Bob Smith

I’ve never tried anything beyond DOS or the SNES/Genesis era, honestly.

I’m typing this reply on an M1 Macbook Air running Asahi. My experience is very positive, but with some caveats. Some positives, some background to contextualize the positives, and some negatives.

Positives: Great screen, nice battery life when in use, fast, runs the programs that I use on a daily basis for work. Good support for the specific hardware that I have. I enjoy using it as my go-to laptop. Fedora isn’t something that I use on any of my other linux boxes, but I didn’t have much trouble setting it up and it works well with my other devices. Libreoffice, Firefox, Chromium, every DE and window manager that I’ve bothered to test - they work fine. I’m currently running Sway with no issues, KDE worked fine too. Sound, bluetooth, camera all work. Again, my 9-to-5 day job is fully doable from this computer and I enjoy using it.

Background: I’ve been tinkering with Raspberry Pi devices for years and I made do with a PI 4 as a daily driver for a few months once. That experience helped me to focus on native linux solutions that didn’t depend on WINE or x86-specific programs. I can’t remember every decision that I made during that time, but I definitely changed my workflow a bit, started doing more in the terminal, and started using programs that were less resource-heavy. That carried over to how I use other devices. I also don’t game much.

Negatives: Gaming is limited on this hardware. I can play minetest, tuxkart, and some light emulation. That’s about it, but I don’t mind. If you’re trying to run windows programs, you’ll be out of luck. My linux experience on this laptop prior to the Asahi shift to Fedora was a bit buggy because it was a beta version and sound wasn’t supported(other than bluetooth). Everything works fine now, but my understanding is that this is very model-specific. I would probably be having a bad time on newer mac hardware. Power management is so-so and it depends heavily on your choice of desktop environment. If you close your lid and don’t plug in the laptop, you might find out that the battery is dead when you try to use it a day later. No multimonitor support - the USB-C ports are more limited in function than they are when running MacOS.

Also, my only experience is with a niche distribution, so bear that in mind. For me, Asahi has been excellent but don’t expect to be able to run your favorite distro on the hardware. Time will tell if the progress made by Asahi will lead to greater support for Apple Silicon by other distributions, and time will tell how long Asahi will exist as an active project. I preferred the Arch version, but I had no real choice but to jump to Fedora when the developers did. Not a big deal for me.

Hahaha! It was a good bet on my part.

You clearly haven’t met all of my friends.

Fair point, but I still need a quick way to tell people about upcoming funerals. On the plus side, I’m between the wave of friends’ baby photos and the wave of grandbaby photos. Which is nice.

I don’t integrate it with anything else, but facebook remains my best option for getting current contact info for anybody from my past. Even after the enshittification, it remains an effective Rolodex. Rolodex…I am old.

I’ve been having fun with VoxeLibre lately on single-player mode. Nothing too fancy, gameplay is eerily similar to vanilla Minecraft. I’m looking forward to trying other games built on the engine that offer a bit more variation.

One nice thing is that the android version of Minetest is compatible with the PC version, so it is possible to sync save files and play on the go. It also seems to load faster than Minecraft does.

Arch offers a combination of rolling software updates, a simple but easily customized base, pacman for the package manager, the AUR, a barebones installation process by default, good documentation, and active development. That may or may not be a good combination based on your goals.

Other distros offer a different combination of characteristics. Those characteristics are a starting point and you can get to the same destination no matter what you use. The trick is figuring out what starting point is closest to your destination or which starting point makes the journey fun for you. For some people, Arch is that. For plenty of people, Arch isn’t that.

Easy if you go step by step and don’t accidentally skip anything. Archinstall will get you to the same result with lower risk of failure, in a tenth of the amount of time spent. And unless you install operating systems for a living, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Source: Installed Arch on about a dozen different devices, twice without Archinstall.

If you’re looking to learn something, do Linux from Scratch instead. The process is way more granular, way more documented, and way more educational than parroting the steps of installing Arch from the wiki.

I think that phrases like ‘anti-consumer’ can stick to any target, so long as they’re thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.

Nick Cage: Is that supposed to be me? It’s…grotesque.

I’ll give you $20,000 for it.

I played around with Mandrake and Debian around the turn of the century. A bit of a break, but then I started dual-booting Ubuntu in the Windows Vista/X86 OSX era. I jumped to Xubuntu and started running Linux by itself on several machines around 2012.

