneous nonsense. A remarkably precipitous decline in software quality
- bigyabai 1y ago
  Or the rose-tinted glasses have come off. Homebrew is simultaneously a very impressive "my first package manager" experience as well as a chronically deficient packaging solution.
  - subjectsigma 1y ago
    I use “normal, mainline Homebrew as well as Bundles and I’ve never had a major issue. I’m not sure “chronically deficient” is the right word
- thiht 1y ago
  Except that’s just your opinion, not everyone agrees that it’s "in decline" or does "nonsense". Homebrew is exactly what I want from my desktop package manager: I want everything I install from Homebrew to always be in an evergreen state, I’m ok with everything being in latest and Homebrew forcing package maintainers to work with the latest of their dependencies. This ends up being remarkably stable, and I actually get a looot less of version incompatibilities than when I used Linux (easy because I don’t get any with Homebrew). If I want a specific version of something I don’t mind using a specific version manager (eg. asdf or mise)
NERD_ALERT 1y ago

Liquix 1y ago

aerospace is nice, but also consider checking out yabai [0] + sketchybar [1] for an i3/hyprland style tiling setup. more customizable (IMO) and perfectly suited for a terminal based workflow :~^) [0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [1] https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar

ChristianJacobs 1y ago
I switched to AeroSpace from Yabai because I had to disable parts of SIP for certain functions (such as switching workspaces with keybindings from SKHD), and that didn't feel right. Updates are also smoother since I don't need to update the sudoers file allowing the Yabai CLI to run without requiring password. Been happy as a clam ever since.

bee_rider 1y ago

Those apple chips are really quite impressive. But, AMD has those fancy APUs now, maybe it is possible to stay in x86 land a bit longer?

appleaday1 1y ago
what apus?
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Strix Halo
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  All the zen 5 based ones. https://manuals.omamix.org/3/omacom/74/good-linux-hardware https://manuals.omamix.org/3/omacom/74/good-linux-hardware
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
Why do you prefer x86? If another architecture offers better performance with the same hardware support, isn’t that good enough?
- bee_rider 1y ago
  If Linux runs fine on it, sure. The blog post linked seemed to indicate that Linux wasn’t 100% on the M4 yet. If that’s wrong, then that’s good news.
  - microtonal 1y ago
    Asahi only supports M1 and M2 Macs well (and you will still miss support for some functionality, like Thunderbolt or USB-C DP-Alt mode displays). Ryzen APUs have indeed narrowed the gap and if you want to run Linux, it's probably much better to get a recent Ryzen ThinkPad than a Mac (or get a Strix Halo Ryzen once it lands in the good ThinkPad models). (I am a longtime Mac user, but I recently got a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 and all the hardware works out-of-the-box and very well on Linux.)

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SanjayMehta 1y ago

I use macOS for day-to-day work on a laptop, but all serious business is conducted on Linux workstations. I can’t be bothered with Docker et al, so each workstation is configured for one special set of tools, and nothing else. Updates are tightly controlled, to avoid breaking build configurations. In the long run, hardware is cheaper than your time.

appleaday1 1y ago

thats cool been to mila before, anyway OP we need to get CachyOS on Mac Os immidiately

xelxebar 1y ago

This couldn't have come at a more opportune time. My 11th gen Framework just gave up the magic smoke last night, which was a frightening experience. The Framework has given me a bewildering litany of issues over the years, and I now just want something solid, light, and reasonable battery life, so just I threw down for an M4 Air today. Having used Linux exclusively for 25 years and an unaBashed CLI junkie, I'm a bit nervous about workflow friction. How does experience with nixos-darwin compare against just VMing on top of MacOS? Also, is there any reason for mucking about with Apple's bootloader etc?

McAlpine5892 1y ago
> How does experience with nixos-darwin compare against just VMing on top of MacOS? Kinda depends what you want. Both work. With Nix Darwin you’ll sometimes run into packages that aren’t compatible with your system. It’s not an ND problem really - some software was just never built for Mac. Running a VM works great too. I’m a big fan of Orbstack as it’s fairly transparent with the system. It’s nice to hop inside a real Linux box but feel like you’re working ON the actual system. You’ll take a battery hit compared to on-metal as macOS puts VMs on P-cores, but it’s not that bad.

moribvndvs 1y ago

As someone who’s been a heavy apple daily driver since the Intel Macs arrived on the scene, I can feel myself grinding my teeth while reading this. Watching Apple commit to eroding macOS’s previously-lauded user-centric freedom, simplicity, and reliability year after year in their quest to turn it into another iOS black box appliance that you just rent not own makes me wonder what happens when the author approaches similar categories of problems from different directions vis a vis Linux.

