[HN Gopher] From macOS to Arch Linux
___________________________________________________________________
From macOS to Arch Linux
Author : joelittlejohn
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-11-05 12:07 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.juxt.pro)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.juxt.pro)
| [deleted]
| nmstoker wrote:
| 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.
| paco3346 wrote:
| This is what my org does. Devs are allowed to pick their own OS
| as long as they can support it when IT doesn't know about the
| particulars. We've even contemplated running it on production
| servers instead of Ubuntu so that we don't have to wait 18
| months for Canonical to publish the next version of a package.
| obiwan14 wrote:
| > I started on Slackware a long time ago, then used Debian for
| some time and Ubuntu over the years when I needed a virtualized
| environment. I consider myself a Linux newbie and I'm sure I'm
| about to make many questionable choices.
|
| Somebody who started with Slackware, then to Debian and Ubuntu
| does not really fall into the "newbie" group in my opinion.
| [deleted]
| Kalanos wrote:
| 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 handle dev tools for me.
| pkulak wrote:
| I've been on Arch a couple years now; before that MacOS. I'd
| say things break about as often as they did on MacOS. Maybe
| once a year. It's not like MacOS with Homebrew and a few dozen
| developer tools is bulletproof. But at least on Arch you are
| able to understand your own system and have half a chance of
| fixing things.
|
| You're totally right about the real joy being in "getting your
| custom stack". On Arch, for one example, installing Docker is
| just "sudo pacman -S docker". On Mac you get a web page,
| "Docker Desktop" and a tray icon to look at for the rest of
| your life. On Arch everything is just so much easier.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| > 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 issue
| on Linux (other than, obviously, if you have niche hardware,
| but I still haven't had audio issues other than when I tried to
| install Linux on a Chromebook using the MrChromebox coreboot
| UEFI firmware). Audio drivers failing is something that people
| like to throw out there even though it's not very common. I've
| literally never had my audio drivers suddenly fail on me. The
| only mic issues I've had are the ones I'd have on any other
| system, like choosing the wrong input device and wondering why
| no one can hear me.
|
| > maintaining that entire stack across updates is daunting
|
| I've had Arch installs for long, long times. IME and in many
| other people's experiences, Arch doesn't really break that much
| (read: at all for me) through updates compared to other distros
| (eg. Ubuntu). It's a good example of a distro that you'd want
| to use on a desktop for this exact reason.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| 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.
| Kalanos wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I've been a Linux user since before PulseAudio came onto the
| scene, and it's starting to get better. But, applications
| still have issues with new audio devices being connected or
| disconnected, and not detecting the change. Teams for Linux
| is a big offender here, but also OBS Studio.
|
| Bluetooth headphones work too (which, with my previous
| experiences, I never expected to work beyond a tech demo),
| but they sometimes get stuck in HSF/HFP mode and have to be
| switched manually. But, at least there's a good GUI for it.
| hnrj95 wrote:
| i agree. the mental overhead is too much for me to justify,
| personally, for my own machine
| fsflover wrote:
| So don't use Arch. Use Debian.
| Koshkin wrote:
| That's a great advice! On the other hand, what is it that
| Arch offers and Debian does not? (Asking this as a long
| time Slackware fan.)
| jorgemf wrote:
| What offer debian that arch doesn't offer? Arch it is
| really stable and with latest packages. I see debian as a
| pain in the ass when you want a new packages or you have
| to upgrade to a new version. I don't have those issues in
| arch.
| nix23 wrote:
| Newer packages? A rolling release?
| [deleted]
| paulsmal wrote:
| or Fedora
| pjmlp wrote:
| In 30 years the "you are using the wrong distribution"
| never gets old it seems.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Or if you really don't want to have to deal with the
| overhead, choose macOS or Windows.
| donio wrote:
| > You can't join meetings because your headphone/ mic/ video
| drivers aren't working?
|
| Funnily the "oh wait my mic is not working, let me reboot"
| seems to happen all the time when my Mac-using coworkers join
| meetings.
| sneak wrote:
| Meanwhile, macOS, Homebrew, and Docker are all chock full of
| phone-home spyware, which is why I switched away.
|
| It's a bit more work but at least I'm not fighting my computer
| the whole way to not spy on me.
| gbrown wrote:
| 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
| the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list
|
| Like... why?
| foxfluff wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Can you explain to me how dnf or apt is more comprehensive than
| pacman? I use all three: arch on my laptop, fedora on my
| desktop, ubuntu on my work laptop. I do not see the difference
| in comprehensiveness.
|
| There are some house cleaning tasks pacman won't automatically
| do for you because doing so could break things you rely on. The
| same is true on fedora. It'll leave configs untouched, unless
| you run rpmconf which might then just break your stuff:
|
| > If you use rpmconf to upgrade the system configuration files
| supplied with the upgraded packages then some configuration
| files may change. After the upgrade you should verify
| /etc/ssh/sshd_config, /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/ntp.conf and
| others are expected. For example, if OpenSSH is upgraded then
| sshd_config reverts to the default package configuration. The
| default package configuration does not enable public key
| authentication, and allows password authentication.
|
| (From https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-
| system-u...)
|
| The problem is ultimately one of churn, and how the system
| deals with it. Anecdotally Ubuntu tries to deal with it harder
| than the others, and my experience is that Ubuntu breaks (or
| suddenly stops behaving the way you had it configured) the most
| during updates. The others break less but require some
| attention from you.
|
| Some of the churn is caused by distros, some of it is caused by
| the upstream projects. Churn is big in the Linux world.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure what you mean by apt or dnf being more
| comprehensive. The feature set of all Linux package managers
| are pretty similar. The major difference with Arch is you're
| heavily recommended not to do partial upgrades, but pacman will
| do it if you really want to. That's a difference in update
| philosophy between batched releases and rolling releases, not a
| difference in the package managers.
|
| If you mean comprehensive in terms of available software,
| corporate and commercial software seems to often offer debs and
| rpms but not tarballs installable by pacman. On the other hand,
| for anything open source, the Arch official repository plus AUR
| has way more packages available than the Debian/Ubuntu and
| Redhat official repos, and having everything in one AUR for
| third-party packages is much more convenient than the apt/dnf
| way of adding a repo per vendor.
|
| As for checking the home page every time you upgrade, you
| really don't need to. I think that's to stave off complaints if
| something breaks, because it might since you have full freedom
| to set things up however you want and Arch can't guarantee the
| standard packages with standard settings are going to work for
| the combinatorial explosion of possible individual setups
| everyone might have. But in five years of daily Arch use (I
| have it as the OS on 8 devices in my house right now), I've
| auto-upgraded daily and experienced one breakage I can think
| of, two days ago when certain graphical apps stopped showing a
| visible window. It was annoying and I still don't know why it
| happened (guessing something about the Wayland/NVIDIA combo is
| still creating issues), but it fixed itself on the next ugprade
| 7h hours later or so.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| > package managers are pretty similar. The major difference
| with Arch is you're heavily recommended not to do partial
| upgrades, but pacman will do it if you really want to. That's
| a difference in update philosophy between batched releases
| and rolling releases, not a difference in the package
| managers.
|
| No it's a difference in package managers. Pacman doesn't take
| into account library versions when resolving dependencies,
| it's why partial upgrades aren't supported because the only
| way to ensure every package you have installed is linked
| against the version of its dependencies you have installed is
| to have every package on your system come from a snapshot in
| time of the whole repo package tree.
|
| Better package managers don't have this problem and
| understand how to not break your system with partial
| upgrades. This matters as soon as a new version of a package
| has a bug and you want to downgrade it, or you build and
| install a package from the AUR which, when you later update
| your system, could need rebuilding to continue working, but
| pacman has no way to tell you when this is the case.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Not PP, but to me it means much less manual intervention/more
| hooks etc. .
|
| For instance, for debian I can just turn on automatic updates
| and basically never need manual intervention.
