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

I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

yberreby.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 110 posts

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

#31

Post by bigyabai »

wyager wrote: post #22
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!

I remember when homebrew first came out it was pretty snappy and didn't do a bunch of extraneous nonsense. A remarkably precipitous decline in software quality

Or the rose-tinted glasses have come off. Homebrew is simultaneously a very impressive "my first package manager" experience as well as a chronically deficient packaging solution.

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

#33

Post by minton »

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.

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

#34

Post by trueismywork »

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?

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

#35

Post by lioeters »

jmtulloss wrote: post #13

[deleted… my disagreements about time allocation aside, there’s no reason to argue on the internet about it]

> Linux is the most distracting

That's totally subjective. Windows takes the cake, since it ignores user agency when it wants. It's not your operating system. macOS is not as bad, but it does what Apple wants. If your use of computers fits within what Apple wants, then I suppose it's smooth sailing. Otherwise, there are endless distractions of fighting the OS to make it do what you want, and make it NOT do what you don't want it to do. Refreshingly, Linux is all yours. That power comes with responsibility, its greatest advantage and disadvantage.

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

#36

Post by indemnity »

yberreby wrote: post #4
bigyabai wrote: post #2

Nix is downright awful on MacOS, even with the DetSys installer. Almost worse than Homebrew. If you ever sit down to play with a native NixOS install, the difference in functionality is night-and-day.

Care to elaborate on what you've found most painful? Since `nix-darwin` is anything but officially supported, I am expecting trouble, but it would be nice to know if there are specific things I should look out for. I'd love to use NixOS itself, of course, but it's not a native option on this machine due to the missing M4 support in Asahi. For now, I'm trying to see how much package/configuration management discipline…

Not sure what issues they are facing but I use Nix flakes to manage my command line and UNIX env for two Macs, a Linux desktop running NixOS, a Windows WSL environment and two Linux home servers using NixOS.

I used to use a dot file manager (home grown and later yadm).

But once I got over the learning curve I much prefer using Nix.

My machines are now effectively immutable and I wipe them without worrying I will lose anything. Can still have machine or role specific configs (e.g. one of the Linux servers is my firewall, so it has no desktop environment or GUI apps).

Btw, you should Ghostty a try too. I was a long term Alacritty and WezTerm user, but Ghostty in 1.0 form already replaced everything I used those for, and has better native platform integration.

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

#37

Post by yoyohello13 »

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!

Nix Darwin is the solution.

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

#39

Post by tambourine_man »

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 ...

This comment matches my experience precisely

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621441

Also, I can never internalize its nomenclature: formula, cask, tap, bottle… makes no sense to me.

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

#40

Post by qudat »

jasoneckert wrote: post #11

For the same reasons, I prefer Linux - but also like Apple Silicon platform. As a result, I use Fedora Asahi Remix natively on the hardware. It's a few generations behind in support (M1- and M2-based systems right now), but I can't tell you how good it feels to be able to use Linux natively on Apple Silicon hardware. In my workflow, Fedora Asahi Remix runs at least twice as fast as macOS on the same hardware for any…

Why not just run an OS in a VM and full screen it?
Post reply on HN