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I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

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Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#61

Post by vladvasiliu »

skydhash wrote: post #10
st3fan wrote: post #3

> 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 ...

The one issue I had was creating a new admin user for a client project (so I can just package everything created for that client neatly) and then immediately run into permissions issue. After that, I installed macports and never looked back (other than checking formula for installation guidance for some package).

When I used to daily drive a mac, I had Macports since day one, with no issue I can remember. This lasted for some 14 years, out of which 8 were on the same machine.

Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.

So I have to wonder: why does everyone use Brew? Does it have features or other advantages which Macports doesn't? Is macports no longer a thing (I've stopping using macs around 2021)? This reminds me of people complaining about what a crappy experience Windows is, but never even contemplating moving to something else.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#62

Post by w10-1 »

trueismywork wrote: post #34
w10-1 wrote: post #15

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 sa…

What do you mean by direct data on branch prediction (as opposed to sampled one, presumably you mean from perf)? An example?

WWDC 2025, "Optimize CPU performance with Instruments" 14:05+

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/308/

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#63

Post by w10-1 »

minton wrote: post #33
w10-1 wrote: post #15

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 sa…

Insane that their official docs suggest running some Xcode project to start your VM. It seems like such a powerful feature might have a better UI.

You build your VM app in Xcode, but you can run the app headless. The UI is your VM, with a menu to start and stop the VM.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#64

Post by JimDabell »

minton wrote: post #33
w10-1 wrote: post #15

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 sa…

Insane that their official docs suggest running some Xcode project to start your VM. It seems like such a powerful feature might have a better UI.

They are the official docs for a developer API, not an end-user feature. Of course they are going to describe it in Xcode terms. That’s how you use the API.

If you want an app, then pick an app that uses that API.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#65

Post by gloxkiqcza »

minton wrote: post #33
w10-1 wrote: post #15

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 sa…

Insane that their official docs suggest running some Xcode project to start your VM. It seems like such a powerful feature might have a better UI.

More and more I feel like Apple’s SW division is dropping the ball. It’s starting to show more and more that the software is lagging behind the hardware, especially with macOS. macOS is their power user friendly OS. For once they could do a release that actually improves on that front. The list of things to improve is so long and endlessly repeated. Just imagine what an amazing OS macOS could be if Apple actually cared.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#66

Post by microtonal »

Szpadel wrote: post #58

> 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 Li…

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.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#67

Post by microtonal »

bee_rider wrote: post #51
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you prefer x86? If another architecture offers better performance with the same hardware support, isn’t that good enough?

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.

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.)

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#68

Post by javier2 »

Sytten wrote: post #21

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!

well, I prefer they added the forced update, since many people never updated it. So when they run brew install X, they got the 2 year old version of X.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#69

Post by mmcnl »

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.

Re: I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

#70

Post by OJFord »

dbalatero wrote: post #44
yoyohello13 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix Darwin is the solution.

Nix completely broke on my security locked down work laptop, so I had to revert to symlinks, bash, and brew.

Nix-Darwin completely broke on my not at all locked down fresh out of the box from Apple work Mac, refusing to uninstall itself even, so I had to wipe and reinstall macOS. (It was a new machine, so it wasn't a huge deal, but I'd really wanted it to work.)
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