I wouldn't try to make macOS into Arch, if Arch is what works for you.
Just run Arch in a VM on the mac, using Apple's virtualization framework [1]. (No need for other wrappers; the framework is often easier to use directly.) I find no significant performance issues; a lot of software actually runs faster in a Linux VM than when I compile and run it on the mac.
The limitations are that the Linux VM's don't support save/restore of state (i.e., you have to shut down to stop the VM) and the graphics and device support is limited.
You might get more performance if you compile your own Arch distribution with all the flags necessary to enjoy modern CPU features in M-series (particularly M4+ with SME extensions). With M4-Pro memory should run 273GB/second for JAX and PyTorch.
However, AFAICT, PyTorch supports vectorization on Apple silicon by delegating to Apple's Metal API's, and that wouldn't be available from the Linux VM, so you might prefer running those on macOS directly.
To me the biggest draw of the M4 processor is that it supports CPU tracing (at least for Xcode-run code): actual, direct (not sampled) data about CPU internals like branching, cache misses, etc. If you're into performance, this will take you from working with a black box to seeing exactly what's up.
I would love to use Arch in a VM on macOS, but Arch ARM is pretty bad. From the installation experience, the frequent stops in updates because something is compiling, to Chromium being broken for months.
But Alpine does not even attempt reproducible builds, maintainer signing, etc. Running Alpine means anyone with access to the git repo or build server can push any code they want to your system.
They are the official docs for a developer API, not an end-user feature. Of course they are going to describe it in Xcode terms. That’s how you use the API.
If you want an app, then pick an app that uses that API.
Is it also insane to have access to a CLI in a graphical user interface? It just gives you a different level of abstraction to work with. If you want a simple GUI, just grab UTM <https://mac.getutm.app>. Also: check out their gallery.
More and more I feel like Apple’s SW division is dropping the ball. It’s starting to show more and more that the software is lagging behind the hardware, especially with macOS. macOS is their power user friendly OS. For once they could do a release that actually improves on that front. The list of things to improve is so long and endlessly repeated. Just imagine what an amazing OS macOS could be if Apple actually cared.
My homebrew story is always something along the lines of:
Me: Please install software A.
Homebrew: In order to install it I will also install 20 libraries (some need to be built from source), update openssl, update Python and wreck all virtual environments. Also since its been a while I decided it must be time to upgrade your other unrelated packages. Enjoy!
Nix-Darwin completely broke on my not at all locked down fresh out of the box from Apple work Mac, refusing to uninstall itself even, so I had to wipe and reinstall macOS. (It was a new machine, so it wasn't a huge deal, but I'd really wanted it to work.)
for future reference you should really consider installing it with the determinate nix installer [0] instead. it's multi-platform and among other things creates an install receipt so that changes can be painlessly reverted.
Fairly sure that is what I used, though I remember being confused about whether Determinate Systems was the legit way, or super opinionated not necessarily most supported way, which was going to be least friction/widest adoption, etc.
well, I prefer they added the forced update, since many people never updated it. So when they run brew install X, they got the 2 year old version of X.
I remember when homebrew first came out it was pretty snappy and didn't do a bunch of extraneous nonsense. A remarkably precipitous decline in software quality
Except that’s just your opinion, not everyone agrees that it’s "in decline" or does "nonsense". Homebrew is exactly what I want from my desktop package manager: I want everything I install from Homebrew to always be in an evergreen state, I’m ok with everything being in latest and Homebrew forcing package maintainers to work with the latest of their dependencies. This ends up being remarkably stable, and I actually get a looot less of version incompatibilities than when I used Linux (easy because I don’t get any with Homebrew).
If I want a specific version of something I don’t mind using a specific version manager (eg. asdf or mise)
Or the rose-tinted glasses have come off. Homebrew is simultaneously a very impressive "my first package manager" experience as well as a chronically deficient packaging solution.
For the same reasons, I prefer Linux - but also like Apple Silicon platform.
As a result, I use Fedora Asahi Remix natively on the hardware. It's a few generations behind in support (M1- and M2-based systems right now), but I can't tell you how good it feels to be able to use Linux natively on Apple Silicon hardware. In my workflow, Fedora Asahi Remix runs at least twice as fast as macOS on the same hardware for any task (and 4-6 times faster for heavier tasks).
It's a few years behind is true, but the gap keeps widening. DP Alt Mode isn't supported. M3 and M4 support might never happen. It doesn't seem like a viable long-term alternative to be honest.
The gap is widening largely because the maintainer left the project due to the Linux kernel rust drama. But there is still plenty of very talented contributors who have taken over. That, combined with a rapidly growing interest to run Linux on Apple Silicon instead of macOS, will likely result in faster development over the next few years.