|
| For arch I am not supposed to use automatic updates and have
| to (!) read the news.
|
| Why? Why does arch need more manual intervention? Sure, I can
| do that but it just seems like a pointless waste of time.
| m01 wrote:
| I don't think Debian's automatic updates do major release
| upgrades automatically, do they? Those IIRC do require
| manual intervention - if nothing else you need to run the
| installer & possibly respond to prompts, but possibly more
| depending on your system.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| 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.
| evol262 wrote:
| 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.
| jimjimjimjim wrote:
| Sometimes there are some manual interventions that you may have
| to perform.
| gbrown wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. Why?
| ayushnix wrote:
| You can either deal with it once in while or you could let
| it pile up for years and then when a new major release
| comes up, you could spend days troubleshooting or
| reinstalling from scratch.
|
| I think either method is fine, depending on the
| circumstances. Your choice.
| omnicognate wrote:
| 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.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Because many of the changes are large enough that it will
| break, and that's expected.
|
| The KISS principle applies here.
|
| If a config file format changes in a service between
| version 3 and version 4, should the package manager be
| responsible for it? Or the admin?
|
| Sometimes it's not just merging changes in.
|
| In a non-rolling release distribution, you only need to
| worry about those changes during major upgrades. In a
| rolling release distro, they can change at any time. It's
| no different than a user reading the release notes for
| Debian 11 while upgrading from 10, except the upgrades are
| constant.
| nvarsj wrote:
| It's the philosophy of Arch to stick to vanilla as much as
| possible and keep things simple. It's a rolling distro too
| with no fixed release cycles. When you upgrade fedora,
| ubuntu, etc. they perform various scripts to migrate
| existing configuration. In Arch, it just simply installs
| the vanilla packages whenever you tell pacman to update.
| Very rarely there is some breaking change, maybe once or
| twice a year, that requires manual intervention. Yeah they
| could automate it all but such stuff takes effort and
| breaks in other ways.
| [deleted]
| nemetroid wrote:
| For one, not putting every single edge case into the
| package manager makes the behaviour of the package manager
| easier to understand.
| elitepleb wrote:
| Upstream breaks your stuff, you roll into the incompatible
| release, getting to fix it yourself.
|
| There's no fixed release schedule that promises total
| compatibility at the cost of running years old releases.
| spystath wrote:
| Well, manual interventions are rare [0] and almost all of
| them nowadays are due to the odd package restructuring.
| Usually the package manager will notify you about a
| conflict between two packages and won't proceed (so nothing
| will break). At this point you can check the website if
| there is a need to force install a package or two.
|
| Although definitely more technical than most distributions
| the perceived difficulty of Arch is mostly a meme at this
| point. The last large possibly-system-breaking change was
| almost 10 years ago [1]. And even then, the solution was
| quite trivial. Now if you are forcing updates that conflict
| without reading the news then you're in for a bad time, but
| that's true for all distributions. In general pacman is
| very conservative and won't leave your system partially
| updated. Now there is a chance upstream updates break
| things, but that's the nature of the rolling release model.
|
| Manual compilations are not necessary if you stick to the
| official repositories. If you need a package in the AUR
| then a ports-like setup is required. I have packaged stuff
| for both RPM and DEB-based distributions, nothing really
| beats the simplicity and flexiblity of the Archlinux
| packaging tools.
|
| [0]: https://archlinux.org/news/
|
| [1]: https://archlinux.org/news/the-lib-directory-becomes-
| a-symli...
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Looking through the latest advisories of upgrades requiring
| manual intervention, those mostly seem to be files that
| were mishandled. I guess they want to avoid "being smart"
| and trying to second guess the system setup.
|
| Other distributions attempt to migrate the config / tools
| which mostly works, except when it doesn't. Earlier today I
| upgraded an Ubuntu 21.04 to 21.10. The computer is a
| glorified Spotify Connect player, so I don't configure
| anything on it. But for some reason, after the reboot,
| there's some issue with gvfsd-something-or-other. I never
| configured anything related to that. Is this normal /
| expected? No idea. A quick search on the release notes [0]
| yields nothing.
|
| So I guess there are always tradeoffs. Arch seems to adopt
| more of a hands-off approach, where you only get a basic
| system and then you build your own environment. As such,
| there's many possible variations. In contrast to Ubuntu /
| Fedora / etc, where the devs can reasonably expect that a
| system is in a roughly known state.
|
| [0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/impish-indri-release-
| notes/21...
| javier2 wrote:
| They announce (known) breaking changes that may require
| manual intervention. Meanwhile, when my ubuntu upgrade
| breaks something there is never any release notes or
| documentation to help me fix it. After my previous ubuntu
| upgrade at work, the screen locker is segfaulting instead
| of locking my screen, and clicking links inside the Slack
| crashes slack...
| jorgemf wrote:
| Pacman now tells you when there is an announcement in the
| website. Most of this announcements are due some issue
| introduced in a package. I haven't faced all of them as
| usually they resolved quickly and when I update the system
| the new packages solves the issue. Rarely there has been a
| breaking change in a package that needed some easy manual
| intervention. I have maybe done this line 5 or 6 times in
| 15 years. Compared to Ubuntu, I find it upgrading process
| more tedious (I haven't tried it in the last year's so
| maybe now is better). Said that, probably i won't use arch
| for a production environment and stick to Ubuntu, but for
| home/work system, I love it
| javier2 wrote:
| You don't have to run arch if you are happy with your Ubuntu or
| whatever other distro. I run arch because I like trying out new
| software when its released, not when maintainers of ubuntu
| decide to include it in the next release cycle. You are pretty
| much always on the latest kernel, for good or bad. aur also is
| a gem compared to apt when it comes to modifying in-tree
| packages and maintaining those with the system package manager.
|
| But well, if you are happy with your distro you don't have to
| use anything else.
| cturtle wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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.
| apetresc wrote:
| 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 packages for virtually everything are updated within
| hours or days of an upstream release, with incredible practical
| stability.
|
| > > Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch
| Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively
| subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list >
| Like... why?
|
| That's very much a "cover-your-ass" type disclaimer, like a ToS
| that says you have no right to expect anything to work. In
| practice, 99.99% of upgrades work completely unattended, and in
| the .01%, you see a failure, you go to the News site and it
| says "sorry, we made a backwards-incompatible push, please
| delete this path before upgrading" or something like that, you
| do it, and then everything is fine again for another 18 months.
|
| Arch still has the vestiges of this reputation as a wild-west
| distribution for reckless code cowboys, but in practice it is
| the de-facto "set it and forget it" distro. I spend literally
| 10x less time worrying about my distribution and package
| manager when I'm on Arch then on any other computing system
| I've ever encountered.
| lgunsch wrote:
| I have used Arch Linux for the past 8 years. I've had 3
| installations on four different laptops (I migrated one
| installation to a second laptop).
|
| Your comment would be a really great description of my
| experience.
| bavell wrote:
| I've used Arch for the better part of the last decade and
| agree with this assessment as well.
| gbrown wrote:
| > 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
|
| Sorry, what I meant was: when I need to manage the version of
| something carefully, I just compile it from source and that's
| OK with me. My understanding is that people use the AUR for
| this on Arch, and the pains don't seem worth it.
|
| > The main thing that people like about it is the rolling
| release model
|
| Fair enough, though I've been pretty happy with the pace of
| update from, for example, Fedora.
|
| > That's very much a "cover-your-ass" type disclaimer, like a
| ToS that says you have no right to expect anything to work.
|
| Fair enough
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > Sorry, what I meant was: when I need to manage the
| version of something carefully, I just compile it from
| source and that's OK with me. My understanding is that
| people use the AUR for this on Arch, and the pains don't
| seem worth it.
|
| Nobody's making you use the AUR! If you want to 'make &&
| sudo make install' you can do that all day long.
|
| The AUR value add is that other people have already figured
| out recipes for how to take the equivalent of 'make && sudo
| make install' and generate a package you can mange with the
| package manager.
