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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

#31

Post by cosmic_cheese »

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?

I think people like Arch because it serves the purpose of blank slate pretty well and doesn’t have ancient package problems. It’s easier to build something like Omarchy for Arch than it would be for more opinionated distros.

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

#32

Post by jmward01 »

Power management in all aspects is one big thing that I wish was better in all distros. Hibernate/fans/shorter battery life are real usability things. I only use windows when I am at risk of being fired for not using it and macos is 'acceptable' but there are soooo many little things that make me cringe about it (.DS_Store littering every drive I touch is close to the top) but if I knew I could get mac hardware, including MPS backend working well in pytorch and battery life, with a solid distro guaranteed to work I would definitely buy that over all the pc hardware out there.

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

#33

Post by throwawee »

For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.

That was years ago and I'm still on it.

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

#35

Post by kylemaxwell »

I swapped from Linux to MacOS when the M1s came out, and I love the integration with all the iCloud stuff (particularly Messages). Occasionally I miss being on Linux, as somebody who did so for 20+ years before making the switch. But on Mac, stuff actually does Just Work.

Reading this makes me a little misty-eyed and I miss my solid old Thinkpads from 10-20 years back.

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

#36

Post by boppo1 »

throwawee wrote: post #33

For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive. That was years ago and I'm still on it.

What do you like better than debian?

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

#37

Post by sys_64738 »

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 over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.

Is it this or that you have the Linux skills to tinker so just do. Giving Linux laptops to non-techies yields self-sufficiency in people I've not seen with other OS platforms.

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

#38

Post by sauercrowd »

throwawee wrote: post #33

For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive. That was years ago and I'm still on it.

Hardware support in the last years has really improved significantly. I was using arch a lot back around 2016, and it was a nightmare. On every kernel update had to recompile a kernel driver cause my laptops chipset was something bizarre, nvidia drivers were mostly half working and it all just felt like a fragile card house.

Ubuntu was by far the best option to actually use my system rather being constantly distracted by another little piece that fell out the wall

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

#40

Post by E39M5S62 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #15
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. Stay away from ARM laptops and SoCs, they aren't there yet when it comes to Linux. If you like to tinker, go for it, but expect hardware to just not work, or worse, you'll get stuck on a kernel fork that never gets updated. If you want a good Linux machine, buy one from a vendor that explicitly sells and supports machines with Linux on them. IMO you can tinker as much as you…

The Thinkpad x13s is more-or-less there. I've been using it as my primary machine (and laptop) for the last month, and it 'just works'. All day battery life, fanless so it's dead silent, and a crisp screen with decent DPI. KDE and Vivaldi run as fast as my i7-13700 desktop.
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