But for me, the long term momentum of new platforms as they release doesn't matter - what IS supported is excellent (including the brilliant GPU driver).
My Mac Studio M1 Ultra runs Fedora Asahi Remix perfectly with full support and is exactly what I need. So those who are looking for a fast Apple Silicon system that can run Linux natively will save $$ and buy a used M1/M2 from Apple or otherwise.
Unfortunately, a lot of this effort seems stalled by some of the Linux kernel developers' hostility towards Rust, which also prompted Hector Martin (marcan42) to leave the project.
Now at the current rate, Apple is still moving backwards faster than the FOSS community is moving forward. I actually miss macOS 10.5 on PowerPC.
Yes - it's a developer workstation and I run a few different staging environments on it, including a K3s cluster and a big FreeBSD VM - both of which are lightening fast. But what always surprises me is how fast it is at compiling anything.
Because it's very cumbersome. Managing with multiple audio devices and displays must be done in the host OS. Keyboard shortcuts might not work correctly. Gestures might not work correctly. Suspending and resuming is a pain, basically need to login twice. It's a lot of friction.
As someone who’s been a heavy apple daily driver since the Intel Macs arrived on the scene, I can feel myself grinding my teeth while reading this. Watching Apple commit to eroding macOS’s previously-lauded user-centric freedom, simplicity, and reliability year after year in their quest to turn it into another iOS black box appliance that you just rent not own makes me wonder what happens when the author approaches similar categories of problems from different directions vis a vis Linux.
I know this won’t apply to everyone but I’ve been able to, relatively successfully, stick to the constraint that most of my dev tools are static binaries: zoxide, fzf, eza, btop and so on. There is one glaring exception which is docker but I let it pass.
By sticking to this I’m able to avoid Homebrew’s mess and Nix’s complexity. I use mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/) to manage the binaries and languages I have on my machine. It handles installing multiple versions and is directory-aware.
> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system.
Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage.
What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...
It's been five years for my data point, but every single time it came time to update brew, I hit something else I'd never seen before. Every time, it broke.
And from what I can see, migrations are still causing issues. [0]
Crazy, what kind of set up were you trying to do there? Been using it for probably 10 years and I can't remember the last time I had an issue and I run updates on it automatically every day. Biggest problem I remember is having to chown a directory again or something.
It usually hit, when a dependency of programs gets shoved out into cask. The moment where that happens, and where the things listing it as a dependency realise its now cask and not the main repo, is not altogether in sync.
Interesting that you had such a smooth experience. I was mainly using Homebrew on the daily between 10 and 14 years ago, so I couldn't give you specifics. My experience at the time was poor; maybe I was using it wrong. My impression from looking at recent user reports was that Homebrew's stability has continued to lag behind pacman's, but I agree that my assertion in the latter part of the excerpt you quoted was insufficiently substantiated, so I'll remove it.
The one issue I had was creating a new admin user for a client project (so I can just package everything created for that client neatly) and then immediately run into permissions issue. After that, I installed macports and never looked back (other than checking formula for installation guidance for some package).
When I used to daily drive a mac, I had Macports since day one, with no issue I can remember. This lasted for some 14 years, out of which 8 were on the same machine.
Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.
So I have to wonder: why does everyone use Brew? Does it have features or other advantages which Macports doesn't? Is macports no longer a thing (I've stopping using macs around 2021)? This reminds me of people complaining about what a crappy experience Windows is, but never even contemplating moving to something else.
> Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.
Macports comes up all the time, just like you've mentioned it here. It has a few user friendly benefits (no sudo, more up-to-date apps, better gui clients, slightly easier to add custom package, etc), but in general hard to say exactly why one app wins
I also used to use Macports exclusively (and Fink before that!). For me the reason behind the switch, after resisting it a long time, was simple: everything I used from Macports was also in Homebrew, but I just kept running into things I wanted to install that were in Homebew but not in Macports.
Yeah, homebrew works so well for me I also use it on Linux. In fact, its growing support for Linux/arm means I'm no longer stuck with Arch ARM VMs and can get up to date dev tooling in any Linux arm distro
Asahi only supports M1 and M2 Macs well (and you will still miss support for some functionality, like Thunderbolt or USB-C DP-Alt mode displays). Ryzen APUs have indeed narrowed the gap and if you want to run Linux, it's probably much better to get a recent Ryzen ThinkPad than a Mac (or get a Strix Halo Ryzen once it lands in the good ThinkPad models).
(I am a longtime Mac user, but I recently got a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 and all the hardware works out-of-the-box and very well on Linux.)
This couldn't have come at a more opportune time. My 11th gen Framework just gave up the magic smoke last night, which was a frightening experience.
The Framework has given me a bewildering litany of issues over the years, and I now just want something solid, light, and reasonable battery life, so just I threw down for an M4 Air today.