|
| There exist plenty of tools to automate all AUR
| interactions, but none of these will ever be included in
| Arch's main repos, since they are not a core part of Arch
| itself. This is to maintain a sharp delineation between
| properly supported Arch packages and the more wild west AUR
| recipes. That said, once you download a PKGBUILD from the
| AUR, you can use the same official tools to build and
| install the package that are used for the distro proper.
|
| When I want to build from source, and something isn't in
| the AUR, I just spend the 5 minutes to make a proper
| PKGBUILD for myself. It is very easy and it simplifies
| management of things.
| pxc wrote:
| > The main thing that people like about it is the rolling
| release model; new packages for virtually everything are
| updated within hours or days of an upstream release, with
| incredible practical stability.
|
| Fedora Rawhide and openSUSE Tumbleweed are both nearly as up-
| to-date[1] as the Arch repos but they have package managers
| with correct dependency solvers and continuous integration
| pipelines with tests produce their repos. NixOS Unstable is
| _more_ up-to-date than Arch Linux[1], and its package manager
| never breaks your system on upgrades and features automatic
| rollbacks no matter what filesystem you use.
|
| 'I want a rolling release' doesn't really explain the choice
| to use Arch in particular, imo, and it's weird that this
| extremely common answer to 'why Arch' talks about a feature
| that isn't really specific to Arch
|
| --
|
| 1: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest
| simion314 wrote:
| >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.
| jorgemf wrote:
| Usually when gnome doesn't start up in arch it is due
| extensions which are not supported either gnome or arch.
| But you usually find them in AUR, which fix your issues
| quite quickly. I haven't had any issues with gnome 3 in
| arch since they move to it, apart from extensions and a
| couple of things not well integrated in Wayland+gnome. Said
| that, it has been much more a nightmare for me to install
| packages in docker images of Ubuntu.
| simion314 wrote:
| My point is that in Arch you can't start your work day by
| updating your system, you might have to fix shit instead
| of working.
|
| With an LTS distro I know when teh notification for
| updates appears that is a security thing and it is safe
| to update.
|
| >Said that, it has been much more a nightmare for me to
| install packages in docker images of Ubuntu.
|
| I am assuming you are trying to install something outside
| the official repos, like you want to get the latest
| node/python or some other latest stuff using a PPA. Those
| PPA might not be that good quality so you could get
| issues like conflicts. I am not a sysadmin or dev-ops guy
| to tell you what is the correct way to install newer
| version of stuff.
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| pxc wrote:
| > 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
|
| Arch proper has like 60% the package count of openSUSE,
| fewer than 1/2 as many packages as Fedora, fewer than 1/3
| as many packages as Debian, and fewer than 1/6 as many
| packages as NixOS.[1]
|
| Maybe some of this is Arch having larger packages
| (splitting fewer of them out), but whatever fudge factor
| you wanna add in, the Arch repos are _extraordinarily
| small_. You have to get into really niche shit like Solus
| or Exherbo to find a distro with a smaller software
| selection than the Arch repositories.
|
| The idea that Arch is as usable as most Linux distros
| without leveraging the AUR is ridiculous.
|
| --
|
| 1: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total
| schleck8 wrote:
| 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'.
| swasheck wrote:
| 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.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| The the ethos of the distribution is gatekeeping :)
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| 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).
| pxc wrote:
| > 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.
|
| People who like Arch because they think the AUR is actually
| good hate doing repo management. What they like about the AUR
| is that it's One Big Repo, and it (unlike the barren Arch repos
| themselves) is pretty comprehensive.
|
| > > Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch
| Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively
| subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list >
| Like... why?
|
| Because Arch's interpretation of 'keep it simple, stupid' means
| they are allergic to engineering in their distro tools. As a
| result, their package manager has deficient dependency
| resolution behavior. This is exacerbated by the fact that the
| devs make relatively little use of things like transitional
| packages, for some reason. But Pacman is fast, because by
| choosing not to have a complete dependency solver, it avoids
| tackling a problem with high computational complexity. For some
| people, that part of the user experience is good enough that it
| allows them to forgive Pacman for doing insane things like
| pointlessly breaking installed software every now and again.
| alexarnesen wrote:
| 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 past
| year I've been running an Arch desktop, I have resolved every
| issue by using the Arch wiki and Google/ stack overflow. I
| suspect that partly, the Arch approach is appealing to those of
| us who prefer a simpler system, because those are easier to
| grapple with in a support context.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Would you recommend Arch to someone without a lot of Linux
| experience? Ubuntu has me thinking of switching to a
| different OS.
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| I'd recommend going for it, and as others have said, be
| prepared to read the Arch Wiki, a lot. I think what's most
| important would be to simply have the guts and the
| inspiration to keep going, even if you think you've lost
| all hope. Personally, I started out my Linux journey with
| Ubuntu, then distro hopped and tried PopOS, and Ubuntu-
| based distro with extra things here and there. Then, I took
| a Linux course online (for free) and gave me general
| fundamentals, it advertises as the "The Start from scratch
| Linux course". After that and spending tons of time on
| Reddit and seeing post after post and the memes about 'I
| use arch btw' I decided to try it out. It was definitely
| fun and a tad time consuming at first, but after that I've
| learned a ton more about Linux and how things work. I've
| only had a broken system a couple times. _Again, the
| ArchWiki is your friend._
| bavell wrote:
| 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.
| pxc wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: the _only_ people I 'd recommend Arch to
| are people without a lot of Linux experience (who are
| interested in learning).
|
| Once you learn the basics of what goes into a distro and
| you know how to set things up and troubleshoot, there's no
| reason to use a distro with a package management story as
| backwards as Arch's.
|
| After you're done with Arch, learn to write packages for a
| couple distros (practice building them on something like
| OBS[1], which lets you build and distribute packages for
| almost any distro). Then choose your distro based on _the
| quality of the tooling it is built on_ and package whatever
| you need that isn 't already in it.
|
| --
|
| 1: https://build.opensuse.org/
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| You can give it a try but be prepared to spend a lot of
| time reading the wiki
| ativzzz wrote:
| I recommend checking out EndeavourOS. It's an Arch based OS
| that sets you up with a friendly installer and a desktop
| environment out of the box, then gets out of your way. You
| don't get the fun experience of installing arch from
| scratch but it's a gentler introduction to the ecosystem.
|
| I switched from ubuntu to Endeavour as my first dive into
| Arch recently and have been happy with it.
| freebuju wrote:
| Arch recently introduced a general prompt-style installer
| script that should be able to help you setup and install
| a working Arch on any system.
|
| https://python-
| archinstall.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installi...
| nicta wrote:
| My personal experience with Linux has been Ubuntu ~1 week
| -> Debian 2 days -> Arch 11 years now.
|
| It will require some time learning and reading through the
| wiki. I would definitely recommend trying it in a vm first.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| This has been exactly my experience as well. Ubuntu would
| have fewer issues _initially_ , and almost no setup, but
| after setup it would break more often and always find ways to
| break in new and interesting ways that were very difficult to
| resolve, and I never could understand what was wrong.
|
| With Arch, I was able to fix every issue that came up, full
| stop. But it required much more setup. It also breaks way
| less often. Prior to Arch, I never really felt that "full-
| empowered linux-user" feeling. It was always voodoo. Now I DO
| get that feeling and I really feel in charge and in control
| of my system. Interestingly, I still run ubuntu server for a
| couple servers, (I generally prefer debian for servers, but
| that's a separate discussion.) and I still find the
| occasional issues that come up to be difficult-to-resolve
| voodoo, despite having a much greater level of understanding
| of how linux works and does things.
| emrah wrote:
| I know it's not Arch Linux but PopOS is a great pragmatic
| alternative. Everything worked out of the box on the old laptops
| I installed it.
