One thing I couldn't find in your post was the reason behind choosing the ThinkBook. I'm about to make the exact same switch you did (thanks for bringing up Omarchy, I hadn't heard of it before!). I'm considering a ThinkPad P14s. What made you decide on the ThinkBook?
> It just works. One thing I noticed lately is that sometimes a shortcut breaks, or something is not working anymore. This is also because Omarchy is just brand new, and I’m inexperienced running Linux as my main OS. But for the last 5 years with the M1, hardware-wise, things just worked.
My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort. I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above.
My experience is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux.
Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.
> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.
Is it this or that you have the Linux skills to tinker so just do. Giving Linux laptops to non-techies yields self-sufficiency in people I've not seen with other OS platforms.
I think the ‘out of the box’ Linux desktop experience has improved a lot. To me the difference is in the long tail of software. On Linux the variety of toolkits historically available means depending on what software you’re using you may encounter a lot of inconsistency- I certainly do. On the Mac far less so.
> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.
It depends. I've been running Debian since 2020-ish. I picked my hardware to run Linux. Nothing much changed for me between Debian 10 and 13 tbh.
> I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
I would say Windows is a bit worse now. I find I have to use Rufus to enable some magic option to able Local user installation (I am not having a MS account), setup choco, install the stuff via choco and then set a desktop background.
> While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above
Most stuff just does work. If you are running exotic hardware, then sure. But if you have a bog standard desktop or laptop it will work.
The biggest problem with Linux tbh is that if you aren't using Gnome or KDE, the UI is just bit jank in some places.
What IMHO is more interesting than the article itself - what is this little cyberdeck-style mini notebook on the left in this picture that is part of the article? Does anyone have a link?
Oh darn, I thought they'd gotten Arch running on an M1 but they actually switched to a ThinkBook.
I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.
When I have to touch Android or Windows, I feel absolutely awful because I am used to MacOS and iOS.
Likewise, Android and Windows users will feel awful when having to use MacOS and iOS.
It's simply a matter of habit and experience.
Having used Windows and Android for 10+ years before switching to the Apple ecosystem, I can say with confidence though that MacOS is not weird at all. It makes far more sense than the insanity that is Windows/Android.
I have been on an M1 macbook pro since launch and while I love the hardware, easily my favourite device I have ever owned but MacOS has just always been the thing to be the faustian bargain coming from being a linux person. I spend a lot of time SSHed into more GPU capable linux machines for most of my work and thus get an escape but after driving a friend's linux machine I started looking for a way to daily drive a linux machine. I tried Asahi Linux and also tried to find some non apple machines including with Snapdragon X Elite ones but so far I haven't found anything with good battery life and a decent linux driver support.
So far Asahi linux with the reduced battery life seems to be the best bet.
I don't mind tinkering. I love tinkering. I am not looking for "just works" but something which I could get to work after putting in the hours. If someone has suggestions please share.
Edit: Sorry to go somewhat off topic.
This is kind of a hard read. I'm no mac fanboy but at some point I decided to replace the frankenstein world of computing by something roughly coherent.
Clearly this person just wants hackability and tweakability, which Arch will give you in spades. All power to them!
I'd say this is a "fine" alternative, but not an upgrade.
+1 for using an ARM processor though. Once you leave x86 and the fan parade, there is no going back. Silence is bliss.
Omarchy never made much sense to me. The biggest benefit of Arch is that it's hackable and you can set it up exactly as you want it.. so why skip the entire process that teaches you how to do that?
> I’m surprised with what all worked out of the box, like hibernating, external monitors/keyboards, media keys. Not sure how much is thanks to DHH’s Omarchy, and what’s native Arch Linux support
It's pretty much ALL Omarchy. If you install Arch by itself you get a tty prompt... and that's about it.
Omarchy looks super impressive. Haven't used it myself, but the scripts and dotfiles in the Github repo (https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy) have been inspiring
I think the biggest takeaway from this blog post is that developers and other professionals should take more note of the tiling window managers available on Linux like Sway and Hyprland - they are insanely fast and customizable to exactly what we need to be more productive.
I'm a Sway user (ironically on Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac) and I won't have it any other sway... er... I mean way.
Power management in all aspects is one big thing that I wish was better in all distros. Hibernate/fans/shorter battery life are real usability things. I only use windows when I am at risk of being fired for not using it and macos is 'acceptable' but there are soooo many little things that make me cringe about it (.DS_Store littering every drive I touch is close to the top) but if I knew I could get mac hardware, including MPS backend working well in pytorch and battery life, with a solid distro guaranteed to work I would definitely buy that over all the pc hardware out there.