Having used Linux exclusively for 25 years and an unaBashed CLI junkie, I'm a bit nervous about workflow friction.
How does experience with nixos-darwin compare against just VMing on top of MacOS?
Also, is there any reason for mucking about with Apple's bootloader etc?
> How does experience with nixos-darwin compare against just VMing on top of MacOS?
Kinda depends what you want. Both work. With Nix Darwin you’ll sometimes run into packages that aren’t compatible with your system. It’s not an ND problem really - some software was just never built for Mac.
Running a VM works great too. I’m a big fan of Orbstack as it’s fairly transparent with the system. It’s nice to hop inside a real Linux box but feel like you’re working ON the actual system. You’ll take a battery hit compared to on-metal as macOS puts VMs on P-cores, but it’s not that bad.
It's interesting and all but in typical "Apple switcher" fashion, a preposterous comparison is/will be made: the M4 Pro MBP is around 3K€, replacing a laptop that seems to go for around 1K€ at best.
When something costs 3 times as much, it should be better. It's a bit like comparing an entry level Ford to an S class Mercedes.
I think the best "feature" of Apple computers is that it prevents cheapskates from making bad choices they will regret.
In my family, they use iPhones and I'm glad for it because if they would use Androids, they would just buy the cheapest garbage they could find and the experience would be miserable. It's funny how a corporation greed is actually useful to prevent some people being fucked by their own greed (stinginess is a form of reverse greed, particularly true when you actually have money).
Well a 1k MacBook Air has the same build quality as the 3k MacBook Pro. It just has less performance. I have a HP ZBook from work and for 3k you don’t get the build quality of a 1k MacBook Air.
In my experience when you only compare on build quality of laptops there’s nothing that’s on the level of current MacBooks.
Beyond just build quality too. The $1k air has phenomenal speakers for a laptop, a great display (albeit, no 120hz), and a touchpad that is unmatched on any other laptop. Plus, it's silent.
For $1k in the WinTel world you're lucky to get 1920x1200, or even worse, 16:9 1920x1080 as the standard. I switched to Mac the day the M1 came out, and haven't looked back despite how much I miss Linux. macOS grew on me, and I can't stomach paying $3k+ for a machine that is still substandard to a $1k MacBook Air.
The only laptop that comes close is the new arm Surface Laptop 7, but - no Linux on that for now.
I don't really understand the comparison with a cheap Asus laptop. Ofcourse the MBP will win. But a decent Lenovo ThinkPad or HP EliteBook/ZBook will have flawless Linux support with a rigid and robust chassis.
The vast majority of which unfortunately still come with Intel processors, especially the premium models. I handed my work issued Lenovo X1 back to my employer as being unusable due to overheating and excessive thermal throttling. The M4 Macbook Pro I now have is such a huge positive difference, I have adjusted to macOS and enjoy Intel outside.
X1 is Intel only, but the new Lunar Lake is quiet and cool. And T14(s) comes with AMD. Mac hardware still is #1, but kernel panics because holding it wrong is definitely not normal.
I enjoyed reading the post and maybe will try following some part of it, such as the nix-darwin setup. Thanks for sharing, it is well written.
I have used Arch in a couple of personal laptops during a handful of years and macOS at job for the last year. I love using Arch, even though it is sometimes painful qua drivers and issues with non-essential hardware. In macOS I don’t recall having issues with homebrew, however I am more familiar with pacman on Arch and therefore prefer it. Before starting to use it, I set up alacritty on macOS building it from source.
> quite impressed with the smoothness of the UX on this relatively cheap machine.
I recently tried installing cachyos kernel on fedora I tried sched_ext with it (scx_lavd specifically) and to my suprise changing CPU scheduler resolved all UI stuttering for me (even dual 360hz + laptop screen on 3y old laptop with integrated intel gpu)
I occasionally use M1 apple mini and right now I can confidently say that now my Linux machine works smoother.
I recently moved from a 60Hz 5k Apple Studio Display to a 120Hz 4k Dell display for my main work desk. I was surprised that on macOS (on an M3 Pro), the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is barely noticeable (mostly in the control center slide animation), whereas my ThinkPad with GNOME is super smooth at 120Hz. Window dragging, browser scrolling, etc., are all much smoother on the 120Hz display.
aerospace is nice, but also consider checking out yabai [0] + sketchybar [1] for an i3/hyprland style tiling setup. more customizable (IMO) and perfectly suited for a terminal based workflow :~^)
I switched to AeroSpace from Yabai because I had to disable parts of SIP for certain functions (such as switching workspaces with keybindings from SKHD), and that didn't feel right. Updates are also smoother since I don't need to update the sudoers file allowing the Yabai CLI to run without requiring password. Been happy as a clam ever since.