| Sayrus wrote:
| If I may suggest, take a look at autorandr [1], it saves your
| monitor configuration and automatically enables it when a set of
| monitor is detected. It's a small thing, but it improves the
| experience and will replace your home alias.
|
| [1] https://github.com/phillipberndt/autorandr
| extr wrote:
| I currently run a dual boot with Arch and Windows 11 on an XPS
| 13. There are positives to each:
|
| * Windows has much better support for handling the Hi/Multi DPI
| setup that is my laptop + 2 4K screens. Wayland gets there, but
| unfortunately the font rendering is annoying bad, and the
| fractional scaling doesn't _quite_ look right. And of course it
| 's a very "just works" experience if you stay on the happy path.
| The Windows OneDrive + Office integration is great, and I have
| some photo software I run that is Windows-only.
|
| * Arch gives a much better "pure laptop" experience. Hotkeys make
| everything easy, tiling WMs are just infinitely superior if
| you're working off one small screen. Also I get BETTER battery
| life on Arch, the laptop runs totally cool (and fans never spin
| up), and closing the lid puts it into true S3 sleep. It's very
| snappy and I use less RAM.
|
| Also, I think people have this idea that if you use Arch the only
| "right" way to do it is to spend a million hours setting up a
| whole universe of CLI apps and becoming a wizard with hotkeys. I
| only use the CLI if it's truly easier than a GUI or something I
| don't use often. I basically just install the regular google-
| chrome-stable binary from AUR and then do everything on the web.
| Email? I set up a desktop link to fastmail. Spotify? Don't bother
| with native linux app, just set up a desktop link to the web
| player. Need to use Excel and don't feel like switching to
| windows? Just go use the web version, etc...Seriously, the move
| to webapps is doing more for the linux desktop experience than
| anything else.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| Just gonna plug my bspwm-esque tiling windows manager for
| Windows 10 and 11 here since I know how hard life on Windows is
| without one: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi/
| extr wrote:
| Small world! I use this and submitted issue #22 about the
| Electron/Chromium frozen window problem. Despite that issue,
| really fantastic software, by far the best linux-like tiling
| WM solution for Windows at the moment (and I've tried them
| all). Fantastic work!
| sunaurus wrote:
| 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 great package managers. Nothing is super-integrated with the
| core system like pacman is in Arch, and even when heavily using
| some package manager, there will always be a bunch of software
| that can only be updated using their own auto-update mechanism
| instead of a central package manager.
|
| * Docker in general is just much slower compared to running
| directly on Linux.
|
| * Setting up ergonomic custom keyboard shortcuts is painful and
| requires (multiple?) third-party applications to do well.
| remolueoend wrote:
| 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.
| pxc wrote:
| What remappings do you use?
| javier2 wrote:
| I only use macOS for work now because they have become too
| expensive to keep one just for personal use. The new M1 Air is
| not that expensive though, but it's still 3 times the price of
| a decent AMD based laptop.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| I just got my first Mac ever: a MacBook Air M1. Coming from
| Arch I thought I would handle it easy. How bad can it be? It
| just works, right?... right?
|
| So I wanted a laptop instead of a desktop computer and
| Framework isn't available where I'm from so I went for the
| MacBook. In terms of performance, all is fine. Some OS based
| decisions make me want to put everything back into the
| packaging and send the thing back.
|
| 1) I might be alone with this but how is there no forward
| delete (del) button? I've never noticed but apparently I use it
| quite a lot. cmd + Backspace solves that.
|
| 2) The entire OS feels more trackpad-centric than other OS's
| I've used which confuses me. The gestures and the trackpad are
| top notch though.
|
| 3) I don't understand the Option key. Overall the Command,
| Option and CTRL keys do weird things in my opinion and growing
| up with Windows and Linux, I don't understand what command does
| either. Which leads me to...
|
| 4) The keyboard shortcuts feel complicated for the sake of
| complicatedness.
|
| 5) Why can I not click an app on the dock to minimise it into
| the dock?
|
| 6) The delete key, man.
|
| This sounds negative but there's a lot of positive stuff with
| that thing (I'm good with the display and keyboard, the battery
| life is crazy compared to laptops I've had before, ...). I'm
| not sure yet if I want to learn a whole new OS though so I'm
| undecided if I want to keep it yet. The main downside of using
| Linux for me is Adobe (effing) Photoshop and Lightroom not
| working.
| [deleted]
| exegete wrote:
| I'm actually in the same boat. My approach to save a few bucks
| was to buy a lower end laptop I knew was somewhat compatible
| with Arch. But now I want something that just works without me
| configuring everything (and some better hardware too). I still
| have a box I built at home that I can tinker with Linux if I
| want too.
| [deleted]
| pkulak wrote:
| Whoa now, don't leave me hanging. What are the benefits of the
| "Apple ecosystem"? I'm using a Macbook right now because it's
| tiny and light and has amazing hardware, but once I need to get
| things done, it's closed and charging. If you have multiple
| devices, why do they all need to be identical?
| sunaurus wrote:
| Well, there's not any one simple answer to the question -
| there's no one killer feature, it's more about a bunch of
| different tiny QoL features that work really seamlessly
| without any setup. Apple apps and devices all integrate
| really nicely with eachother in small but noticable ways.
|
| You can probably get close with Linux using a bunch of
| different apps, services and tinkering, but with Apple, it's
| all quite effortless.
| stnikolauswagne wrote:
| Having my phonecalls automatically forwarded to my laptop is
| a huge benefit. Being able to use my iPad pro as a secondary
| monitor for when I have to go into the office is very useful
| as well. Painless copy-paste between devices is also a huge
| bonus.
|
| I'm sure there are ways to get all of that running on linux
| but I'd rather spend the time that it would take setting all
| that up working and let my company pay a bit more on my
| equipment.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| "All that" seems to just be one app, which requires no
| setup beyond clicking "pair" on the phone once.
| pkulak wrote:
| Is all that really a "huge" benefit? I never get phone
| calls that aren't spam, or have the need to copy paste from
| a phone. And an 11-inch second monitor doesn't sound like a
| huge benefit. Especially when I could just have my company
| "pay a bit more" on a real second monitor.
|
| But, not gonna discount your perspective. Everyone has
| different priorities, and it's why different products exist
| for different folks.
| stnikolauswagne wrote:
| I guess it always depends on the person. I get probably
| on average 8-10 work related phone calls a day and spend
| 2-3 hours a day on the phone, and have been on call 24/7
| for the last 6 months, any little convenience that I can
| get I will take. I imagine with better work/life balance
| these things become much less of a big deal but for now I
| am really glad to have an environment that causes me
| relatively little hassle.
| pkulak wrote:
| Yeah, that makes sense.
| lmohseni wrote:
| I have a macbook and and Iphone, so one handy thing I use is
| the clipboard is shared between devices on the same LAN that
| are signed into the same icloud accont. so I can select some
| text with my mouse, hit "paste" in my phone, and it works
| instantaneously. definitely one of those "wow we live in the
| future" moments.
| vbarrielle wrote:
| This feature is available for the linux/android combination
| using kdeconnect. Unfortunately I don't think there's an
| iOS app for that.
| johnny22 wrote:
| the ios app just came out recently didn't it? I think i
| saw that mentioned.I don't use iOS, but i saw articles
| about it. YMMV.
| foobarian wrote:
| The Alt-Tab behavior on MacOS across multiple screens is really
| annoying. Also window resizing behaviors. If there was a way to
| override those it would be an unmatched system/environment.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I haven't tried it so I can't vouch for it, but AltTab[0] may
| meet your window switching needs.
|
| What specifically would you prefer to be different for window
| resizing behaviors? If it's something akin to Aero Snap on
| Windows there's a multitude of options, including Moom[1],
| Rectangle[2], and Magnet[3] among others.
|
| [0]: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ [1]:
| https://manytricks.com/moom/ [2]: https://rectangleapp.com/
| [3]: https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
| shbooms wrote:
| > Setting up ergonomic custom keyboard shortcuts is painful and
| requires (multiple?) third-party applications to do well.
