Pumpkin Escobar

Apple computers ARE really well put together, maybe no other maker exactly as good. But I’d say the Microsoft Surface line is a similar quality. Razer too though they’re pretty expensive.

Asus zephyrus laptops are pretty great build quality, close to Apple but without the same kind of pricing and markup gouging we get from Apple

Im not an apple hater, they make some great stuff. My point above was just that they don’t have competition in the “I need a Mac” space so their hardware isn’t competitively priced. And their build quality is great, but not every laptop needs to be built like a tank with top of the line components.

It’s good, a lot of good work going on, what they already have is impressive and the development seems pretty active and progressing well.

But if you’re buying a laptop to run Linux and don’t plan to use macOS, I really think there are a lot of better options out there (depending on what’s important to you). You’re going to pay the Apple premium price for a computer, and though apple computers are good hardware, they’re expensive and largely overpriced for small upgrades. Whatever price you find for a refurbished M2, take that money and go find a laptop known to be well supported on Linux, it’ll just be a better experience and you’ll probably get more for your money.

I haven’t run Asahi in 6+ months but thunderbolt/usb4 wasn’t working when I last used it so I couldn’t use my usb dock. Video was OK but I think Audio was sketchy (don’t remember specifics). It’s stuff that will get fixed at some point but right now it feels like a handful of minor annoyances or inconveniences

Even in 1-2 years when Asahi gets some updates and is in a better spot (I really do expect it to be) I still don’t think I’d lean towards a macbook with Asahi over something else if Linux is the only OS you’re going to run. Of course, if you’re looking to dabble with some iOS development or something else you need a mac for, but don’t want to live in MacOS, then Asahi’s a great option to get you back to Linux.

Ah, good to know. I haven’t really used that save configuration and reuse process, I just do the install directly at the end of configuring everything. But I can see the draw for using that, a shame it doesn’t seem to work that well.

• archinstall is one of the better/best distro installs around - it just does what it says it will and is pretty intuitive
• LUKS encryption is easy to set up in archinstall - strongly recommend encrypting your root partition if you have anything remotely sensitive on your system
• If you do use encryption but don’t like typing the unlock password every reboot, you can use tpm to unlock - yes, this is less secure than requiring the unlock password every time you reboot, but LUKS + TPM unlock is still MUCH better than an unencrypted drive just sitting there
• sbctl is a good tool for secure boot - If you want to get more secure, locking down bios with an admin password, turning on secure boot, sbctl works really well and is pretty easy to use. I would suggest reading up to understand what it’s doing before just installing/configuring/using it
• yay is a solid AUR helper / pacman wrapper

archinstall’s default btrfs layout has I think 4-5 separate subvolumes (I’m not running btrfs anymore so can’t check) but at the very least I remember it has:

• /
• /var
• /home

being separate subvolumes and mountpoints, you can just use a previous snapshot from 1 without rolling back others

Related to the snapshotting stuff, timeshift-autosnap is pretty helpful, hooks into pacman and takes a snapshot before installing/updating packages.

Personally I found btrfs and the snapshots helpful when starting to use arch, but now that I know how not to blow things up, it has been stable enough for me I just felt ext4 was easier.

Similar to previous reply about MATE with font size changes, I do that with plasma. I hadn’t seen plasma big screen you linked, I’ll definitely try that one out. I’ve wondered about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Mobile? Like these sort of niche projects don’t always get a lot of attention, if the bigscreen project doesn’t work out, I’d bet the plasma mobile project is fairly active and given the way it scales for displays might work really well on a tv

Speaking of scaling since you mentioned it. I have noticed scaling in general feels a lot better in Wayland. If you’d only tried it in X11 before, might want to see if Wayland works better for you.

Lan-mouse looks great but keep in mind that there’s no network encryption right now. There is a GitHub ticket open and the developer seems eager to add encryption. It’s just worth understanding that all your keystrokes are going across the network unencrypted.

More than distro hopping maybe try out a zen kernel or compiling kernel yourself and changing kernel config and scheduler, or a newer version of the stock kernel?

I’m not super current on what’s in each kernel but I’d expect latest mainline to handle newer processors better than some of the older stable kernels in some of the more mainstream slower releasing distros.

Ran Asahi for several months, tried it out again recently. It’s good/fine, I just don’t love fedora.

There’s some funkiness with the more complicated install, the AI acceleration doesn’t work, no thunderbolt / docking station.

MacBooks are great hardware but I don’t think they’re the best option for Linux right now. If you’re never going to boot into macOS then I’d look for x13, new Qualcomm, isn’t there a framework arm64 option now or was that a RISC module?

I’m also assuming you’re not looking to do any gaming? Because gaming on ARM is not really a thing right now and doesn’t feel like it will be for a long while.

Respect, but…

FWIW they didn’t merge it, they closed the PR without merging, link to line that still exists on master.

The recent comments are from the announcement of the ladybird browser project which is forked from some browser code from Serenity OS, I guess people are digging into who wrote the code.

Not arguing that the new comments on the PR are good/bad or anything, just a bit of context.

I’ve been tempted to try and install plasma mobile on a tablet.

Why no arch install?

Been 100% linux for like 6-9 months now, these stories make me thankful for finally making the switch.

I’ve tried to make the switch 3-4 times in the past and was stopped by 2 main things:

• Drivers / Laptops were tough to get set up
• Gaming

The experience was so much better this time and I really have no regrets. I don’t imagine I’ll ever run Windows again outside of a VM

Elon “Nick Cannon” Musk

Rip up the Reddit contract and don’t use that data to train the model. It’s the definition of a garbage in garbage out problem.

Asahi only partially supports the M3 and I guess now the M4 is out (though only in iPad)?

I like that. If there was a site that did like The Razzies for movies but for technology enshitification, I would definitely watch, and probably follow a blog if it was done well

I’m far from an expert in init systems, but there are some benefits to declarative approaches for configuration. It’s one of the main reasons yaml and toml are as popular as they are. The short version is, declarative configuration tends to be less verbose, and the declarative contract defines what state you want things to be in, not how to get there which makes it easier on the person writing the unit file, and on the implementers of systemd in that there’s a smaller surface-area to test

Generally declarative:

• requires less verbose configuration files, less room for error
• is easier to document and easier to understand
• leaves the implementers more freedom to improve their system as long as they live up to the agreed-upon contract
• is easier for implementers to test/validate. They don’t need to support a scripting language and every single crazy thing someone might try with one but still consider valid

Got hyprland running on the macbook, have tested it out on desktop. Not quite the daily driver, plasma 6 on X is still the norm there, but I think as soon as synergy works in Wayland I’ll make the switch everywhere