My experience with mac is that yes it looks like to have longer battery life with less fan noise sometimes, but it might be by tricking you into a worse user experience of your machine.
For example, you computer to always go to kind of sleep when it is not necessarily what you want.
Like with the memory, you will not see app crashing upfront, but at some point macos stops all the other apps when you switch app. And like going from a web browser window, to a pdf, and back, or from a browser window to another, you will experience something like a 1s delay between your click and the window showing up from being minimized.
For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.
How confident are people that Omarchy will be well maintained in the future?
I'm considering making that same switch from MacOS to Arch, but I'm not sure if I should have confidence in something like Omarchy which is relatively new.
I swapped from Linux to MacOS when the M1s came out, and I love the integration with all the iCloud stuff (particularly Messages). Occasionally I miss being on Linux, as somebody who did so for 20+ years before making the switch. But on Mac, stuff actually does Just Work.
Reading this makes me a little misty-eyed and I miss my solid old Thinkpads from 10-20 years back.
Best thing about Omarchy is that is just a set of config files for Hyprland and Waybar plus bash scripts (even the screensaver is a bash script running in fullscreen )
I don't know if anyone else agrees, but for some reason no one can replicate the smoothness of the Apple trackpad. And now with that PLUS the heatless apple silicon - I don't think I could go to another OS and the x86 hardware world. I would just feel like I'm in clunky-land. Now don't get me wrong, I like a lot about Linux desktops, but Mac gets a lot of things right. I don't want to take anything away from people migrating from Mac, but the PC didn't kill Desktop Linux, Mac did.
> But the quality of MacBooks is just another level. I had 3 or 4 so far since 2010, and each of them held at least 5 years. Crazy good.
When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave me 8-10h battery life and the only issue I ever had was that 1.5 years ago the battery was reaching end of life and capacity started dropping very fast.
That was just a 70$ repair I could easily do myself.
My youngest daughter just inherited my mother's x220 (?) (she has been running Linux) that I got for my mother in 2011 or 2012. That never received any work and still works fine except that I didn't change the battery so you have to run it of ac power.
My older daughter and my mother both just got some used thinkpads that are >3years old and don't have any issues either.
So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good".
There are two points I feel are worth focusing and I’ve experienced similar:
- Linux is fast. Few years ago I wanted to run Linux and used my MacBook Air 2013 (one of the best machines I’ve had). It was amazing how Ubuntu ran so sleek especially comparing to the MacBook Pro 2018 with macOS.
- x86_64 feels less portable than arm.
Since I got MBP from my work I’ve also got another machine for Windows. I’ve went with 13” MSI Perstige with 125H which was the latest back then offering hybrid cores (performance + economy).
It’s 1kg is amazing and the OLED is also nice.
But in order for the machine to actually compile and be snappy I need to ensure it’s not dropping to 0.4-0.8Ghz and then it easily gets warm and noisy.
The MBP 2021 also shows age. But even with more frequent fans and 80% of original battery it outperform the younger MSI since day one.
TL;DR
* Unless you need specific software, Linux distros are great and fast. Much more joy (imho) than Windows.
* SoC/ARM is still rare but it would be much more interesting comparison to current Macs in terms of portability (fans, battery life)
The dream: an Arch-friendly laptop that runs as cool as Apple Silicon, with Apple's monitor, Apple's trackpad, Apple's audio. Ask HN: What am I looking for?
As usual these kind of posts are from people mostly using Apple's hardware as pretty UNIX, and not really as developers into the Apple ecosystem, the Cult of Mac crowd.
The same that fill FOSDEM corridors with MacBooks, despite the main purpose of the whole weekend, or at least how its roots were almost 30 years ago.
Yes I was one of those. But I've moved off Apple years ago because their UNIX got more and more delapidated and all their fancy cloud stuff was unusable to me for not working on all my OSes.
Every new release I'd tick off more and more features that were unusable to me, hated all the iOSification of a desktop OS, and hated the new hardware lockdowns. The actual new features I liked were few and far between. So I just gave up on Apple completely. I had already left iOS at that point because of its locked down nature (no alternative appstores mainly and no hardware support for OpenPGP cards over NFC)
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 99.6 ms ] threadMy experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort. I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above.
Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.
Is it this or that you have the Linux skills to tinker so just do. Giving Linux laptops to non-techies yields self-sufficiency in people I've not seen with other OS platforms.
It depends. I've been running Debian since 2020-ish. I picked my hardware to run Linux. Nothing much changed for me between Debian 10 and 13 tbh.
> I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
I would say Windows is a bit worse now. I find I have to use Rufus to enable some magic option to able Local user installation (I am not having a MS account), setup choco, install the stuff via choco and then set a desktop background.
> While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above
Most stuff just does work. If you are running exotic hardware, then sure. But if you have a bog standard desktop or laptop it will work.
The biggest problem with Linux tbh is that if you aren't using Gnome or KDE, the UI is just bit jank in some places.
https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/arch-b...
I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.
When I have to touch Android or Windows, I feel absolutely awful because I am used to MacOS and iOS.
Likewise, Android and Windows users will feel awful when having to use MacOS and iOS.
It's simply a matter of habit and experience.
Having used Windows and Android for 10+ years before switching to the Apple ecosystem, I can say with confidence though that MacOS is not weird at all. It makes far more sense than the insanity that is Windows/Android.
Clearly this person just wants hackability and tweakability, which Arch will give you in spades. All power to them!
I'd say this is a "fine" alternative, but not an upgrade.
+1 for using an ARM processor though. Once you leave x86 and the fan parade, there is no going back. Silence is bliss.
I would love to try a linux laptop, but I want decent battery and no fan. Arm support for linux desktops is still very very limited and buggy.
It's pretty much ALL Omarchy. If you install Arch by itself you get a tty prompt... and that's about it.
Omarchy looks super impressive. Haven't used it myself, but the scripts and dotfiles in the Github repo (https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy) have been inspiring
I'm a Sway user (ironically on Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac) and I won't have it any other sway... er... I mean way.
For example, you computer to always go to kind of sleep when it is not necessarily what you want.
Like with the memory, you will not see app crashing upfront, but at some point macos stops all the other apps when you switch app. And like going from a web browser window, to a pdf, and back, or from a browser window to another, you will experience something like a 1s delay between your click and the window showing up from being minimized.
That was years ago and I'm still on it.
I'm considering making that same switch from MacOS to Arch, but I'm not sure if I should have confidence in something like Omarchy which is relatively new.
Reading this makes me a little misty-eyed and I miss my solid old Thinkpads from 10-20 years back.
When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave me 8-10h battery life and the only issue I ever had was that 1.5 years ago the battery was reaching end of life and capacity started dropping very fast.
That was just a 70$ repair I could easily do myself.
My youngest daughter just inherited my mother's x220 (?) (she has been running Linux) that I got for my mother in 2011 or 2012. That never received any work and still works fine except that I didn't change the battery so you have to run it of ac power.
My older daughter and my mother both just got some used thinkpads that are >3years old and don't have any issues either.
So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good".
- Linux is fast. Few years ago I wanted to run Linux and used my MacBook Air 2013 (one of the best machines I’ve had). It was amazing how Ubuntu ran so sleek especially comparing to the MacBook Pro 2018 with macOS.
- x86_64 feels less portable than arm. Since I got MBP from my work I’ve also got another machine for Windows. I’ve went with 13” MSI Perstige with 125H which was the latest back then offering hybrid cores (performance + economy). It’s 1kg is amazing and the OLED is also nice. But in order for the machine to actually compile and be snappy I need to ensure it’s not dropping to 0.4-0.8Ghz and then it easily gets warm and noisy.
The MBP 2021 also shows age. But even with more frequent fans and 80% of original battery it outperform the younger MSI since day one.
TL;DR
* Unless you need specific software, Linux distros are great and fast. Much more joy (imho) than Windows.
* SoC/ARM is still rare but it would be much more interesting comparison to current Macs in terms of portability (fans, battery life)
Oh. Still in the honeymoon phase.
The same that fill FOSDEM corridors with MacBooks, despite the main purpose of the whole weekend, or at least how its roots were almost 30 years ago.
Every new release I'd tick off more and more features that were unusable to me, hated all the iOSification of a desktop OS, and hated the new hardware lockdowns. The actual new features I liked were few and far between. So I just gave up on Apple completely. I had already left iOS at that point because of its locked down nature (no alternative appstores mainly and no hardware support for OpenPGP cards over NFC)