|
| Take a look at Hammerspoon[0] for this if you haven't already.
| It requires some work to get it working the way want (you'll be
| writing some basic Lua code) but it's by far the best, all-in-
| one solution I've found for this problem on macOS. It has a ton
| of built-in modules for automating things including being to
| setup hotkeys globally as well as modal/on per-app basis
|
| [0] https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon
| zdragnar wrote:
| Hammerspoon is what makes macOS usable for me (plus karabiner
| for caps lock twiddling). The randomly rearranging layout of
| mission control has to be the most user hostile annoyance I
| have ever experienced in an OS to date.
|
| Ironically, there isn't anything equivalent to it in linux
| land, and once I had gotten some really nice customizations,
| going back makes me a little sad.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| If you're talking about spaces automatically swapping
| around, you can disable that functionality in System
| Preferences-Mission Control, just fyi.
| kstrauser wrote:
| If Lua scripting doesn't float your boat and you don't mind
| commercial software, Keyboard Maestro[0] is brilliant. I use
| it for:
|
| * Expanding text macros (like TextExpander but not with a
| subscription)
|
| * Automating web forms I have to fill out frequently (find
| the "Last Name" button; send "Smith"; hit "tab"; send "Joe";
| find the "Submit this form" button and press it).
|
| * Opening apps with hotkeys.
|
| * Scripting stuff that isn't scriptable, like "find the Music
| app; right click on the ... menu; click Share; click Copy
| Link" to get the currently playing song's URL. (PS: If you
| know how to reliably get this another way, please let me
| know.)
|
| * Doing really nifty things with OCR on the screen, like
| "send this set of keypresses, then look for the text that
| says 'I accept this', put the mouse over it, and click it"
| for apps that don't use native widgets.
|
| Hammerspoon is super cool too, but I don't have the time to
| really tweak it as much as I can Keyboard Maestro.
|
| [0] https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - I used Arch and other distributions for years and always
| ended up back on macOS. There are tradeoffs, but on net it's
| hard to beat macOS especially if you use other Apple devices
| (plus the hardware has been getting better and better).
|
| It's nice to have things work out of the box and never having
| to worry about things like hibernate, suspend, battery life
| etc. Trackpads, display resolution, fonts, random config
| failures - plus any macOS issue is usually easier to find a
| real solution for online imo.
|
| Even in this article a ton of stuff seems like a pain in the
| ass:
|
| - Hacking to connect bluetooth headphones
|
| - Config required to reconnect to wifi
|
| - Config required to get the monitor working
|
| - No good native calendar
|
| And of course at the end suspend/hibernate is still not working
| (naturally, probably never will work 100%). I'd also guess
| battery life is pretty bad and the UI of the tiling wm may be
| missing nice to have things (like accurate battery remaining).
| Offpics wrote:
| Im going to switch from arch to mac in one month. What I should
| consider installing on it beside homebrew?
| kristofferR wrote:
| 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).
| deadbunny wrote:
| Macs Just Work.
|
| Sorry, just found it funny with the big list of
| applications you're recommending to install to do basic
| thing in OSX when the usual argument against Linux on HN is
| "Macs just work".
| manquer wrote:
| They do for regular users who use typical end user apps
| it doesn't just work for devs.
|
| Apple is not designing OS for devs their vast majority of
| users are not devs or even professionals these days,
| while macs can be used for development with some
| wrangling to get a POSIX like environment without too
| much performance loss, it is not linux. Docker will run
| in a VM and be slower and some basic stuff like procfs
| would be completely missing , most of their gnu utils are
| from late 80s GPL being the reason.
|
| I am also moving back to apple largely because of the m1x
| performance and battery. Hope Asahi becomes very stable
| soon on M1
| pxc wrote:
| > Apple is not designing OS for devs their vast majority
| of users are not devs or even professionals these days
|
| yeah. So why are so many devs more or less forced to use
| MacBooks? someone tell their CTOs
| zdragnar wrote:
| Hammerspoon is fantastic
| deergomoo wrote:
| Not OP, but give MacPorts a try to see if you prefer it to
| Homebrew. It tends to push more of the configuration onto the
| user, but if you're coming from Arch you might well prefer
| that. It's also _much_ faster than Homebrew in my experience.
| sunaurus wrote:
| If you use a big monitor, Rectangle
| (https://rectangleapp.com/) is must-have. It's minimal and
| works really well. Without it, using multiple windows side-
| by-side is really painful.
| pxc wrote:
| only use Homebrew for 'Casks' (GUI .apps)-- `brew cask`
| subcommand
|
| Nix or pkgsrc for reliable management of CLI tools (both, if
| you want to try Nix but want an escape hatch)
|
| don't forget to install GNU coreutils, grep, find, and bash.
| (BSD coreutils are weird and anemic if you're used to GNU.
| macOS bash is ancient, etc.)
|
| disable cursor acceleration (barely works, but it's the only
| thing that works):
| https://plentycom.jp/en/cursorsense/index.html
|
| the only mature terminal emulator on the platform that
| performs okay (provided you enable GPU acceleration):
| https://iterm2.com/
|
| recover basic key remapping functionality: https://karabiner-
| elements.pqrs.org/
|
| recover basic audio controls like per-app volume mixing:
| https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic
|
| recover FUSE support: https://osxfuse.github.io/
|
| recover configurability for a whole host of missing
| functionality, like global keyboard shortcuts, through
| automation (Lua scripting): https://www.hammerspoon.org/
|
| recover clipboard management: https://hluk.github.io/CopyQ/
|
| if you don't use some hack to get window tiling, you might
| also want to...
|
| recover basic window management functionality:
| https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
|
| recover modifier key window drag:
| https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize
|
| good luck.
| jonfw wrote:
| Seeing a lot of recommendations for yabai- but I personally
| prefer amethyst for window management. Yabai had too much
| configuration for me- amethyst is easier
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| 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 webcam soon because I
| don't want to keep paying the ongoing subscription. (Why is
| everything a freaking subscription these days ...)
|
| In the past I used the tiling window manager Yabai, but I've
| gotten away from that recently. It didn't work properly 100%
| of the time, unfortunately.
| ideologysec wrote:
| Camo has a one-time "lifetime" $79 license fee, if you want
| to go that route, you just have to go to their website.
| SxC97 wrote:
| Not OP but it depends entirely on how Linux-y you want your
| experience to be. I regularly hop between pop, manjaro, and
| macOS.
|
| Brew is a given, but I also run karabiner elements for key
| remapping, Yabai+skhd+limelight for windows management,
| sketchybar as a panel, and Alfred as the run launcher since
| d-menu for Mac is still in early development.
|
| This gives me some nice consistency between OSs since I use
| BSPWM+Polybar+Rofi on Linux.
|
| There are several other neat little utilities that could come
| in handy like bettertouchtool and keyboard maestro for system
| wide automation with a gui and hammerspoon if you want a lua
| based automation program.
|
| I personally use hammerspoon to bring up a list of Yabai
| shortcuts for windows management since I have too many
| keybindings.
|
| As for dev tools, I use nvim, doom emacs, or VSC so it's
| pretty easy to carry my config between OSs.
| belthesar wrote:
| I'm super pleased with my Linux desktop. I'm now full time Linux
| on the desktop, having run Windows, dual booting
| Windows/Hackintosh, and then Windows/Linux for quite some time. I
| still have a Windows partition, but I haven't been in it in half
| a year at this point. The experience on my desktop hasn't been
| flawless, but it has been pretty nice on the whole. I can't say
| the same for my laptop, which has been a 2 year experiment at
| this point. When I was using it predominantly to do light work in
| the office, it worked out well, but I find it more and more
| difficult to use from a non-coding productivity standpoint.
