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From macOS to Arch Linux

juxt.pro

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Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#51

Post by nmstoker »

Was interested in the idea of Arch in a commercial environment.

Presumably this only works in a certain kind of place: one with motivated individuals and without the "oh my God people might do what they think is sensible" types from an overactive Compliance group.

Personally this would be a very satisfying kind of place to work because the single biggest challenge I face in my company is the endless fiddling that the desktop team do breaking things, as it's is often done wrongly or should be left well alone. I don't begrudge the people in the team as they're actually decent but they're stuck having to juggle various demands and roll out a steady stream of MS changes faster than they appear to have capacity for.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#52

Post by kristofferR »

Offpics wrote: post #37
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?

Bartender, Karabiner-Elements, MacUpdater, NightOwl, iStat Menus, Keyboard Maestro, Rectangle, Amphetamine are some of the most important "OS Enhancement" apps I use.

TripMode, Tripsy, 1Password, Raindrop.io, iTerm, Tower, IINA, Soulver, Spark, Carbon Copy Cloner, Find Any File, Flux, Pacifist, are some my most used "non-common" apps (excluding things like Firefox and VS Code).

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#53

Post by swasheck »

schleck8 wrote: post #28
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…

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'.

i say this as a windows user for my workplace, but that's not being gatekeepers, it's upholding the ethos of the distribution. i've used arch quite a bit as a hobby linux and the reality is that i've learned more about linux via arch documentations and by being curious about how to resolve things instead of demanding an easy path. the knowledge gained produces the easy path.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#54

Post by zibzab »

dainiusse wrote: post #13
otar wrote: post #4

Haha... I've used Ubuntu and then Arch prior to switching mac. If you have enough time and nerves to do OS/desktop env stuff yourself, then go ahead... In the end I decided to use my time for more effective things and stop geeking around.

Yeah. Sounds like geeking around. 20 years ago we had this cult of "living in the console" and ignoring X servers at all. It was fun for some time - even watching some video stuff using mplayer's aalib, playing mud.... But then again - this is not about productivity - it is just fun, while if you need to do work, family, etc... There's rarely time for that.

If using Ubuntu is "living in the console" for you, then something is seriously wrong with how you use it.

I mean, you sure _can_ do it. But that's not what you are supposed to do.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#55

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf

I don't see how apt or dnf are any more comprehensive than pacman. What do you mean by that?

Before Arch, I used Fedora. It used yum as its package manager. That thing managed to corrupt its own databases at least twice during normal usage. Distribution major version upgrades always caused problems.

I never had problems like these after switching to Arch.

> I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed

You only need to compile user packages. Official Arch Linux repositories host binary packages. You can download the PKGBUILD if you want.

> for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates.

99% of the time updates just work for me. Sometimes they introduce a few .pacnew files, I diff and merge them with my local files and that's it.

> Like… why?

Sometimes manual intervention is necessary. Usually it's not a big deal. The news tell you what to do and most importantly why you must do it.

The most complicated maintenance I ever experienced with Arch was when it switched /bin to /usr/bin.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#56

Post by stinkytaco »

zibzab wrote: post #54
dainiusse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Sounds like geeking around. 20 years ago we had this cult of "living in the console" and ignoring X servers at all. It was fun for some time - even watching some video stuff using mplayer's aalib, playing mud.... But then again - this is not about productivity - it is just fun, while if you need to do work, family, etc... There's rarely time for that.

If using Ubuntu is "living in the console" for you, then something is seriously wrong with how you use it. I mean, you sure _can_ do it. But that's not what you are supposed to do.

"supposed" is a strong word here. I don't know that you're supposed to do anything except get done what you want to get done.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#57

Post by flatiron »

thesuitonym wrote: post #48
stevencorona wrote: post #46

I 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.

arch users don't really "put up" with this. every computer i run (besides my work windows machine) is arch and they have broken exactly 0 times. i update once a week, 0 problems.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#58

Post by vurudlxtyt »

zibzab wrote: post #50

I don't get why people go from osx to arch. Why not something that just works, and updating is not Russian roulette?

People like to parrot this but I've literally never had a breaking change from an upgrade in ~5-6 years of Arch usage. At least, if I did, it didn't take more than a couple minutes to fix, because I honestly don't remember having issues.

On the other hand doing a dist-upgrade on Ubuntu has burned me more than once. I fear having to do it on one of my home servers, and should really get off of it.

I'd argue that updating more often is more safe, since anything that goes wrong will be incremental and likely easier to deal with if it does. (Not appropriate for a production server though, you don't want things to change on that unless it's deliberate and likely infrequent)

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#59

Post by simion314 »

apetresc wrote: post #26
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 think you're confusing Arch with Gentoo or something - the Arch package manager is not from-source, it ships binaries just like apt. Perhaps you're thinking of the AUR, which does usually just host the PKGBUILD which you run makepkg on directly to compile, but that's analogous to something like an Ubuntu PPA, not the core package manager. The main thing that people like about it is the rolling release model; new pa…

>That's very much a "cover-your-ass" type disclaimer,

This is not true for all hardware configurations or true for all packages combination(including weird AUR ones) in the world. For sure if we Google if this really happens in the real world you will see that indeed update break things.

Also keeping up with upstream does not mean you only get the new features but also the new bugs, especially if you were using GNOME3 a fee years back at each new GNOME release the forums and reddit was filled with new memory leaks issue, new plugin/extension breakage issues and even GNOME not starting up.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#60

Post by vurudlxtyt »

popey wrote: post #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 pro…

FWIW I've had this work out of the box for several years. Could be a case-by-case thing, but I've only ever had to configure it to my preferences rather than surprise-discover that it didn't work.
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