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.
In my current job, we're using Ubuntu for our development machines. It's a solid system.
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.
https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/arch-b...
Check it out here: https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal/blob/main/micro-jo...
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.
I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.
Stay away from ARM laptops and SoCs, they aren't there yet when it comes to Linux. If you like to tinker, go for it, but expect hardware to just not work, or worse, you'll get stuck on a kernel fork that never gets updated.
If you want a good Linux machine, buy one from a vendor that explicitly sells and supports machines with Linux on them.
IMO you can tinker as much as you want without forcing hardware compatibility issues upon yourself in order to have something to tinker with.
Any suggestions for something well built but lightweight and that one could figure out how to get 8+ hours of actual daily usage battery life on?
A recent ThinkPad with one of the latest AMD Ryzen U CPUs should have a very decent battery life. You just need some custom udev rules to set the right power saving states for different devices. Powertop should make this straightforward. IMHO, this is a great compromise, because you stay on x86_64 and Linux, you get within 3/4 of ARM's power efficiency, and hardware support is perfect. I've squeezed more than 11 hours from some models.
One thing that is often discounted is that Safari is marvel of power efficiency, which adds up to the efficiency of Apple M chips. IMHO, there should be dedicated Chromium and Firefox builds with compile flags and options that optimize efficiency. To counter that, running a barebones Linux setup is a good option. Keeping your CPU wakeups/s low lets you cross the 10 hour barrier.
Outside that maybe something like system 76. They advertise 14h for one of their models.
With a clean hyprland setup, light as a feather, battery lasts forever unless you run it hard.
Makes M4 Macs feel bloated and cheap.
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.
Now I just want to get work down on an OS that feels like it belongs to power users and closely matches my deployment targets.
This is why I switched to Omarchy.
I'm very happy I went through the pain of setting everything up from scratch. It taught me how it all works. I just don't see how I'd get that same knowledge ever with Omarchy
I can from a time when sysadmins were expected to know C and kernel and TCP/IP internals, but that world is no more. Blame it on education, blame it on the pace of technology, I don't know.
I'm not sure how I feel about that, especially thinking about when all the people who know and can build low-level stuff retire and die off. Maybe AI will save them. Who knows?
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.
I have no idea how people are still using alt tab in 2025.
* cpupower is pretty nice for manual control of your clock speeds
* the diversity of window managers allows you to have something like a mostly-black UI, which can help on OLED screens. You can even invert the screen color in X, if your programs insist on rendering black-on-white.
* not randomly cranking up the CPU for some windows whatever scan thing saves some power
That was years ago and I'm still on it.
Debian is great if what you want to do, is something that has been easy for 5 years. You set it up and forget it.
Debian breaks down whenever you try to do something new that requires some new dependency. Oh you want to run a Go program written in 2023? Now you have to download and install the new version yourself because the latest version in apt is 1.19. On arch stuff like that is generally not a problem. It's the best supported distro after the Debian based ones.
I was a bit surprised this is not a Debian Policy violation (and any Debian patches for security support may no longer apply), but at least the user experience will "just work". Cross-reference https://bugs.debian.org/1040507 .
Ubuntu was by far the best option to actually use my system rather being constantly distracted by another little piece that fell out the wall
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.
Also curious about Windows on Arm, but my plan is to run Linux mainly (which hopefully gets better support at that point!)
articsputnik•3d ago