This really doesn't sound like an article written as a "Linux newbie" ~ but props to them for finding solutions to their various workflow needs and learning. That's a big part of what Linux is all about :)
From macOS to Arch Linux
41–50 of 256 posts
Re: From macOS to Arch Linux
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes there are some manual interventions that you may have to perform.
Yeah, exactly. Why?
You can see the announcements at https://archlinux.org/. The most recent is from June:
> Starting with libxcrypt 4.4.21, weak password hashes (such as MD5 and SHA1) are no longer accepted for new passwords. Users that still have their passwords stored with a weak hash will be asked to update their password on their next login.If the login just fails (for example from display manager) switch to a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and log in there once.
I wasn't affected. The next one before that was February, and also didn't affect me.
I think I could count the number of such planned manual interventions that have affected me in the 6 years I've been running Arch on my laptop on the fingers of one hand. It's approximately the number of times I would have had to reinstall my OS from scratch in that time on most other distros, based on extensive prior experience of whole distro version upgrades messing things up in mysterious ways. I put this down to the rolling release and the arch devs not being lulled onto assuming everyone's running a fresh, pristine installation.
I have a 6 year old, heavily used (including for work), heavily customised development laptop I have installed the OS on exactly once, and I have absolutely no reason to contemplate starting again from scratch. It's bang up to date and rock solid. You'd have to pry Arch from my cold, dead fingers.
Re: From macOS to Arch Linux
#43Can 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…
Sometimes when visiting arch forums the undertone is a little gatekeep-ey and people asking for more beginner friendly ways to install software like GUIs or AUR helpers are responded to with answers like 'You don't. You compile it yourself from the command line'.
For a more beginner-friendly approach to Arch, try Manjaro. The user experience is much better: you can choose one out of several desktop environments and get sane defaults, has its own system that can easily swap between different drivers and kernels, and generally very robust overall. Also the forums are more friendly towards beginners, so I view it as Arch without the elitism. The package updates are usually several weeks behind from Arch (since it uses a curated snapshot of Arch), but I view this as a plus (in reality you don’t need that much bleeding-edge updates).
Re: From macOS to Arch Linux
#44Can 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…
In the last two years I’ve been on the arch-announce mailing list I think I have only needed to respond to breaking updates twice.
I choose arch for three reasons. 1. The official repos and the AUR have nearly every package I have ever needed. And usually packages are updated soon after a release. 2. Being rolling release, I never need to reinstall arch, just run updates periodically. 3. I love learning, and I have learned more about Linux and system maintenance from arch than anything else. While there might be a slightly larger cost of time spent setting up (and maintaining when I break something) arch, I have decided that the tradeoffs are worth it to me.
Re: From macOS to Arch Linux
#45> 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 Sounds like a problem of hardware not designed for Linux. Everything has been working out of the box for me on a Librem laptop.
To be fair, I've had those with all Dell laptops on Windows too. In fact I've never had a Windows laptop that could reliably wake up from sleep every time.
When I had a MacBook it also wouldn't reliably wake up from sleep every time either.
Re: From macOS to Arch Linux
#46I made a similar jump over the past few years out of frustration with stagnating apple hardware (pre-m1). I spent a year with a hackintosh, which worked pretty well, but became disenchanted by the continued locking-down of the OS.
For the most part, daily driving Linux as my desktop has been great - no small thanks to Electron. Slack, Spotify, VSCode, etc. all just mostly work.
Going the arch-route took extra upfront work since you're effectively building a desktop environment from scratch, but the benefit is knowing exactly how -everything- works. If I press my "volume up" shortcut and the overlay volume bar isn't displayed, I know exactly which sway config and executable to look at. It's refreshingly simple.
The downsides are that upgrading is a bit anxiety producing (will I break anything?). HiDPI on Linux is still (in my experience) a bit of a mess. If you run wayland, you need to patch xwayland/sway/wlroots if you don't want blurry x11 apps. And there are some quirks- like, I can't drag files into Slack. Maybe it's fixable, but at some point you become satisfied with "good enough".
Re: From macOS to Arch Linux
#47Can 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? 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.
It sounds like you may be confusing Arch with some other distro. You rarely if ever need to compile anything yourself. Pacman works just like apt or dnf, i.e. resolves dependencies, downloads and installs packages for you, unless you have something specific in mind.
Re: From macOS to Arch Linux
#48I made a similar jump over the past few years out of frustration with stagnating apple hardware (pre-m1). I spent a year with a hackintosh, which worked pretty well, but became disenchanted by the continued locking-down of the OS. For the most part, daily driving Linux as my desktop has been great - no small thanks to Electron. Slack, Spotify, VSCode, etc. all just mostly work. Going the arch-route took extra upfront…
>The downsides are that upgrading is a bit anxiety producing (will I break anything?).
I don't understand why Arch users put up with this. There are plenty of distros that you can build your DE on your own with, but that have regular releases, and are extremely stable.
Re: From macOS to Arch Linux
#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 properly.
I'm sure everyone has experience of this happening on any distro, and probably even on Windows and MacOS. But it should at least try out of the box in my mind.
Re: From macOS to Arch Linux
#50I don't get why people go from osx to arch.
Why not something that just works, and updating is not Russian roulette?