|
| When I do work, I generally remote into my desktop via VSCode
| anyway at this point (and I really like this workflow tbh), but
| because I don't daily drive the laptop, there's less time spent
| to improve the tooling, and the ratio of time spent working to
| time spent fixing a weird issue is much lower than on my desktop.
| With some of my work potentially benefiting from the new Apple
| SoCs, the reversal in direction back to good sane defaults in
| hardware layout, and the far greater likelihood that my ratio of
| work to fix ratio would significantly increase, I'm pretty sure
| that an Apple Silicon laptop is in my near future.
| RistrettoMike wrote:
| 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 :)
| jefc1111 wrote:
| I tried for years to switch away from Mac OS to Linux. I tried
| Ubuntu a few times as I am familiar with it from a server
| perspective.
|
| It finally clicked when I tried Manjaro. The killer app for me is
| i3 Window manager (which you can of course use on other
| distributions). In general though I just like there being 'less'.
| I use Thinkpads and yes - have had issues with audio, and with
| sleep etc, but all solvable.
| culopatin wrote:
| With Thinkpads I rather have Bluetooth working than onboard
| audio. The speakers are so bad I don't even want to hear them
| beep.
| fsflover wrote:
| > 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.
| slowmotiony wrote:
| 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.
| tssva wrote:
| When I had a MacBook it also wouldn't reliably wake up from
| sleep every time either.
| blinkingled wrote:
| Ditto on most non Nvidia equipped ThinkPads. Typically Dell
| also does a good job at Linux compatibility but sometimes
| things take time to be worked out on newer hardware.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| My strategy when picking hardware to run Linux on with 100%
| success so far:
|
| 1. Wait about 6 months before purchasing newly released
| hardware (new generation of GPU, network adapter...) to let
| drivers trickle down from the manufacturer to the kernel and
| then to the distribution.
|
| 2. If it has an Nvidia logo on it, leave it on the shelf.
| fsflover wrote:
| Alternatively, simply buy preinstalled Linux. Worked for
| me.
| blinkingled wrote:
| Exactly - I have had great success with this strategy for
| many years now. Sometimes I take chances with #1 by running
| rolling release distros like Arch or Tumbleweed.
| awill wrote:
| For my personal desktop, I use Arch linux, and I'm perfectly
| happy. However, for a work laptop, I am pretty sure I'd take a
| new M1 Macbook Pro over a Thinkpad/XPS w/ Arch Linux.
|
| A MBP can get 15+ hours of battery life, supports suspend/resume,
| and in the case of the Intel models, smooth GPU switching between
| dedicated and onboard.
|
| Linux does none of that well. On a desktop, none of that matters,
| but I wouldn't take those tradeoffs on a work laptop.
| jchw wrote:
| I'm on a Thinkpad T14s for work, running Arch. Sleep/resume
| isn't a problem, battery life is fine (haven't measured but
| it's probably around 8 hours) and the GPU is acceptable for the
| work I am doing.
|
| Funny enough, what actually hit me in the face was an audio
| driver regression, but after a minor kernel update it's
| seemingly back in business. A lot of stuff changes, but man,
| Linux audio really never changes.
|
| If you really need GPU switching, that one definitely would be
| a bummer, but I'd really prefer a single GPU that can just
| handle light and heavy workloads reasonably. I think that's
| probably going to be the norm soon.
|
| Another thing oft overlooked is Thunderbolt support: it's
| definitely not as good on Linux. I'm currently just using a
| non-Thunderbolt USB-C dock because my needs are not crazy
| enough to need more.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Is that true for preinstalled distros as well? You can buy
| thinkpads/XPS with fedora/ubuntu preinstalled and I expect that
| the manufacturer took care that everything works well.
|
| On the flipside, if I install MacOS on a thinkpad (somewhat
| popular), I would expect problems with battery life,
| suspend/resume and gpu switching. Same with installing windows
| on chromebooks.
| culopatin wrote:
| Idk my Thinkpad works pretty good with Mac. The main pain
| point is getting the correct wifi card. 35 bucks later and I
| have an airport card in it that works perfectly. Handoff,
| airdrop, the whole thing.
|
| Trackpad works as good as in windows, but a Mac one is still
| better. The touch screen works, and track point works too.
| Battery life is the same or better than windows because I'm
| not burning CPU time on background updates unless I chose to.
|
| I haven't tried a dock, but HDMI out works fine.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sad we're still seeing comments like this in 2021: "I
| normally work using an external monitor, so I started looking
| at my options to configure the external display including the
| external keyboard and mouse."
|
| Trying to use linux on a laptop is how I ended buying my first
| Macbook a decade ago.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| People are having _lots_ of issues too with external monitors
| and Mac laptops. _xrandr_ on Linux ain 't complicated and it
| works well.
|
| I've got a M1 running on OS X and it's a sweet machine. I've
| got a beefy LG Gram laptop (24 GB of RAM, wider screen, much
| lighter than the M1) running Linux and it's a very sweet
| setup too.
|
| The LG Gram running Linux is for the serious stuff, the M1
| running OS X is to watch YouTube vids and overall surf from
| the couch.
|
| Now of course the real work is done on my desktop/workstation
| (running Linux too but whatever).
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| That is a sweet LG laptop you have. I daily a 2018 i9/32GB
| Intel MBP for work, with an eGPU and three 27" monitors.
| "Setup" was just plugging them in.
|
| I've got an M1 Max 64Gb for myself, and at 4.7lbs it's just
| light enough given its raw power (cpu and graphics). It
| also handles that many monitors without resorting to the
| eGPU (which is a good job, since it can't use one!) Had an
| M1 Air before that and mostly used it with old Thunderbolt
| 27" display and external keyboard/mouse. But I could (and
| did) play factorio on it for several hours on the couch on
| battery.
|
| I've always wanted to try a System76 laptop, on the basis
| that they'd have all that laptop-linux stuff sorted out,
| but Apple started making nice laptops again...
|
| It's easy for me now to drop $4k on a laptop. A decade ago,
| when I switched to a MacBook I was working for myself, and
| "it just works" was worth it so I could concentrate on
| making money rather than knob twiddling. It was a stressful
| time, so maybe I'm still carrying that experience with me.
| awill wrote:
| What battery life does the LG get? I'm guessing less than
| half your Mac
| another-account wrote:
| Reading the netstat source... yeah, there's freedom.
| calferreira wrote:
| Arch is like the IKEA version of Linux. Thanks to their WIKI, i
| feel that i can troubleshoot most issues by myself despite not
| having huge linux experience.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Arch Wiki is useful even if you're using a different distro.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| In many cases I think the Arch wiki is superior even to the
| official documentation. Which I think says a lot about the
| state of most documentation.
| flippinburgers wrote:
| If they are using an XPS everything should already be working on
| linux.
| stevencorona wrote:
| 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 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".
| thesuitonym wrote:
| >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.
| flatiron wrote:
| 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.
| jjulius wrote:
| Because it gives me more chances to learn how something works
| than a stable OS.
| pkulak wrote:
| 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.
| samarthr1 wrote:
| I am personally facing up to make the opposite switch. 2 days of
| battery life is very attractive for me. I am thinking of keeping
| my current laptop as my "desktop" and carrying a Mac around.
|
| Since most of my tools are cross platform, (jetbrains ides), my
| work can just continue Grimm one place to another using GitHub
| for synchronisation.
| anschwa wrote:
| Arch is great, although I think fedora does a much better job at
| providing a no-nonsense Linux workstation and would make for a
| smoother transition from macOS.
| tanjiro wrote:
| Its not just the initial setup that's painful with Arch, the
| whole rolling update model means things break often and I no
| longer have the patience to patch them. But I do agree that linux
| provides a better env for development compared to macOS. On
| Ubuntu atm and works like charm with flexibility to extend it as
| I like.
| jatone wrote:
| rolling updates isn't actually a problem in practice. the
| maintainers do test the applications before releasing the
| updates.
