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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

#51

Post by OGEnthusiast »

harshitaneja wrote: post #20
heavyset_go wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That seems to be the conclusion I have been avoiding to reach. With graviton and other arm based linux server machines being a good bulk of my work I hoped I wouldn't have to worry about multi architecture docker builds. Ah well. Any suggestions for something well built but lightweight and that one could figure out how to get 8+ hours of actual daily usage battery life on?

I've had a great experience with my Framework 13 (AMD), although I usually get 4-5 hours of battery life, so not quite the full 8 hours you're looking for.

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

#52

Post by bee_rider »

jmward01 wrote: post #32

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, incl…

Linux is more likely to have to deal with something like poor/nonexistent drivers that mean a device consumes extra power compared to Windows. But,

* cpupower is pretty nice for manual control of your clock speeds

* the diversity of window managers allows you to have something like a mostly-black UI, which can help on OLED screens. You can even invert the screen color in X, if your programs insist on rendering black-on-white.

* not randomly cranking up the CPU for some windows whatever scan thing saves some power

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

#53

Post by WD-42 »

boppo1 wrote: post #36
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?

Debian is awesome for servers or systems that you just want to keep running without messing with it. On desktop though it’s nice to have, for example, Neovim is that is not 3 major versions behind.

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

#54

Post by bee_rider »

bitwize wrote: post #13
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 is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux. Now if you're talking…

Has Arch gotten much worse recently or something? When I used it they were pretty good about posting “manual intervention required” when needed on the front page of their site.

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

#55

Post by WD-42 »

jasoneckert wrote: post #29

I think the biggest takeaway from this blog post is that developers and other professionals should take more note of the tiling window managers available on Linux like Sway and Hyprland - they are insanely fast and customizable to exactly what we need to be more productive. I'm a Sway user (ironically on Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac) and I won't have it any other sway... er... I mean way.

To me it’s not even the tiling. It’s the ability to switch focus to windows in a directional manner. Like super hjkl or whatever.

I have no idea how people are still using alt tab in 2025.

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

#56

Post by throwmeaway222 »

I don't know if anyone else agrees, but for some reason no one can replicate the smoothness of the Apple trackpad. And now with that PLUS the heatless apple silicon - I don't think I could go to another OS and the x86 hardware world. I would just feel like I'm in clunky-land. Now don't get me wrong, I like a lot about Linux desktops, but Mac gets a lot of things right. I don't want to take anything away from people migrating from Mac, but the PC didn't kill Desktop Linux, Mac did.

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

#57

Post by dismalaf »

joshdavham wrote: post #34

How confident are people that Omarchy will be well maintained in the future? I'm considering making that same switch from MacOS to Arch, but I'm not sure if I should have confidence in something like Omarchy which is relatively new.

Why does it need to be maintained? It's just an install script to install common apps on Arch and to install and configure Hyprland. It's not really a distro on its own.

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

#58

Post by dismalaf »

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?

Meh, I use LazyVim with Neovim. It's the same deal. I like Neovim but don't want to bother configuring it when someone else has a much nicer setup and are sharing it.

Hyprland and desktop ricing is the desktop equivalent of configuring your editor.

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

#59

Post by margalabargala »

mappu wrote: post #49
margalabargala wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run multiple arch systems and multiple Debian systems in my house. Debian is great if what you want to do, is something that has been easy for 5 years. You set it up and forget it. Debian breaks down whenever you try to do something new that requires some new dependency. Oh you want to run a Go program written in 2023? Now you have to download and install the new version yourself because the latest version in apt i…

Trixie now has go1.24 - including the upstream default GOTOOLCHAIN value to automatically download new compiler versions straight from go.dev if the go.mod wants them. I was a bit surprised this is not a Debian Policy violation (and any Debian patches for security support may no longer apply), but at least the user experience will "just work". Cross-reference https://bugs.debian.org/1040507 .

That is both neat and surprising.

That said while my specific example perhaps is obsolete, the general class of problem I described is not.

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

#60

Post by WD-42 »

bee_rider wrote: post #54
bitwize wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux. Now if you're talking…

Has Arch gotten much worse recently or something? When I used it they were pretty good about posting “manual intervention required” when needed on the front page of their site.

It hasn’t. I can’t remember a “rug pull” in the last 10 years. People forget arch packages are pretty much as close to upstream as you can get, the arch packagers tend to do as little as possible.
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