I use macOS for day-to-day work on a laptop, but all serious business is conducted on Linux workstations. I can’t be bothered with Docker et al, so each workstation is configured for one special set of tools, and nothing else. Updates are tightly controlled, to avoid breaking build configurations.
In the long run, hardware is cheaper than your time.
Care to elaborate on what you've found most painful? Since `nix-darwin` is anything but officially supported, I am expecting trouble, but it would be nice to know if there are specific things I should look out for.
I'd love to use NixOS itself, of course, but it's not a native option on this machine due to the missing M4 support in Asahi. For now, I'm trying to see how much package/configuration management discipline I can reclaim on macOS, and familiarize myself with Nix in the process.
I could have just used a set of Ansible scripts and Homebrew, but that didn't seem quite as interesting as trying Nix out.
Not sure what issues they are facing but I use Nix flakes to manage my command line and UNIX env for two Macs, a Linux desktop running NixOS, a Windows WSL environment and two Linux home servers using NixOS.
I used to use a dot file manager (home grown and later yadm).
But once I got over the learning curve I much prefer using Nix.
My machines are now effectively immutable and I wipe them without worrying I will lose anything. Can still have machine or role specific configs (e.g. one of the Linux servers is my firewall, so it has no desktop environment or GUI apps).
Btw, you should Ghostty a try too. I was a long term Alacritty and WezTerm user, but Ghostty in 1.0 form already replaced everything I used those for, and has better native platform integration.
I am running nix darwin and its a dream.
Don’t have any issues and things just work.
Setting everything up just the way I like it took ages but thats because I wanted to play with it.
I think what you might be missing here is that compared to the package management in Arch, the package management in MacOS appears not great in comparison.
That's totally subjective. Windows takes the cake, since it ignores user agency when it wants. It's not your operating system. macOS is not as bad, but it does what Apple wants. If your use of computers fits within what Apple wants, then I suppose it's smooth sailing. Otherwise, there are endless distractions of fighting the OS to make it do what you want, and make it NOT do what you don't want it to do. Refreshingly, Linux is all yours. That power comes with responsibility, its greatest advantage and disadvantage.
Did you actually read the article? Multiple times, they talk about how they're just trying to find a smooth, comfortable workflow and don't need every detail perfect (at least initially).
The core initial setup here took about 2h30 from getting the laptop out of its packaging to being able to run and develop my main project's code within the environment I described.
Even if it takes you a full 2 days, that's literally 0.1% of your time over the 5-year life of a machine. Sharpen your axe before you go into the woods.
I wouldn't try to make macOS into Arch, if Arch is what works for you.
Just run Arch in a VM on the mac, using Apple's virtualization framework [1]. (No need for other wrappers; the framework is often easier to use directly.) I find no significant performance issues; a lot of software actually runs faster in a Linux VM than when I compile and run it on the mac.
The limitations are that the Linux VM's don't support save/restore of state (i.e., you have to shut down to stop the VM) and the graphics and device support is limited.
You might get more performance if you compile your own Arch distribution with all the flags necessary to enjoy modern CPU features in M-series (particularly M4+ with SME extensions). With M4-Pro memory should run 273GB/second for JAX and PyTorch.
However, AFAICT, PyTorch supports vectorization on Apple silicon by delegating to Apple's Metal API's, and that wouldn't be available from the Linux VM, so you might prefer running those on macOS directly.
To me the biggest draw of the M4 processor is that it supports CPU tracing (at least for Xcode-run code): actual, direct (not sampled) data about CPU internals like branching, cache misses, etc. If you're into performance, this will take you from working with a black box to seeing exactly what's up.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Virtualization/run...
I would love to use Arch in a VM on macOS, but Arch ARM is pretty bad. From the installation experience, the frequent stops in updates because something is compiling, to Chromium being broken for months.
Consider Alpine, if it fits your needs. The ARM support if first class.
But Alpine does not even attempt reproducible builds, maintainer signing, etc. Running Alpine means anyone with access to the git repo or build server can push any code they want to your system.
Alpine is a musl research/hobby distro at best.
Insane that their official docs suggest running some Xcode project to start your VM. It seems like such a powerful feature might have a better UI.
They are the official docs for a developer API, not an end-user feature. Of course they are going to describe it in Xcode terms. That’s how you use the API.
If you want an app, then pick an app that uses that API.
Is it also insane to have access to a CLI in a graphical user interface? It just gives you a different level of abstraction to work with. If you want a simple GUI, just grab UTM <https://mac.getutm.app>. Also: check out their gallery.
You build your VM app in Xcode, but you can run the app headless. The UI is your VM, with a menu to start and stop the VM.