|
| i encounter usually 2-3 bugs (and almost always they are minor)
| per year due to rolling updates and usually its in the software
| I'm developing relying on old behaviors. and a simple package
| downgrade fixes it almost every time.
| blux wrote:
| "...means things break often..."
|
| Citation needed. I can provide some anecdotal evidence to the
| contrary; I've been running Arch both privately and
| professionally now for about 15 years and sure there were some
| issues initially but the last decade or so I've been updating
| my systems fearlessly on a regular basis.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I've only been running arch on my laptop for a year, and it
| hasn't broken once, unlike Ubuntu which I constantly had
| issues with.
| bengalister wrote:
| After almost 2 years running Arch I switched back to Windows last
| summer on my home laptop (Dell XPS 13 9380).
|
| The pipewire update needed by pulseaudio effects broke the sound
| output to my bluetooth headset. Also at the same time a Gnome
| update made my desktop environment unstable. I did not want to
| spend time on freezing dependencies, reverting some of them etc.
| Got tired at the time of these occasional maintenance operations,
| and not optimal hardware support. To be honest most of the update
| issues were related to Gnome major updates. I think an update
| only broke once my system, I could not login (pam configuration
| upgrade issue). I was running the LTS kernel.
|
| I think I had better battery life on Linux thought. It must have
| improved with Firefox/Chromium hardware acceleration.
|
| Arch is still my preferred distro for a dev machine thought.
|
| Back to Windows, I just updated to W11 today, I very much like
| the changes in the UI. Also the ability to run some Linux GUI
| apps without starting a X server, exporting the DISPLAY, etc
| directly from the a WLS2 vm is nice.
|
| Even thought I think I'll keep my development environment in a VM
| (arch) mainly because of docker. I found docker for desktop on
| Windows really too slow. Security wise I also prefer that, I
| install too many tools that I don't trust. The drawback of using
| a VM is of course performance but that is not that an issue for
| the kind of dev/work I do
| (NodeJs/Typescript/Vue/Python/Cloudformation/Terraform). Also
| sometimes I have an idea or something I'd like to test quickly
| and I don't want to start the VM and I just give up.
|
| I'll probably stick to that 1 or 2 years, when I'll think about
| replacing my laptop. If I had to today, I'll probably go for a
| Macbook air m1.
| vereis wrote:
| I just forego docker desktop and run docker on the command line
| in wsl2 instead.
|
| Have you considered trying that?
| rbut wrote:
| Not Arch, but macOS to Linux related.
|
| As a developer, used macOS for 13 years. Switched to Ubuntu after
| Apple went to M1.
|
| It's been pretty much flawless and required no more tweaks during
| setup than a typical macOS install would. Developing on the same
| environment as our servers is a massive plus.
|
| The key is choosing the right hardware from the start. For my
| desktop, I chose an Asus TUF gaming motherboard that had
| everything Intel. For my laptop, I chose a laptop that is
| supported by the manufacturer, in this case a Dell XPS 13.
|
| (Selecting the correct hardware is no different to creating a
| Hackintosh setup, but the hardware support is infinitely better)
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Just curious, how's the trackpad compared to a recent MacBook
| Pro?
|
| I've been using my Thinkpad T490 with Debian for 3 years and
| it's fine. But then I tried the new MacBook Pro and that
| trackpad is very nice indeed. Feels a lot more precise. And the
| attention to smaller details and a consistent UI is nice to see
| too.
|
| I've also been kind of peeved about several small things in
| Linux lately. Installing apps is not simple anymore. It started
| as apt-get and deb files. Now there's flatpak and app images
| and electron which all have different install flows. Sometimes
| my Ethernet connection would, after resuming from sleep, drop
| to 100 Mbps until I reboot. Suspend doesn't really work
| consistently. Tried installing Alfred (spotlight-like search /
| app launcher) and that seems to be flakey too. Mapped it to
| alt+ space but that doesn't always enable it to come up.
| rbut wrote:
| I'm pretty picky about trackpads and the XPS 13 is as good as
| my Late 2013 Macbook Pro, or even better. (The MacBook
| trackpad was only good in macOS, the windows/linux drivers
| were never as good)
|
| Its large enough, no accidental registrations due to palm and
| the right click is actually physical (which I find better
| than the Macbook's double finger right-click tap).
| acomjean wrote:
| I went Mac->linux too. I took the notebook route when apple
| wasn't making anything compelling 3 years ago. I did the pay to
| solve compatibility problem (I bought a system76). It really
| has been pretty flawless in terms of upgrades and install. A
| fan broke after a couple years, but I replaced.. It even runs
| Steam very well.
|
| Its not great with power unless I switch to "intel graphics"
| from Nvidia. (The intel graphics don't drive external monitors
| though..).
|
| Very happy with it.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| Not only is the hardware support better, but even with good
| hardware support, you have to do more on Hackintoshes (manually
| download and copy tens of kexts, edit a very, very long plist
| file for OpenCore, screw with the serial number if you want
| iMesasge, etc., etc.). Linux usually "just works."
| jagrsw wrote:
| I also use Iosevka on my Linux desktop since a couple of days.
| Subjectively a very aesthetically pleasing monospaced font.
|
| My aesthetics skills are 2/10, and I usually don't care about UI
| feel much, but for some reason I really dislike "not nice" (R)
| fonts. But recently I switched to the combination of the default
| Windows 11 font (Segoe) for desktop, and Iosevka for consoles,
| and this feels good.
| kureikain wrote:
| I used Fedora/Ubuntu at works and Arch Linux at home exclusively
| to 2012 when I started to get into Ios dev.
|
| Nowadays I used Mac exclusively for all of my work + personal
| setup(except Server of course).
|
| And I'm convince that the only reason for me to use it is due to
| iOS dev. If I can get away with it I will go back to Linux. Some
| points:
|
| - No more dealing with homebrew and its bizarre upgrade policies.
| You don't know when a package will be break. You run `brew
| install python` and every thing broken.
|
| - No more dealing with the weirdo of its disk image and the
| locked of system volume
|
| - No more dealing with junks stuff in a few place such as
| `/Library` or `/System/Library` and `~/Library`
|
| - No longer has to run docker in a VM
|
| - Fuse just works
|
| - No more buggy file watchers. For some reasons the file watcher
| (fsnotify package I belive) on Mac sometime works, sometime not
| and sometime just had CPU up to 100%
|
| - No more custom syntax to work with fslimit
|
| - No more plist file that also gzip and encrypt
|
| - No more installing software by going to a website and download
| a stupid xip file.
|
| - No more reverse engineering how a certain thing works and
| script it out.
|
| But due to iOS works, not just iOS development I also help with
| CI/CD for mobile app and having access to a mac locally is handy,
| I have to keep using it.
| j7ake wrote:
| Interesting, but no discussion about the touchpad? I imagine one
| downgrade from moving away from Mac is the touchpad experience.
| donio wrote:
| I guess it comes down to personal preferences but for me the
| touchpad on the X1 Carbon is so much better than the Mac ones.
| It's just the right size (why does the Mac ones need to be so
| huge?), lovely physical buttons and the trackpoint is nice to
| have. Works perfectly on Linux.
| otar wrote:
| 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.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| This is HackerNews, not PracticalUserNews! :-)
| dainiusse wrote:
| 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.
| zibzab wrote:
| 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.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| "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.
| nix23 wrote:
| He installed ubuntu server and had no clue how to install
| gnome ;)
| flippinburgers wrote:
| Mac can never come close to xmonad + any linux distro.
| popey wrote:
| "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.
| javier2 wrote:
| I have been running Arch since about 2008. This used to be a
| problem with laptops, but I have had great experiences with
| this exact problem since about 2012. Or maybe I got better at
| buying laptops with largely compatible hardware.