I largely shifted to Arch around the time that snaps came out because they weren’t playing nice with some of my low-end machines. Nowadays, mainly Arch. Exceptions: Fedora on my M1, Debian Bookworm on an old x86 tablet and any time I set up WSL on a Windows machine.

I owe myself a fresh install of freebsd on decent, well-supported hardware sometime. I end up shoving it on niche, constrained or old hardware to see if I can get better results than linux. One day, I’ll give it a real rundown on modern hardware.

When I played around with FreeBSD I was fascinated by Securelevels and file flags. I don’t have any real use for that functionality on the systems that I run, but I probably would’ve thought of something by now if it was a Linux feature.

I agree.

A part of me misses the days of dual-using a rock solid professional server OS for business and a cobbled-together similar OS for home computers and older hardware.

Cobbled-together became good enough. Then it became better in some cases. Then it became better in most cases. Now I haven’t bothered with a non-Linux for over half a decade.

I always assumed that a lot of this boils down to semantics and trademark law.

OpenIndiana is a direct code-line descendant of Unix System V through OpenSolaris via Solaris. Thank you for that, Sun Microsystems. I understand (but haven’t looked) that a lot of code these days is simply ported over from BSD or Linux. If you compare the source code to an old copy of the Lions book, you’re probably not going to see any line-by-line overlap. Thank goodness - we shouldn’t be literally running old operating systems from the '80s. I don’t think that OpenIndiana is Unix-certified by the Open Group (Trademark).

The BSDs started out as a sort of ‘Ship of Theseus’ rebuild of an academic-licensed copy of Unix around the time that AT&T was getting litigious and corporate Unixes (Unices?) were starting to Balkanize.

GNU/Linux started out as a work-alike (functions the same but with totally different code) inspired by MINIX, which in turn was an education-licensed Unix work-alike designed to show basic operating system principles to students. I think that one or more linux-based operating systems have obtained UNIX certification from the Open Group, just like Apple did for MacOS (paying money and passing some tests). It doesn’t seem like any of them are still paying to keep up the certification. Does it matter if they did at one point?

Going back to proprietary corporate Unixes, I believe that IBM AIX and HP-UX still exist as products. They started out as UNIX and have been developed continuously since then. They are both Certified Unix. By now, their codebases probably diverge substantially both from one another and from all of the Unix-likes. IBM also has a mainframe OS with a fascinating history that has nothing to do with UNIX. It is Certified Unix because it passes the right tests and IBM paid for certification. It is not UNIX code and doesn’t descend from UNIX code.

Simple as.

Amber pairs very well with retsina.

Ubuntu isn’t my favorite, but I used xubuntu for many years. A lot of noise gets thrown around about Snaps, but from an end-user perspective they tend to work fine unless you have very low system constraints. Better than adding a half-dozen repositories that may or may not be around for long. A lot of developers work to make sure that their software runs well in Ubuntu and the LTS releases tend to be a good long-term option if you don’t want any significant changes for a long time.

Even with their regular releases, I daisy-chained upgrades on an old Core2 laptop for something like seven years without any major (computer becomes a paperweight) issues. Sometimes (like with Snaps) Ubuntu insists on going its own way, which can result in errors/shitty OS things that don’t pop up in other distributions. I’ve had to deal with some minor issues with Ubuntu over the years (broken repositories, upgrades causing hiccups, falling back to older kernels temporarily), but I think that you’ll get issues like that regardless of what distro you pick.

What are you trying to build? A work laptop that you’re going to take on trips, a gaming computer, a server? Something else?

For you, what is too much hassle? Are you a new Linux user or an experienced user with no spare time? What are you accustomed to doing when you install an operating system and what do you expect to be preinstalled?

What is your favorite colour?

I didn’t, but only because my solution wasn’t novel or generalized for other people. I made a script to fire up tmux on a ‘primary’ computer with key-based access to my other computers, load up a set of windows and panes, and ssh into each computer. One window would be computers in one section of my home, another window would be computers elsewhere. The only challenge was getting a baseline grasp of the tmux scripting syntax.

I initially set it up to run htop on each computer (dashboard goal, plus easy ability to terminate programs), but the basic setup was flexible. I could set other programs to run by default or and send terminal command updates to each computer from any device that could ssh into the primary computer. Automating updates on a computer-by-computer basis is a better solution, but the setup let me quickly oversee and interactively start multiple system updates at once, from a phone, tablet, or laptop.