More and more I feel like Apple’s SW division is dropping the ball. It’s starting to show more and more that the software is lagging behind the hardware, especially with macOS. macOS is their power user friendly OS. For once they could do a release that actually improves on that front. The list of things to improve is so long and endlessly repeated. Just imagine what an amazing OS macOS could be if Apple actually cared.
What do you mean by direct data on branch prediction (as opposed to sampled one, presumably you mean from perf)? An example?
WWDC 2025, "Optimize CPU performance with Instruments" 14:05+
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/308/
My homebrew story is always something along the lines of:
Me: Please install software A.
Homebrew: In order to install it I will also install 20 libraries (some need to be built from source), update openssl, update Python and wreck all virtual environments. Also since its been a while I decided it must be time to upgrade your other unrelated packages. Enjoy!
Yea, homebrew feels like a package manager for people who have no idea what packages or versions are.
Its doing so much hand-holding and extra stuff, it cant be really considered “pro” at all.
What bothers me the most is when they immediately remove packages because they get EOL’ed, but in the real world it doesn’t work like this.
I still have projects that use old PHP versions for example and brew just refuses to install these since they have been deprecated.
So then you have to use some finicky workaroud and download these old versions off of some repo/cask that will also probably go away at some point.
Doesn’t homebrew have launchd unit files now? When it was supposed to be totally self-contained? Homebrew is lost.
I just use https://mise.jdx.dev/ for everything command-line nowadays, and keep brew for casks only.
You should use pyenv instead of relying on homebrew for your python version
Better yet, use uv [1]. I've been using it on all of my projects since it came out, and I'm never looking back. It's in a class of its own.
[1]: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/
Nix Darwin is the solution.
nix for CLI and config and Homebrew (through nix-darwin) for GUI programs is a good combo.
Nix completely broke on my security locked down work laptop, so I had to revert to symlinks, bash, and brew.
Nix-Darwin completely broke on my not at all locked down fresh out of the box from Apple work Mac, refusing to uninstall itself even, so I had to wipe and reinstall macOS. (It was a new machine, so it wasn't a huge deal, but I'd really wanted it to work.)
for future reference you should really consider installing it with the determinate nix installer [0] instead. it's multi-platform and among other things creates an install receipt so that changes can be painlessly reverted.
[0] https://determinate.systems/nix-installer/
Fairly sure that is what I used, though I remember being confused about whether Determinate Systems was the legit way, or super opinionated not necessarily most supported way, which was going to be least friction/widest adoption, etc.
I install a modern llvm toolchain and then just build from source
well, I prefer they added the forced update, since many people never updated it. So when they run brew install X, they got the 2 year old version of X.
I remember when homebrew first came out it was pretty snappy and didn't do a bunch of extraneous nonsense. A remarkably precipitous decline in software quality
Except that’s just your opinion, not everyone agrees that it’s "in decline" or does "nonsense". Homebrew is exactly what I want from my desktop package manager: I want everything I install from Homebrew to always be in an evergreen state, I’m ok with everything being in latest and Homebrew forcing package maintainers to work with the latest of their dependencies. This ends up being remarkably stable, and I actually get a looot less of version incompatibilities than when I used Linux (easy because I don’t get any with Homebrew).
If I want a specific version of something I don’t mind using a specific version manager (eg. asdf or mise)
Or the rose-tinted glasses have come off. Homebrew is simultaneously a very impressive "my first package manager" experience as well as a chronically deficient packaging solution.
I use “normal, mainline Homebrew as well as Bundles and I’ve never had a major issue. I’m not sure “chronically deficient” is the right word
For the same reasons, I prefer Linux - but also like Apple Silicon platform. As a result, I use Fedora Asahi Remix natively on the hardware. It's a few generations behind in support (M1- and M2-based systems right now), but I can't tell you how good it feels to be able to use Linux natively on Apple Silicon hardware. In my workflow, Fedora Asahi Remix runs at least twice as fast as macOS on the same hardware for any task (and 4-6 times faster for heavier tasks).
It's a few years behind is true, but the gap keeps widening. DP Alt Mode isn't supported. M3 and M4 support might never happen. It doesn't seem like a viable long-term alternative to be honest.
The gap is widening largely because the maintainer left the project due to the Linux kernel rust drama. But there is still plenty of very talented contributors who have taken over. That, combined with a rapidly growing interest to run Linux on Apple Silicon instead of macOS, will likely result in faster development over the next few years.
But for me, the long term momentum of new platforms as they release doesn't matter - what IS supported is excellent (including the brilliant GPU driver).
My Mac Studio M1 Ultra runs Fedora Asahi Remix perfectly with full support and is exactly what I need. So those who are looking for a fast Apple Silicon system that can run Linux natively will save $$ and buy a used M1/M2 from Apple or otherwise.
Hmm what about Debian? https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
I still have to use macOS for mobile app development, but definitly want to use Linux on M2.
