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Oh darn, I thought they'd gotten Arch running on an M1 but they actually switched to a ThinkBook. I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. Ma

Oh darn, I thought they'd gotten Arch running on an M1 but they actually switched to a ThinkBook. I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.

sarmasamosarma 1y ago
What’s so hard about it?
ahepp 1y ago
It was not super difficult to get Gentoo running on an m1 MacBook with the (unsupported) instructions some of the Asahi folks left around. I guess Arch might be a bit more difficult in some ways, given the weird status of arm64 being a different project from core Arch?
- freehorse 1y ago
  Asahi was originally arch based. Not sure how it is faring now, though
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    Arch on aarch64 still exists but it is poorly maintained. I switched to Fedora and I've been happy with that choice, although I do miss the AUR at times.
0xfaded 1y ago
Same, I have a Mac at work and can suffer the horrible window management by just having more physical monitors (3 + the built in screen). I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.
- piskov 1y ago
  For mac try moom: easily best keyboard-based windows management. As for spaces: just create a few (important), then go to system settings and map alt 1-5 to switch between those
  - philjohn 1y ago
    Failing that Rectangle.app It's the first thing I install on any Mac.
- adastra22 1y ago
  I think it is just us getting old. I used Linux since high school in the 90's, through all the way to the late 00's. I switched to OS X (long before it was macOS) because that's where all the and coming developer tools were, and I got tired of being sysadmin to my own Linux install as things break. Now I'm the opposite of you. I WANT to run Linux, and I have both a recent Framework and Lenovo laptop at home that I bought for this purpose. But I have some issue with Nvidia drivers, or just stuck down a rabbit hole trying to configure a GUI the way I want, or whatever, and I give up and go back to macOS where everything is familiar and works out of the box. I'm too old and/or busy to deal with that shit, but it probably reflects my age more than it does macOS vs Linux.
  - Pooge 1y ago
    I just had PTSD from reading your comment. Laptop + Nvidia drivers + Linux just do NOT work together. Nvidia drivers almost bricked my laptop once, and I'm glad a random guy in a Discord server could help me out because I couldn't even get to the boot screen.
    - jeroenhd 1y ago
      The biggest issue with Nvidia drivers, the mux chip issue, doesn't seem to be very prominent anymore these days. With modern laptops, you'll probably boot to desktop, though your experience will be terrible and pretty much unaccelerated. Nvidia remains a problem on Linux, though they're making steps in the right direction. By putting all of their code in the secret and signed firmware, they can actually open source their drivers now, which is a lot better than how things used to be. Still, I wouldn't buy Nvidia anything with a computer I want to run Linux on, it's not worth the hassle. Sucks that all developments related to AI are using Nvidia APIs though.
rogerrogerr 1y ago
Curious, what is it that doesn’t make sense?
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago
  I can't figure out how to set a shortcut that moves the current window to my other monitor. Always have to go into the toolbar to do it. Edit: And oh! Why do I constantly have to (painfully manually) maximize windows. Preview is constantly choosing a different size, for example. Why is this not remembered. I can't recall the last time an application in linux forgot its size after restarting.
  - asteroidburger 1y ago
    You might like https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
    - mokkol 1y ago
      This app solves all window problems for me as well.
  - rswail 1y ago
    Agreed that apps forget where they were, or end up on the main screen instead of the attached one. Rectangle deals with a lot of that with key shortcuts. I don't love MacOS, but I don't hate it. I have a bunch of extra utilities like Rectangle, BarTender, MonitorControl, Karabiner-Elements, that make things better. I use MacPorts so when I open a terminal, I get a Unix/Linux environment. Things I miss from Linux/X-11, primarily middle button copy/paste, and being able to run an X-11 app remotely over LAN/WAN. But a lot of that is configurable with terminals like iTerm2.
  - PeterWhittaker 1y ago
    Not at my Mac right now, but I've defined cmd-F[12] to move windows from one monitor to the other. The trick is to capture the exact words you see in the Window menu, with the exact monitor name, and use those exact words when defining the keyboard shortcut. A clunky PITA, but once setup, works like a charm.
mrtksn 1y ago
Considering that macOS is popular among even actual tech-illiterates, it is safe to say that their system is probably pretty logical and easy but since you are a power user on something else you will have to unlearn you previous ways of doing things. At some point it will click and you'll be fine.
- j4coh 1y ago
  Or, alternatively, non-illiterates have different needs.
  - mrtksn 1y ago
    macOS is quite popular among tech literate people too, it's almost the default OS for most techies.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      A lot of those only have surface level knowledge about tech, especially reviewers.