| orangepurple wrote:
| That's because of the garbage S0 sleep state enforced by the
| UEFI/BIOS of the laptop
|
| tl;dr: There's a way to disable Windows 10's "Cook your Laptop"
| facility, Microsoft calls it "Modern Sleep" for some reason I
| can't understand, via a simple BIOS change which disables S0
| and re-enables S3. No more coming back to a laptop that's so
| hot you can burn your hands on it. To do this, go into the BIOS
| config and change the sleep option from "Windows 10" to
| "Linux".
|
| More info: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-
| Laptops/Fix-f...
| eitland wrote:
| Thanks! I'll try this!
|
| I'm trying to get #boilinbaglaptop trending but will happily
| also use the term "Cook your Laptop" :-)
|
| Edit: I've been looking through the BIOS three times now and
| still can't find it :-/
| JeremyNT wrote:
| S3 is actually totally gone on Tiger Lake and newer, so
| with a new laptop you are hosed. This is a really gross
| move by MS and Intel.
|
| If you want to make s0ix (which is what you'll need to now
| research if you're in this boat) suck somewhat less, start
| here [0] then follow the troubleshooting steps [1] (since
| it surely won't work the first time).
|
| It used to be I'd roll my eyes at the people on HN
| complaining about Linux suspend, assuming they just had
| outdated information (from personal experience I'd not had
| any issues with S3 for many years), but now with the
| removal of S3 I have to start agreeing with the
| neighsayers.
|
| [0] https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-
| states-li...
|
| [1] https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2020/linux-s0ix-
| troubleshooting
| orangepurple wrote:
| I've also seen a thread claiming that CPU C-states are
| screwed up after wake from S3. So it seems CPU sleep is
| buggy all around.
| asddubs wrote:
| the option for linux sleep mode exists on my thinkpad
| with an 11th gen intel CPU
| eitland wrote:
| I'm about to install KDE Neon or Pop!_OS on my Lenovo ThinkPad
| p1 Gen2 which currently runs Windows exactly because I have
| found it running in my bag to many times.
|
| My older Lenovo Yoga with KDE Neon rarely do that. Also there
| is still a noticeable difference (30% last I measured on the
| same hardware) in compile times and when it comes to cli tools
| like git the experience is in a completely different league.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I tried Manjaro the other day and had to try 3 kernel versions
| before I found one that woke from sleep without crashing, the
| display wouldn't hold its resolution through display sleep,
| bluetooth wouldn't connect without writing a custom config
| file, and CUPS auto-detected the wrong drivers.
|
| I went back to Ubuntu and it all Just Worked.
|
| My conclusion: yeah, the Debian stale package problem sucks,
| but it doesn't suck as badly as the rolling release instability
| problem.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| I had several issues with waking from sleep on Ubuntu based
| distros as well, and had to wait ages for updates that would
| fix it. It's not all green on the other side!
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Me too, but that was 15 years ago. Manjaro was a trip back
| to the Bad Old Days.
|
| I'm sure we're deep in YMMV territory, but I gave Manjaro a
| spin based on the recent hype wave so whenever I see an
| echo of that wave I feel obliged to share my experience.
| Shrug.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| I learned this the hard way.
|
| When i was around 16, i was gifted a laptop. Mind you, this was
| my first pc ever. Before that i was going to internet cafes.
|
| So being the good "hacker" i was at the time, i installed
| Ubuntu to be like the cool kids. Few days later the motherboard
| got fried in my backpack. Apparently, the laptop didn't go to
| sleep when i closed the lid and overheated.
|
| Still hurts.
| javier2 wrote:
| To be fair this happens with my work macbook every now and
| then. It hasn't died though.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| My Windows work laptop has done this a couple times. Hasn't
| managed to actually kill itself yet, though. A pity.
| fsh wrote:
| The default config of systemd on Arch suspends to RAM when the
| lid switch of a laptop is triggered. Unfortunately many modern
| laptops no longer implement the S3 sleep state in favor of
| Microsoft's proprietary "Connected Standby" (i.e. the mode that
| tends to cook laptops in their bags). My new Thinkpad has a
| toggle in the EFI to re-enable S3, after which suspend to RAM
| works on Arch with no further configuration necessary.
| hackmiester wrote:
| Do you have any further information about the issue with
| Connected Standby? It's one of my favorite features on my
| Surface.
| fsh wrote:
| This was discussed on hn a while ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952
|
| My old surface also never stayed in suspend reliably.
| jchw wrote:
| So far I rarely have issues with suspend/resume on Linux with
| laptops. My current laptops are a Thinkpad T14s Gen 1 and a
| Thinkpad P51, and they sleep and resume properly every time.
| Desktops as well: I've got a Ryzen 5950X+RX590 setup, works
| exactly as intended. Previous desktop too, and the one before
| that.
|
| Granted... it could just be luck. I accept that. But, for me,
| I've never specifically sought out linux compatible parts and
| sleep/resume has not been an issue for a long time for me.
|
| I tend to just run the later stable kernels, which might help a
| bit. Though Arch should give you basically this by default, so,
| I dunno.
| vurudlxtyt wrote:
| 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.
| bestouff wrote:
| Even with a fresh install of Windows 10 or 11, a recent laptop
| has chances to burn out in your bag because of the "modern
| suspend" feature, a.k.a. S0ix state.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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.
| pmontra wrote:
| I press the resume/suspensd button on my laptop. I explicitly
| disabled the suspend and resume on lid close. Maybe I suspend
| and don't close the lid (hot machine after something CPU
| intensive) or maybe I fail to fully close it? A button is
| safer.
| julianlam wrote:
| Your comment made me realize that I've unintentionally
| adapted my behaviour to do the same thing.
|
| I press the power button, and wait for the power LED to
| turn off before I close the lid.
|
| Had a laptop stay on twice in a bag... never again.
| donio wrote:
| 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.
| emidln wrote:
| I thought this was a dealbreaker until I installed an SSD in
| my laptop in the mid to late 00s. When my machine is fully
| graphical in less than 5 seconds, I just didn't care. My
| browser restored tabs, my editor restored everything, my
| desktop restored windows. It was a complete non-issue as long
| as the machine could cold-boot quickly. As an upside, my
| machine also no longer overheated if I forgot to long press
| the power off prior to putting it in my backpack.
|
| I configured my current laptop to screen off on lid close and
| to shutdown after 5 minutes. I'm probably just weird.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Maybe weird, but not alone - I have a couple of Ubuntu
| laptops (with SSDs) and I generally just shut them all the
| way down and boot back up if I am taking them anywhere /
| not using them for a while.
| thom wrote:
| I recently moved a Dell XPS to Manjaro and it's the first time
| power management has ever just worked out of the box for me on
| Linux, including proper hibernate (which tbh is my default
| choice for most sleep states).
| wink wrote:
| And every time this comes up I need to clarify that if it
| worked out of the box I'd need to switch it off because I hate
| that behaviour, I only want it to sleep when I give an explicit
| command. And I've heard that from more people, but I guess we
| are the minority.
| wooque wrote:
| As a former i3wm user, just install KDE or GNOME and get on with
| your life, using only window manager is pointless masturbation
| zibzab wrote:
| I don't get why people go from osx to arch.
|
| Why not something that just works, and updating is not Russian
| roulette?
| vurudlxtyt wrote:
| 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)
| Comevius wrote:
| Same experience here with 15 years of Arch usage, a few major
| issues before systemd, none since, except having to migrate
| the boot loader, network manager and so on to systemd and
| from time to time having to use a workaround from the latest
| news at archlinux.org. I have also migrated to pipewire a
| month ago with a single command and no issues.
|
| It's quite stress free, because the whole operating system is
| basically the kernel, systemd, x11 or wayland, pulseaudio or
| pipewire, the nvidia driver and pacman. Not much can go
| wrong.
| zibzab wrote:
| Actually, I tried arch again last month after unfa's video
| on pipewire support.
|
| Couldn't even revert back to PA when PW failed, the entire
| system had to be reinstalled.
|
| Can you make it work? Absolutely. Can it fail
| catastrophically if you make one little mistake?
| Absolutely.
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