What about support for graphics? Does it work?
Yes, thanks to the heroic efforts of Alyssa Rosenzweig <https://rosenzweig.io/>, Asahi Lina <https://www.youtube.com/c/AsahiLina>, and others.
Unfortunately, a lot of this effort seems stalled by some of the Linux kernel developers' hostility towards Rust, which also prompted Hector Martin (marcan42) to leave the project.
Now at the current rate, Apple is still moving backwards faster than the FOSS community is moving forward. I actually miss macOS 10.5 on PowerPC.
Curious, what kind of tasks are these where you see a big uplift? Anything to do with containerization?
Yes - it's a developer workstation and I run a few different staging environments on it, including a K3s cluster and a big FreeBSD VM - both of which are lightening fast. But what always surprises me is how fast it is at compiling anything.
Why not just run an OS in a VM and full screen it?
Because it's very cumbersome. Managing with multiple audio devices and displays must be done in the host OS. Keyboard shortcuts might not work correctly. Gestures might not work correctly. Suspending and resuming is a pain, basically need to login twice. It's a lot of friction.
As someone who’s been a heavy apple daily driver since the Intel Macs arrived on the scene, I can feel myself grinding my teeth while reading this. Watching Apple commit to eroding macOS’s previously-lauded user-centric freedom, simplicity, and reliability year after year in their quest to turn it into another iOS black box appliance that you just rent not own makes me wonder what happens when the author approaches similar categories of problems from different directions vis a vis Linux.
I know this won’t apply to everyone but I’ve been able to, relatively successfully, stick to the constraint that most of my dev tools are static binaries: zoxide, fzf, eza, btop and so on. There is one glaring exception which is docker but I let it pass.
By sticking to this I’m able to avoid Homebrew’s mess and Nix’s complexity. I use mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/) to manage the binaries and languages I have on my machine. It handles installing multiple versions and is directory-aware.
> Homebrew's filesystem permission handling is controversial, to say the least, and it has a tendency to fail at a package manager's main job: ensuring that new dependencies don't break the system.
Homebrew user from day 1 it appeared. I have many many packages installed on multiple actively used systems and I have never had to deal with any kind of breakage.
What is this myth? Yeah yeah I am just one data point ...
It's been five years for my data point, but every single time it came time to update brew, I hit something else I'd never seen before. Every time, it broke.
And from what I can see, migrations are still causing issues. [0]
[0] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/19951
Crazy, what kind of set up were you trying to do there? Been using it for probably 10 years and I can't remember the last time I had an issue and I run updates on it automatically every day. Biggest problem I remember is having to chown a directory again or something.
It usually hit, when a dependency of programs gets shoved out into cask. The moment where that happens, and where the things listing it as a dependency realise its now cask and not the main repo, is not altogether in sync.
Interesting that you had such a smooth experience. I was mainly using Homebrew on the daily between 10 and 14 years ago, so I couldn't give you specifics. My experience at the time was poor; maybe I was using it wrong. My impression from looking at recent user reports was that Homebrew's stability has continued to lag behind pacman's, but I agree that my assertion in the latter part of the excerpt you quoted was insufficiently substantiated, so I'll remove it.
I also had a bad time with brew back then. On new machines these days no issues at all.
Every time I need to update anything on brew, I end up updating thousands of packages and it goes on and on for a long time.
The trick for smooth experience is to treat it like `pacman -Syu`:
Running this every few days and fixing everything that it explicitly complains about kept me issue-free for the last 10 years or so.The one issue I had was creating a new admin user for a client project (so I can just package everything created for that client neatly) and then immediately run into permissions issue. After that, I installed macports and never looked back (other than checking formula for installation guidance for some package).
When I used to daily drive a mac, I had Macports since day one, with no issue I can remember. This lasted for some 14 years, out of which 8 were on the same machine.
Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.
So I have to wonder: why does everyone use Brew? Does it have features or other advantages which Macports doesn't? Is macports no longer a thing (I've stopping using macs around 2021)? This reminds me of people complaining about what a crappy experience Windows is, but never even contemplating moving to something else.
> Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.
Macports comes up all the time, just like you've mentioned it here. It has a few user friendly benefits (no sudo, more up-to-date apps, better gui clients, slightly easier to add custom package, etc), but in general hard to say exactly why one app wins
I also used to use Macports exclusively (and Fink before that!). For me the reason behind the switch, after resisting it a long time, was simple: everything I used from Macports was also in Homebrew, but I just kept running into things I wanted to install that were in Homebew but not in Macports.
This comment matches my experience precisely
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44621441
Also, I can never internalize its nomenclature: formula, cask, tap, bottle… makes no sense to me.