      - mrtksn 1y ago
        Not really, it's just that macOS is more suitable for a different level of abstraction than linux.
    - jeroenhd 1y ago
      That's not my experience at all. Some tech companies are macOS shops and their employees will use macOS, but Windows still dominates the market.
      - mrtksn 1y ago
        Depends on the work I guess, for anything MS Office related Windows in way better.
afiori 1y ago
I never have MacOS a chance, I have only used it for some quick safari debugging sessions, but in the last decade+ whenever I see a UI trend that really bothers me, makes things worse and harder to use invariably after some time I discover that they were copying Apple's UI/UX. So I suspect I would not like using apple devices
herbst 1y ago
Same experience here. I wanted to like it, after all it appears to be exactly what I want. An professional, stable Unix system with enterprise support. I was and am still surprised that I found nothing of that and even Ubuntu or fedora community look more "enterprise ready" to me these days.
- skydhash 1y ago
  macOS is actively trying to hide everything unix these days and almost all the good features require building an app to access them (or buying one).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
f311a 1y ago
You can actually do that, there is asahi-alarm
carlosjobim 1y ago
Sell it and buy a PC.
solardev 1y ago
As someone who grew up on DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Linux, macOS definitely took some getting used to (and I still have many gripes with it, especially the window management). Rectangle makes it better: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle That said, though, Macbooks are far and away the best laptop hardware you can get right now, and the combination of a POSIX/unix-like CLI environment and the ability to run common general-user desktop apps (Adobe/Microsoft/entertainment/etc) is very nice. On Linux you'd have to emulate some of the desktop apps, and on Windows you'd have to use WSL or Docker or such to gain a good *nix shell. And you'd have to put up with all the Windows ad spam and copilot spam. But I do wish Apple would allow other operating systems on their laptops, and properly support them. I'd love to be able to properly BootCamp into Asahi or Windows for Arm with all the required drivers, etc.
- samgranieri 1y ago
  You can run Asahi Linux nicely on Apple Silicon
  - solardev 1y ago
    I thought a lot of stuff still doesn't work (graphics, etc.?)
- raffraffraff 1y ago
  It took me two weeks of farting about with Rectangle, alttab, hammerspoon and karabiner to make MacOS not give me face cancer every time I had to use it. I still kinda hate it because I can't get keyboard shortcuts to just fucking work. On the work MacBook I use the mouse more than I'd like because I can't reliably do stuff that I have done fluidly on windows and Linux for decades, mostly around keyboard cursor control, selection, jumping in blocks of words and paragraphs, sane use of home / end, page up/down etc. Just when I think I have it cracked, I try to select the next two words, or from cursor to end of line, and it's like "no sir, in this fucking app it does something completely different, good luck finding out why it how to fix it" I agree about the hardware though. Since the early 2010s MacBook Pro has been the best hardware. Before the M series I had a MBP13 2015, and in fact, it's still the "kitchen laptop", running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
entrepy123 1y ago
> regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. When picking up macOS, two things really help: 1. Having some macOS techies in your circle (co-workers or friends) to whom you can fearlessly ask random newbie questions, since there's a good chance there's a way that works well, which you are not discovering, and one or more people in your Mac User Friends group will have a good suggestion. (Maybe an LLM or Reddit can solve this, but real people are good, too.) 2. Leaning into whatever the macOS way to do the thing is. Don't try to do it the Windows or Linux way. Fall into the Apple paradigm. Don't fight it.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  The main problem I had was that apple is a really closed system. I'm not a one OS guy, i always need my stuff to work on windows, Linux, android etc. I don't even use iOS anymore because it's too limited. Most of the things Apple offers in terms of cloud sync don't work on everything so it's a pretty but useless walled garden to me. It's a shame because I was a long standing mac user. Because it was a good and fairly open Unix with a good UI. But since iOS became popular macOS has moved into a direction that didn't work for me anymore. They care more about locking users into their ecosystem now than anything else.
mbrochh 1y ago
Isn't that totally normal? When I have to touch Android or Windows, I feel absolutely awful because I am used to MacOS and iOS. Likewise, Android and Windows users will feel awful when having to use MacOS and iOS. It's simply a matter of habit and experience. Having used Windows and Android for 10+ years before switching to the Apple ecosystem, I can say with confidence though that MacOS is not weird at all. It makes far more sense than the insanity that is Windows/Android.

