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From macOS to Arch Linux

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Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#91

Post by pkulak »

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.

For what it's worth, when one of my Macs upgrades, and starts rebooting 8 times over the course of an hour, I get pretty damn anxious too. At least with Arch it's just a bunch of packages being replaced and then a reboot. Plus, if you run a snapshotting filesystem like btrfs, you can always just roll your whole system back a few hours if things are really borked; though I've never personally had to do that. No option like that on Macs. If you upgrade and something important stops working, you're shit outta luck.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#92

Post by evol262 »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #66
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…

As another plus, the Arch wiki itself is absolutely fantastic. People will point to the Arch wiki even when running other distributions. For example, it is the place to go when doing something like GPU passthrough to another OS running on qemu/KVM.

Which, honestly, is grating.

It's great that the Arch wiki is as good as the Gentoo wiki was in 2002, but it would be even better if the Arch wiki actually acknowledged the people doing the work. For GPU passthrough, for example, the initial author/current maintainer of VFIO published a development blog which has a [multi-part series explaining VFIO and passthrough from the bottom up](http://vfio.blogspot.com/2015/05/vfio-gpu-how-to-series-part...) six years ago.

This is not referenced anywhere in the Arch wiki, despite the fact that it's the literal author, most of the steps in their wiki haven't changed in the intervening years, and it's almost certain that whatever place the authors of that wiki page eventually cribbed it from probably came from the original blog.

The Arch wiki contributors, in this sense, aren't great netizens. Worse, the Arch wiki (and various subreddits) are almost as bad as the Arch/Ubuntu forums were in 2005. They often lead to a bunch of "shotgun debugging" where users are copy and pasting things they don't understand at all in the hopes that it will fix whatever problem they're encountering for reasons they won't understand.

Arch is fine, and it has its place. There are some brilliant people using Arch. The community in general is full of people who intentionally shoot themselves in the foot and are then proud that they find superglue for the wound on the Arch wiki instead of using a distro with better engineering practices where they never would have had these problems at all. The mistaken belief that doing any of this somehow "teaches" you meaningful things about Linux as opposed to solving real problems (since 99% of the "problems" Arch users encountered will never be seen on other distros, due to the fact that the maintainers carefully ensure there are limited footguns out of the) is terrible.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#93

Post by d3nj4l »

swasheck wrote: post #53
schleck8 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The the ethos of the distribution is gatekeeping :)

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#94

Post by II2II »

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…

It is probably a reference to the AUR, but its use is not as common as some people seem to think and is somewhat discouraged (since, like PPA, the packagers are not necessarily trusted). I would also have a hard time claiming that programs from the AUR are compiled yourself. Yes, the software is usually compiled on your own hardware. On the other hand, the compilation process is handled by makepkg or an AUR helper. With an AUR helper, the process is remarkably like installing a program with pacman since it will handle dependencies.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#95

Post by remolueoend »

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…

Your last point is interesting. When I switched from macOS to Linux, the tool is missed most was definitely Karabiner-Elements. I got nightmares from xkb & related tools.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#96

Post by bavell »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #78
alexarnesen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch is the first system I have been able to support, fully. As in, 100% of the issues I run across with my distro, I can resolve. I used to run Ubuntu as my gnome desktop distribution, and when it worked (99% of the time), it was a superior experience to Arch. However when running Ubuntu I would inevitably run across some issue that seemed to require a level of sysadmin chops that I never have possessed. For the pas…

Would you recommend Arch to someone without a lot of Linux experience? Ubuntu has me thinking of switching to a different OS.

If you're interested, I'd recommend checking out the Arch wiki - imo it's one of the most comprehensive repositories of Linux info out there and pretty easy to follow. Even other distros use and link to it since it's very general and has a huge scope. Great reference for power users and starting point for beginners.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#97

Post by d3nj4l »

kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #16
Kalanos wrote: post #6

Getting your custom stack tuned feels great, but maintaining that entire stack across updates is daunting. You can't join meetings because your headphone/ mic/ video drivers aren't working? yikes. i trust apple to handle hardware and os for me. I've switched to: macOS > brew (basic cli utils & gui apps) > some basic zshrc (not ohmyzsh) > docker (not environment managers) > done. ^ but i've lost trust for them to hand…

> You can't join meetings because your headphone/ mic drivers aren't working? yikes. I really don't know where you're getting this from. This isn't 2004 and you don't have to screw with ALSA drivers to get basic audio functionality on Linux. On both PulseAudio and Pipewire, I've never had this problem and I know many others who haven't had issues either, and I really just don't think audio input/output is a gigantic…

It’s way better than it was before (though not 2004, I used Linux for a long time and even ~ 2012 BT audio was finicky), but it’s not as plug and play an experience as on windows and macOS. For example, see this issue where BT headphones drop to extremely bad audio when you want to also use the inbuilt mic: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/616973/use-high-qua...

The solution to this is basically to remove pulse and install pipe wire, which is definitely not the default on most distros and not something you can do without technical skills and the time to manage the setup.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#98

Post by donio »

ubermonkey wrote: post #76
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…

True fact: proper sleep/wake on lid close is probably 40% of why I switched from Windows to Mac in about 1999 -- and that was when the Mac was on OS 9, not the BSD-based OSX. I can't imagine going to a system where it wouldn't work. That's baseline, out of the box functionality for me.

The "proper" lid close gave us the image of engineers walking around the office with the screen slightly propped open to keep their Macs from going to sleep.

Yeah I know that there are ways around it but apparently it was too much to figure out for most.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#99

Post by jjulius »

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.

Because it gives me more chances to learn how something works than a stable OS.

Re: From macOS to Arch Linux

#100

Post by ideologysec »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #74
Offpics wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im going to switch from arch to mac in one month. What I should consider installing on it beside homebrew?

I try to keep it pretty simple. I use Karabiner for two specific keyboard alterations (swapping : and ;, and mapping cmd+esc to cmd+` for my keyboard without a dedicated ` key). I also use iTerm instead of the built-in terminal. That's about it, at least recently. I do have Rectangle installed but I don't really use it. Well, I also use Camo so that I can use my iPhone as a webcam, but I'll probably buy a decent webc…

Camo has a one-time "lifetime" $79 license fee, if you want to go that route, you just have to go to their website.
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