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From macOS to Arch Linux

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Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#31

Post by rbut »

Not Arch, but macOS to Linux related.

As a developer, used macOS for 13 years. Switched to Ubuntu after Apple went to M1.

It's been pretty much flawless and required no more tweaks during setup than a typical macOS install would. Developing on the same environment as our servers is a massive plus.

The key is choosing the right hardware from the start. For my desktop, I chose an Asus TUF gaming motherboard that had everything Intel. For my laptop, I chose a laptop that is supported by the manufacturer, in this case a Dell XPS 13.

(Selecting the correct hardware is no different to creating a Hackintosh setup, but the hardware support is infinitely better)

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#32

Post by spystath »

gbrown wrote: post #11
jimjimjimjim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes there are some manual interventions that you may have to perform.

Yeah, exactly. Why?

Well, manual interventions are rare [0] and almost all of them nowadays are due to the odd package restructuring. Usually the package manager will notify you about a conflict between two packages and won't proceed (so nothing will break). At this point you can check the website if there is a need to force install a package or two.

Although definitely more technical than most distributions the perceived difficulty of Arch is mostly a meme at this point. The last large possibly-system-breaking change was almost 10 years ago [1]. And even then, the solution was quite trivial. Now if you are forcing updates that conflict without reading the news then you're in for a bad time, but that's true for all distributions. In general pacman is very conservative and won't leave your system partially updated. Now there is a chance upstream updates break things, but that's the nature of the rolling release model.

Manual compilations are not necessary if you stick to the official repositories. If you need a package in the AUR then a ports-like setup is required. I have packaged stuff for both RPM and DEB-based distributions, nothing really beats the simplicity and flexiblity of the Archlinux packaging tools.

[0]: https://archlinux.org/news/

[1]: https://archlinux.org/news/the-lib-directory-becomes-a-symli...

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#33

Post by fsflover »

nicolaslem wrote: post #22
blinkingled wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto on most non Nvidia equipped ThinkPads. Typically Dell also does a good job at Linux compatibility but sometimes things take time to be worked out on newer hardware.

My strategy when picking hardware to run Linux on with 100% success so far: 1. Wait about 6 months before purchasing newly released hardware (new generation of GPU, network adapter...) to let drivers trickle down from the manufacturer to the kernel and then to the distribution. 2. If it has an Nvidia logo on it, leave it on the shelf.

Alternatively, simply buy preinstalled Linux. Worked for me.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#34

Post by alexarnesen »

gbrown wrote: post #7

Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf? I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed, but for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates. From the wiki: > Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to…

Arch is the first system I have been able to support, fully. As in, 100% of the issues I run across with my distro, I can resolve. I used to run Ubuntu as my gnome desktop distribution, and when it worked (99% of the time), it was a superior experience to Arch. However when running Ubuntu I would inevitably run across some issue that seemed to require a level of sysadmin chops that I never have possessed. For the past year I've been running an Arch desktop, I have resolved every issue by using the Arch wiki and Google/ stack overflow. I suspect that partly, the Arch approach is appealing to those of us who prefer a simpler system, because those are easier to grapple with in a support context.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#35

Post by vladvasiliu »

gbrown wrote: post #11
jimjimjimjim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes there are some manual interventions that you may have to perform.

Yeah, exactly. Why?

Looking through the latest advisories of upgrades requiring manual intervention, those mostly seem to be files that were mishandled. I guess they want to avoid "being smart" and trying to second guess the system setup.

Other distributions attempt to migrate the config / tools which mostly works, except when it doesn't. Earlier today I upgraded an Ubuntu 21.04 to 21.10. The computer is a glorified Spotify Connect player, so I don't configure anything on it. But for some reason, after the reboot, there's some issue with gvfsd-something-or-other. I never configured anything related to that. Is this normal / expected? No idea. A quick search on the release notes [0] yields nothing.

So I guess there are always tradeoffs. Arch seems to adopt more of a hands-off approach, where you only get a basic system and then you build your own environment. As such, there's many possible variations. In contrast to Ubuntu / Fedora / etc, where the devs can reasonably expect that a system is in a roughly known state.