sarmasamosarma 1y ago

What’s so hard about it?

ahepp 1y ago

It was not super difficult to get Gentoo running on an m1 MacBook with the (unsupported) instructions some of the Asahi folks left around. I guess Arch might be a bit more difficult in some ways, given the weird status of arm64 being a different project from core Arch?

freehorse 1y ago
Asahi was originally arch based. Not sure how it is faring now, though
- Retr0id 1y ago
  Arch on aarch64 still exists but it is poorly maintained. I switched to Fedora and I've been happy with that choice, although I do miss the AUR at times.

0xfaded 1y ago

Same, I have a Mac at work and can suffer the horrible window management by just having more physical monitors (3 + the built in screen). I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.

piskov 1y ago
For mac try moom: easily best keyboard-based windows management. As for spaces: just create a few (important), then go to system settings and map alt 1-5 to switch between those
- philjohn 1y ago
  Failing that Rectangle.app It's the first thing I install on any Mac.
adastra22 1y ago
I think it is just us getting old. I used Linux since high school in the 90's, through all the way to the late 00's. I switched to OS X (long before it was macOS) because that's where all the and coming developer tools were, and I got tired of being sysadmin to my own Linux install as things break. Now I'm the opposite of you. I WANT to run Linux, and I have both a recent Framework and Lenovo laptop at home that I bought for this purpose. But I have some issue with Nvidia drivers, or just stuck down a rabbit hole trying to configure a GUI the way I want, or whatever, and I give up and go back to macOS where everything is familiar and works out of the box. I'm too old and/or busy to deal with that shit, but it probably reflects my age more than it does macOS vs Linux.
- Pooge 1y ago
  I just had PTSD from reading your comment. Laptop + Nvidia drivers + Linux just do NOT work together. Nvidia drivers almost bricked my laptop once, and I'm glad a random guy in a Discord server could help me out because I couldn't even get to the boot screen.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    The biggest issue with Nvidia drivers, the mux chip issue, doesn't seem to be very prominent anymore these days. With modern laptops, you'll probably boot to desktop, though your experience will be terrible and pretty much unaccelerated. Nvidia remains a problem on Linux, though they're making steps in the right direction. By putting all of their code in the secret and signed firmware, they can actually open source their drivers now, which is a lot better than how things used to be. Still, I wouldn't buy Nvidia anything with a computer I want to run Linux on, it's not worth the hassle. Sucks that all developments related to AI are using Nvidia APIs though.

rogerrogerr 1y ago

Curious, what is it that doesn’t make sense?

abdullahkhalids 1y ago
I can't figure out how to set a shortcut that moves the current window to my other monitor. Always have to go into the toolbar to do it. Edit: And oh! Why do I constantly have to (painfully manually) maximize windows. Preview is constantly choosing a different size, for example. Why is this not remembered. I can't recall the last time an application in linux forgot its size after restarting.
- asteroidburger 1y ago
  You might like https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
  - mokkol 1y ago
    This app solves all window problems for me as well.
- rswail 1y ago
  Agreed that apps forget where they were, or end up on the main screen instead of the attached one. Rectangle deals with a lot of that with key shortcuts. I don't love MacOS, but I don't hate it. I have a bunch of extra utilities like Rectangle, BarTender, MonitorControl, Karabiner-Elements, that make things better. I use MacPorts so when I open a terminal, I get a Unix/Linux environment. Things I miss from Linux/X-11, primarily middle button copy/paste, and being able to run an X-11 app remotely over LAN/WAN. But a lot of that is configurable with terminals like iTerm2.
- PeterWhittaker 1y ago
  Not at my Mac right now, but I've defined cmd-F[12] to move windows from one monitor to the other. The trick is to capture the exact words you see in the Window menu, with the exact monitor name, and use those exact words when defining the keyboard shortcut. A clunky PITA, but once setup, works like a charm.

mrtksn 1y ago

Considering that macOS is popular among even actual tech-illiterates, it is safe to say that their system is probably pretty logical and easy but since you are a power user on something else you will have to unlearn you previous ways of doing things. At some point it will click and you'll be fine.

