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From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

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Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#21

Post by abhinavk »

bitwize wrote: post #13
andsoitis wrote: post #3

> It just works. One thing I noticed lately is that sometimes a shortcut breaks, or something is not working anymore. This is also because Omarchy is just brand new, and I’m inexperienced running Linux as my main OS. But for the last 5 years with the M1, hardware-wise, things just worked. My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tink…

My experience is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux. Now if you're talking…

I surely love answering *Why I don't want to backup my files and settings to OneDrive" every few months OR Removing things like Edge Game Assist etc from autostarting.

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#24

Post by 0xfaded »

spangry wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#25

Post by slashnode »

> I’m surprised with what all worked out of the box, like hibernating, external monitors/keyboards, media keys. Not sure how much is thanks to DHH’s Omarchy, and what’s native Arch Linux support

It's pretty much ALL Omarchy. If you install Arch by itself you get a tty prompt... and that's about it.

Omarchy looks super impressive. Haven't used it myself, but the scripts and dotfiles in the Github repo (https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy) have been inspiring

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#26

Post by rogerrogerr »

spangry wrote: post #11

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.

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

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#27

Post by nextos »

harshitaneja wrote: post #12

I have been on an M1 macbook pro since launch and while I love the hardware, easily my favourite device I have ever owned but MacOS has just always been the thing to be the faustian bargain coming from being a linux person. I spend a lot of time SSHed into more GPU capable linux machines for most of my work and thus get an escape but after driving a friend's linux machine I started looking for a way to daily drive a…

> If someone has suggestions please share

A recent ThinkPad with one of the latest AMD Ryzen U CPUs should have a very decent battery life. You just need some custom udev rules to set the right power saving states for different devices. Powertop should make this straightforward. IMHO, this is a great compromise, because you stay on x86_64 and Linux, you get within 3/4 of ARM's power efficiency, and hardware support is perfect. I've squeezed more than 11 hours from some models.

One thing that is often discounted is that Safari is marvel of power efficiency, which adds up to the efficiency of Apple M chips. IMHO, there should be dedicated Chromium and Firefox builds with compile flags and options that optimize efficiency. To counter that, running a barebones Linux setup is a good option. Keeping your CPU wakeups/s low lets you cross the 10 hour barrier.

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#28

Post by khedoros1 »

NomDePlum wrote: post #16
khedoros1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My early Linux experience involved a ton of manual configuration, documentation, and head scratching. But for the past 10 years or so, using Linux has felt like less of a fight than using Windows, and things have tended to "just work" for me.

I run Ubuntu and definitely never been easier. Practically boring.

I used Ubuntu for some time, then Mint. I'm mostly settled on Fedora, and have been for a long time (aside from Raspbian on some Raspberry Pi's). It has a balance of progress and stability that I've been comfortable with.

In my current job, we're using Ubuntu for our development machines. It's a solid system.

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#29

Post by jasoneckert »

I think the biggest takeaway from this blog post is that developers and other professionals should take more note of the tiling window managers available on Linux like Sway and Hyprland - they are insanely fast and customizable to exactly what we need to be more productive.

I'm a Sway user (ironically on Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac) and I won't have it any other sway... er... I mean way.

Re: From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

#30

Post by runjake »

AstroBen wrote: post #22

Omarchy never made much sense to me. The biggest benefit of Arch is that it's hackable and you can set it up exactly as you want it.. so why skip the entire process that teaches you how to do that?

Because some of us want that minimalism and a good “power user” default setup to tweak from there. I spent all of the 90s learning Linux deeply and custom tweaking everything and trying everything posted to freshmeat.net. I bootstrapped my own Linux from scratch before LFS was a thing.

Now I just want to get work down on an OS that feels like it belongs to power users and closely matches my deployment targets.

This is why I switched to Omarchy.

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