fernandojose 1y ago

I enjoyed reading the post and maybe will try following some part of it, such as the nix-darwin setup. Thanks for sharing, it is well written. I have used Arch in a couple of personal laptops during a handful of years and macOS at job for the last year. I love using Arch, even though it is sometimes painful qua drivers and issues with non-essential hardware. In macOS I don’t recall having issues with homebrew, however I am more familiar with pacman on Arch and therefore prefer it. Before starting to use it, I set up alacritty on macOS building it from source.

shmerl 1y ago

I'd stick to Linux/KDE.

seec 1y ago

It's interesting and all but in typical "Apple switcher" fashion, a preposterous comparison is/will be made: the M4 Pro MBP is around 3K€, replacing a laptop that seems to go for around 1K€ at best. When something costs 3 times as much, it should be better. It's a bit like comparing an entry level Ford to an S class Mercedes. I think the best "feature" of Apple computers is that it prevents cheapskates from making bad choices they will regret. In my family, they use iPhones and I'm glad for it because if they would use Androids, they would just buy the cheapest garbage they could find and the experience would be miserable. It's funny how a corporation greed is actually useful to prevent some people being fucked by their own greed (stinginess is a form of reverse greed, particularly true when you actually have money).

zuhsetaqi 1y ago
Well a 1k MacBook Air has the same build quality as the 3k MacBook Pro. It just has less performance. I have a HP ZBook from work and for 3k you don’t get the build quality of a 1k MacBook Air. In my experience when you only compare on build quality of laptops there’s nothing that’s on the level of current MacBooks.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  Beyond just build quality too. The $1k air has phenomenal speakers for a laptop, a great display (albeit, no 120hz), and a touchpad that is unmatched on any other laptop. Plus, it's silent. For $1k in the WinTel world you're lucky to get 1920x1200, or even worse, 16:9 1920x1080 as the standard. I switched to Mac the day the M1 came out, and haven't looked back despite how much I miss Linux. macOS grew on me, and I can't stomach paying $3k+ for a machine that is still substandard to a $1k MacBook Air. The only laptop that comes close is the new arm Surface Laptop 7, but - no Linux on that for now.

Szpadel 1y ago

> quite impressed with the smoothness of the UX on this relatively cheap machine. I recently tried installing cachyos kernel on fedora I tried sched_ext with it (scx_lavd specifically) and to my suprise changing CPU scheduler resolved all UI stuttering for me (even dual 360hz + laptop screen on 3y old laptop with integrated intel gpu) I occasionally use M1 apple mini and right now I can confidently say that now my Linux machine works smoother.

microtonal 1y ago
I recently moved from a 60Hz 5k Apple Studio Display to a 120Hz 4k Dell display for my main work desk. I was surprised that on macOS (on an M3 Pro), the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is barely noticeable (mostly in the control center slide animation), whereas my ThinkPad with GNOME is super smooth at 120Hz. Window dragging, browser scrolling, etc., are all much smoother on the 120Hz display.

mmcnl 1y ago

I don't really understand the comparison with a cheap Asus laptop. Ofcourse the MBP will win. But a decent Lenovo ThinkPad or HP EliteBook/ZBook will have flawless Linux support with a rigid and robust chassis.

grumpyprole 1y ago
The vast majority of which unfortunately still come with Intel processors, especially the premium models. I handed my work issued Lenovo X1 back to my employer as being unusable due to overheating and excessive thermal throttling. The M4 Macbook Pro I now have is such a huge positive difference, I have adjusted to macOS and enjoy Intel outside.
- mmcnl 1y ago
  X1 is Intel only, but the new Lunar Lake is quiet and cool. And T14(s) comes with AMD. Mac hardware still is #1, but kernel panics because holding it wrong is definitely not normal.

disintegrator 1y ago

I know this won’t apply to everyone but I’ve been able to, relatively successfully, stick to the constraint that most of my dev tools are static binaries: zoxide, fzf, eza, btop and so on. There is one glaring exception which is docker but I let it pass. By sticking to this I’m able to avoid Homebrew’s mess and Nix’s complexity. I use mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/ https://mise.jdx.dev/) to manage the binaries and languages I have on my machine. It handles installing multiple versions and is directory-aware.

cweagans 1y ago

> Currently using alacritty. Also considering WezTerm. Highly recommend wezterm. That’s what enabled me to do this: https://cweagans.net/2023/09/application-specific-terminals/ https://cweagans.net/2023/09/application-specific-terminals/ You might also be interested in Hammerspoon! Lua-based customization and scripting of many macOS features.