j4coh 1y ago
Or, alternatively, non-illiterates have different needs.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  macOS is quite popular among tech literate people too, it's almost the default OS for most techies.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    A lot of those only have surface level knowledge about tech, especially reviewers.
    - mrtksn 1y ago
      Not really, it's just that macOS is more suitable for a different level of abstraction than linux.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    That's not my experience at all. Some tech companies are macOS shops and their employees will use macOS, but Windows still dominates the market.
    - mrtksn 1y ago
      Depends on the work I guess, for anything MS Office related Windows in way better.

afiori 1y ago

I never have MacOS a chance, I have only used it for some quick safari debugging sessions, but in the last decade+ whenever I see a UI trend that really bothers me, makes things worse and harder to use invariably after some time I discover that they were copying Apple's UI/UX. So I suspect I would not like using apple devices

herbst 1y ago

Same experience here. I wanted to like it, after all it appears to be exactly what I want. An professional, stable Unix system with enterprise support. I was and am still surprised that I found nothing of that and even Ubuntu or fedora community look more "enterprise ready" to me these days.

skydhash 1y ago
macOS is actively trying to hide everything unix these days and almost all the good features require building an app to access them (or buying one).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

f311a 1y ago

You can actually do that, there is asahi-alarm

carlosjobim 1y ago

Sell it and buy a PC.

solardev 1y ago

As someone who grew up on DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Linux, macOS definitely took some getting used to (and I still have many gripes with it, especially the window management). Rectangle makes it better: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle That said, though, Macbooks are far and away the best laptop hardware you can get right now, and the combination of a POSIX/unix-like CLI environment and the ability to run common general-user desktop apps (Adobe/Microsoft/entertainment/etc) is very nice. On Linux you'd have to emulate some of the desktop apps, and on Windows you'd have to use WSL or Docker or such to gain a good *nix shell. And you'd have to put up with all the Windows ad spam and copilot spam. But I do wish Apple would allow other operating systems on their laptops, and properly support them. I'd love to be able to properly BootCamp into Asahi or Windows for Arm with all the required drivers, etc.

samgranieri 1y ago
You can run Asahi Linux nicely on Apple Silicon
- solardev 1y ago
  I thought a lot of stuff still doesn't work (graphics, etc.?)
raffraffraff 1y ago
It took me two weeks of farting about with Rectangle, alttab, hammerspoon and karabiner to make MacOS not give me face cancer every time I had to use it. I still kinda hate it because I can't get keyboard shortcuts to just fucking work. On the work MacBook I use the mouse more than I'd like because I can't reliably do stuff that I have done fluidly on windows and Linux for decades, mostly around keyboard cursor control, selection, jumping in blocks of words and paragraphs, sane use of home / end, page up/down etc. Just when I think I have it cracked, I try to select the next two words, or from cursor to end of line, and it's like "no sir, in this fucking app it does something completely different, good luck finding out why it how to fix it" I agree about the hardware though. Since the early 2010s MacBook Pro has been the best hardware. Before the M series I had a MBP13 2015, and in fact, it's still the "kitchen laptop", running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

entrepy123 1y ago

> regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. When picking up macOS, two things really help: 1. Having some macOS techies in your circle (co-workers or friends) to whom you can fearlessly ask random newbie questions, since there's a good chance there's a way that works well, which you are not discovering, and one or more people in your Mac User Friends group will have a good suggestion. (Maybe an LLM or Reddit can solve this, but real people are good, too.) 2. Leaning into whatever the macOS way to do the thing is. Don't try to do it the Windows or Linux way. Fall into the Apple paradigm. Don't fight it.

wkat4242 1y ago
The main problem I had was that apple is a really closed system. I'm not a one OS guy, i always need my stuff to work on windows, Linux, android etc. I don't even use iOS anymore because it's too limited. Most of the things Apple offers in terms of cloud sync don't work on everything so it's a pretty but useless walled garden to me. It's a shame because I was a long standing mac user. Because it was a good and fairly open Unix with a good UI. But since iOS became popular macOS has moved into a direction that didn't work for me anymore. They care more about locking users into their ecosystem now than anything else.

mbrochh 1y ago

Isn't that totally normal? When I have to touch Android or Windows, I feel absolutely awful because I am used to MacOS and iOS. Likewise, Android and Windows users will feel awful when having to use MacOS and iOS. It's simply a matter of habit and experience. Having used Windows and Android for 10+ years before switching to the Apple ecosystem, I can say with confidence though that MacOS is not weird at all. It makes far more sense than the insanity that is Windows/Android.