Yeah, homebrew works so well for me I also use it on Linux. In fact, its growing support for Linux/arm means I'm no longer stuck with Arch ARM VMs and can get up to date dev tooling in any Linux arm distro
> Currently using alacritty. Also considering WezTerm.
Highly recommend wezterm. That’s what enabled me to do this: https://cweagans.net/2023/09/application-specific-terminals/
You might also be interested in Hammerspoon! Lua-based customization and scripting of many macOS features.
Those apple chips are really quite impressive. But, AMD has those fancy APUs now, maybe it is possible to stay in x86 land a bit longer?
Why do you prefer x86? If another architecture offers better performance with the same hardware support, isn’t that good enough?
If Linux runs fine on it, sure. The blog post linked seemed to indicate that Linux wasn’t 100% on the M4 yet. If that’s wrong, then that’s good news.
Asahi only supports M1 and M2 Macs well (and you will still miss support for some functionality, like Thunderbolt or USB-C DP-Alt mode displays). Ryzen APUs have indeed narrowed the gap and if you want to run Linux, it's probably much better to get a recent Ryzen ThinkPad than a Mac (or get a Strix Halo Ryzen once it lands in the good ThinkPad models).
(I am a longtime Mac user, but I recently got a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 and all the hardware works out-of-the-box and very well on Linux.)
what apus?
All the zen 5 based ones.
https://manuals.omamix.org/3/omacom/74/good-linux-hardware
Strix Halo
This couldn't have come at a more opportune time. My 11th gen Framework just gave up the magic smoke last night, which was a frightening experience.
The Framework has given me a bewildering litany of issues over the years, and I now just want something solid, light, and reasonable battery life, so just I threw down for an M4 Air today.
Having used Linux exclusively for 25 years and an unaBashed CLI junkie, I'm a bit nervous about workflow friction.
How does experience with nixos-darwin compare against just VMing on top of MacOS?
Also, is there any reason for mucking about with Apple's bootloader etc?
> How does experience with nixos-darwin compare against just VMing on top of MacOS?
Kinda depends what you want. Both work. With Nix Darwin you’ll sometimes run into packages that aren’t compatible with your system. It’s not an ND problem really - some software was just never built for Mac.
Running a VM works great too. I’m a big fan of Orbstack as it’s fairly transparent with the system. It’s nice to hop inside a real Linux box but feel like you’re working ON the actual system. You’ll take a battery hit compared to on-metal as macOS puts VMs on P-cores, but it’s not that bad.
It's interesting and all but in typical "Apple switcher" fashion, a preposterous comparison is/will be made: the M4 Pro MBP is around 3K€, replacing a laptop that seems to go for around 1K€ at best.
When something costs 3 times as much, it should be better. It's a bit like comparing an entry level Ford to an S class Mercedes.
I think the best "feature" of Apple computers is that it prevents cheapskates from making bad choices they will regret.
In my family, they use iPhones and I'm glad for it because if they would use Androids, they would just buy the cheapest garbage they could find and the experience would be miserable. It's funny how a corporation greed is actually useful to prevent some people being fucked by their own greed (stinginess is a form of reverse greed, particularly true when you actually have money).
Well a 1k MacBook Air has the same build quality as the 3k MacBook Pro. It just has less performance. I have a HP ZBook from work and for 3k you don’t get the build quality of a 1k MacBook Air.
In my experience when you only compare on build quality of laptops there’s nothing that’s on the level of current MacBooks.
Beyond just build quality too. The $1k air has phenomenal speakers for a laptop, a great display (albeit, no 120hz), and a touchpad that is unmatched on any other laptop. Plus, it's silent.
For $1k in the WinTel world you're lucky to get 1920x1200, or even worse, 16:9 1920x1080 as the standard. I switched to Mac the day the M1 came out, and haven't looked back despite how much I miss Linux. macOS grew on me, and I can't stomach paying $3k+ for a machine that is still substandard to a $1k MacBook Air.
The only laptop that comes close is the new arm Surface Laptop 7, but - no Linux on that for now.
I don't really understand the comparison with a cheap Asus laptop. Ofcourse the MBP will win. But a decent Lenovo ThinkPad or HP EliteBook/ZBook will have flawless Linux support with a rigid and robust chassis.
The vast majority of which unfortunately still come with Intel processors, especially the premium models. I handed my work issued Lenovo X1 back to my employer as being unusable due to overheating and excessive thermal throttling. The M4 Macbook Pro I now have is such a huge positive difference, I have adjusted to macOS and enjoy Intel outside.
X1 is Intel only, but the new Lunar Lake is quiet and cool. And T14(s) comes with AMD. Mac hardware still is #1, but kernel panics because holding it wrong is definitely not normal.
I enjoyed reading the post and maybe will try following some part of it, such as the nix-darwin setup. Thanks for sharing, it is well written.