[0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/impish-indri-release-notes/21...

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#36

Post by kaladin-jasnah »

rbut wrote: post #31

Not Arch, but macOS to Linux related. As a developer, used macOS for 13 years. Switched to Ubuntu after Apple went to M1. It's been pretty much flawless and required no more tweaks during setup than a typical macOS install would. Developing on the same environment as our servers is a massive plus. The key is choosing the right hardware from the start. For my desktop, I chose an Asus TUF gaming motherboard that had ev…

Not only is the hardware support better, but even with good hardware support, you have to do more on Hackintoshes (manually download and copy tens of kexts, edit a very, very long plist file for OpenCore, screw with the serial number if you want iMesasge, etc., etc.). Linux usually "just works."

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#37

Post by Offpics »

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?

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#38

Post by blinkingled »

nicolaslem wrote: post #22
blinkingled wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto on most non Nvidia equipped ThinkPads. Typically Dell also does a good job at Linux compatibility but sometimes things take time to be worked out on newer hardware.

My strategy when picking hardware to run Linux on with 100% success so far: 1. Wait about 6 months before purchasing newly released hardware (new generation of GPU, network adapter...) to let drivers trickle down from the manufacturer to the kernel and then to the distribution. 2. If it has an Nvidia logo on it, leave it on the shelf.

Exactly - I have had great success with this strategy for many years now. Sometimes I take chances with #1 by running rolling release distros like Arch or Tumbleweed.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#39

Post by foxfluff »

gbrown wrote: post #7

Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf? I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed, but for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates. From the wiki: > Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to…

> Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf?

Can you explain to me how dnf or apt is more comprehensive than pacman? I use all three: arch on my laptop, fedora on my desktop, ubuntu on my work laptop. I do not see the difference in comprehensiveness.

There are some house cleaning tasks pacman won't automatically do for you because doing so could break things you rely on. The same is true on fedora. It'll leave configs untouched, unless you run rpmconf which might then just break your stuff:

> If you use rpmconf to upgrade the system configuration files supplied with the upgraded packages then some configuration files may change. After the upgrade you should verify /etc/ssh/sshd_config, /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/ntp.conf and others are expected. For example, if OpenSSH is upgraded then sshd_config reverts to the default package configuration. The default package configuration does not enable public key authentication, and allows password authentication.

(From https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-u...)

The problem is ultimately one of churn, and how the system deals with it. Anecdotally Ubuntu tries to deal with it harder than the others, and my experience is that Ubuntu breaks (or suddenly stops behaving the way you had it configured) the most during updates. The others break less but require some attention from you.

Some of the churn is caused by distros, some of it is caused by the upstream projects. Churn is big in the Linux world.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#40

Post by nonameiguess »

gbrown wrote: post #7

Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf? I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed, but for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates. From the wiki: > Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to…

I'm honestly not sure what you mean by apt or dnf being more comprehensive. The feature set of all Linux package managers are pretty similar. The major difference with Arch is you're heavily recommended not to do partial upgrades, but pacman will do it if you really want to. That's a difference in update philosophy between batched releases and rolling releases, not a difference in the package managers.

If you mean comprehensive in terms of available software, corporate and commercial software seems to often offer debs and rpms but not tarballs installable by pacman. On the other hand, for anything open source, the Arch official repository plus AUR has way more packages available than the Debian/Ubuntu and Redhat official repos, and having everything in one AUR for third-party packages is much more convenient than the apt/dnf way of adding a repo per vendor.

As for checking the home page every time you upgrade, you really don't need to. I think that's to stave off complaints if something breaks, because it might since you have full freedom to set things up however you want and Arch can't guarantee the standard packages with standard settings are going to work for the combinatorial explosion of possible individual setups everyone might have. But in five years of daily Arch use (I have it as the OS on 8 devices in my house right now), I've auto-upgraded daily and experienced one breakage I can think of, two days ago when certain graphical apps stopped showing a visible window. It was annoying and I still don't know why it happened (guessing something about the Wayland/NVIDIA combo is still creating issues), but it fixed itself on the next ugprade 7h hours later or so.

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