Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

From macOS to Arch Linux

juxt.pro

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 256 posts

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#181

Post by m01 »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #168
matheusmoreira wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf I don't see how apt or dnf are any more comprehensive than pacman. What do you mean by that? Before Arch, I used Fedora. It used yum as its package manager. That thing managed to corrupt its own databases at least twice during normal usage. Distribution major version upgrades always caused problems. I never had problems like these after switching to Arch. > I don…

Not PP, but to me it means much less manual intervention/more hooks etc. . For instance, for debian I can just turn on automatic updates and basically never need manual intervention. For arch I am not supposed to use automatic updates and have to (!) read the news. Why? Why does arch need more manual intervention? Sure, I can do that but it just seems like a pointless waste of time.

I don't think Debian's automatic updates do major release upgrades automatically, do they? Those IIRC do require manual intervention - if nothing else you need to run the installer & possibly respond to prompts, but possibly more depending on your system.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#182

Post by culopatin »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #162
awill wrote: post #153

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 t…

Is that true for preinstalled distros as well? You can buy thinkpads/XPS with fedora/ubuntu preinstalled and I expect that the manufacturer took care that everything works well. On the flipside, if I install MacOS on a thinkpad (somewhat popular), I would expect problems with battery life, suspend/resume and gpu switching. Same with installing windows on chromebooks.

Idk my Thinkpad works pretty good with Mac. The main pain point is getting the correct wifi card. 35 bucks later and I have an airport card in it that works perfectly. Handoff, airdrop, the whole thing.

Trackpad works as good as in windows, but a Mac one is still better. The touch screen works, and track point works too. Battery life is the same or better than windows because I’m not burning CPU time on background updates unless I chose to.

I haven’t tried a dock, but HDMI out works fine.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#183

Post by culopatin »

jefc1111 wrote: post #150

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.

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

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#184

Post by lowbloodsugar »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #159
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#185

Post by sunaurus »

pkulak wrote: post #85
sunaurus wrote: post #10

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…

Whoa now, don't leave me hanging. What are the benefits of the "Apple ecosystem"? I'm using a Macbook right now because it's tiny and light and has amazing hardware, but once I need to get things done, it's closed and charging. If you have multiple devices, why do they all need to be identical?

Well, there’s not any one simple answer to the question - there’s no one killer feature, it’s more about a bunch of different tiny QoL features that work really seamlessly without any setup. Apple apps and devices all integrate really nicely with eachother in small but noticable ways.

You can probably get close with Linux using a bunch of different apps, services and tinkering, but with Apple, it’s all quite effortless.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#186

Post by manquer »

deadbunny wrote: post #170
kristofferR wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bartender, Karabiner-Elements, MacUpdater, NightOwl, iStat Menus, Keyboard Maestro, Rectangle, Amphetamine are some of the most important "OS Enhancement" apps I use. TripMode, Tripsy, 1Password, Raindrop.io, iTerm, Tower, IINA, Soulver, Spark, Carbon Copy Cloner, Find Any File, Flux, Pacifist, are some my most used "non-common" apps (excluding things like Firefox and VS Code).

Macs Just Work. Sorry, just found it funny with the big list of applications you're recommending to install to do basic thing in OSX when the usual argument against Linux on HN is "Macs just work".

They do for regular users who use typical end user apps it doesn't just work for devs.

Apple is not designing OS for devs their vast majority of users are not devs or even professionals these days, while macs can be used for development with some wrangling to get a POSIX like environment without too much performance loss, it is not linux. Docker will run in a VM and be slower and some basic stuff like procfs would be completely missing , most of their gnu utils are from late 80s GPL being the reason.

I am also moving back to apple largely because of the m1x performance and battery. Hope Asahi becomes very stable soon on M1

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#187

Post by sunaurus »

Offpics wrote: post #37
sunaurus wrote: post #10

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…

Im going to switch from arch to mac in one month. What I should consider installing on it beside homebrew?

If you use a big monitor, Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/) is must-have. It’s minimal and works really well. Without it, using multiple windows side-by-side is really painful.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#188

Post by pkulak »

stnikolauswagne wrote: post #175
pkulak wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all that really a "huge" benefit? I never get phone calls that aren't spam, or have the need to copy paste from a phone. And an 11-inch second monitor doesn't sound like a huge benefit. Especially when I could just have my company "pay a bit more" on a real second monitor. But, not gonna discount your perspective. Everyone has different priorities, and it's why different products exist for different folks.

I guess it always depends on the person. I get probably on average 8-10 work related phone calls a day and spend 2-3 hours a day on the phone, and have been on call 24/7 for the last 6 months, any little convenience that I can get I will take. I imagine with better work/life balance these things become much less of a big deal but for now I am really glad to have an environment that causes me relatively little hassle.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#189

Post by johnny22 »

vbarrielle wrote: post #130
lmohseni wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a macbook and and Iphone, so one handy thing I use is the clipboard is shared between devices on the same LAN that are signed into the same icloud accont. so I can select some text with my mouse, hit "paste" in my phone, and it works instantaneously. definitely one of those "wow we live in the future" moments.

This feature is available for the linux/android combination using kdeconnect. Unfortunately I don't think there's an iOS app for that.

the ios app just came out recently didn't it? I think i saw that mentioned.I don't use iOS, but i saw articles about it. YMMV.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#190

Post by thom »

popey wrote: post #49

"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 pro…

I recently moved a Dell XPS to Manjaro and it’s the first time power management has ever just worked out of the box for me on Linux, including proper hibernate (which tbh is my default choice for most sleep states).
Post reply on HN