I have used Arch in a couple of personal laptops during a handful of years and macOS at job for the last year. I love using Arch, even though it is sometimes painful qua drivers and issues with non-essential hardware. In macOS I don’t recall having issues with homebrew, however I am more familiar with pacman on Arch and therefore prefer it. Before starting to use it, I set up alacritty on macOS building it from source.
> quite impressed with the smoothness of the UX on this relatively cheap machine.
I recently tried installing cachyos kernel on fedora I tried sched_ext with it (scx_lavd specifically) and to my suprise changing CPU scheduler resolved all UI stuttering for me (even dual 360hz + laptop screen on 3y old laptop with integrated intel gpu)
I occasionally use M1 apple mini and right now I can confidently say that now my Linux machine works smoother.
I recently moved from a 60Hz 5k Apple Studio Display to a 120Hz 4k Dell display for my main work desk. I was surprised that on macOS (on an M3 Pro), the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is barely noticeable (mostly in the control center slide animation), whereas my ThinkPad with GNOME is super smooth at 120Hz. Window dragging, browser scrolling, etc., are all much smoother on the 120Hz display.
aerospace is nice, but also consider checking out yabai [0] + sketchybar [1] for an i3/hyprland style tiling setup. more customizable (IMO) and perfectly suited for a terminal based workflow :~^)
[0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
[1] https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar
I switched to AeroSpace from Yabai because I had to disable parts of SIP for certain functions (such as switching workspaces with keybindings from SKHD), and that didn't feel right. Updates are also smoother since I don't need to update the sudoers file allowing the Yabai CLI to run without requiring password. Been happy as a clam ever since.
I use macOS for day-to-day work on a laptop, but all serious business is conducted on Linux workstations. I can’t be bothered with Docker et al, so each workstation is configured for one special set of tools, and nothing else. Updates are tightly controlled, to avoid breaking build configurations.
In the long run, hardware is cheaper than your time.
Nix is downright awful on MacOS, even with the DetSys installer. Almost worse than Homebrew.
If you ever sit down to play with a native NixOS install, the difference in functionality is night-and-day.
Care to elaborate on what you've found most painful? Since `nix-darwin` is anything but officially supported, I am expecting trouble, but it would be nice to know if there are specific things I should look out for.
I'd love to use NixOS itself, of course, but it's not a native option on this machine due to the missing M4 support in Asahi. For now, I'm trying to see how much package/configuration management discipline I can reclaim on macOS, and familiarize myself with Nix in the process.
I could have just used a set of Ansible scripts and Homebrew, but that didn't seem quite as interesting as trying Nix out.
Not sure what issues they are facing but I use Nix flakes to manage my command line and UNIX env for two Macs, a Linux desktop running NixOS, a Windows WSL environment and two Linux home servers using NixOS.
I used to use a dot file manager (home grown and later yadm).
But once I got over the learning curve I much prefer using Nix.
My machines are now effectively immutable and I wipe them without worrying I will lose anything. Can still have machine or role specific configs (e.g. one of the Linux servers is my firewall, so it has no desktop environment or GUI apps).
Btw, you should Ghostty a try too. I was a long term Alacritty and WezTerm user, but Ghostty in 1.0 form already replaced everything I used those for, and has better native platform integration.
I am running nix darwin and its a dream. Don’t have any issues and things just work. Setting everything up just the way I like it took ages but thats because I wanted to play with it.
I use most of the same configuration on nixos too
I'd stick to Linux/KDE.
thats cool been to mila before, anyway OP we need to get CachyOS on Mac Os immidiately
>The macOS package management story is not great.
Ummm... Homebrew has been around for at least a decade.
I think what you might be missing here is that compared to the package management in Arch, the package management in MacOS appears not great in comparison.
and can reasonably be described as "not great".
[deleted… my disagreements about time allocation aside, there’s no reason to argue on the internet about it]
> Linux is the most distracting
That's totally subjective. Windows takes the cake, since it ignores user agency when it wants. It's not your operating system. macOS is not as bad, but it does what Apple wants. If your use of computers fits within what Apple wants, then I suppose it's smooth sailing. Otherwise, there are endless distractions of fighting the OS to make it do what you want, and make it NOT do what you don't want it to do. Refreshingly, Linux is all yours. That power comes with responsibility, its greatest advantage and disadvantage.
> Linux is the most distracting
Spoken as someone who's never seen random gaming ads in their OS
Did you actually read the article? Multiple times, they talk about how they're just trying to find a smooth, comfortable workflow and don't need every detail perfect (at least initially).
Yes, but they’re over indexing on that imo. The smooth comfort they’re looking for is costing them multiples of how much time it will actually save
The core initial setup here took about 2h30 from getting the laptop out of its packaging to being able to run and develop my main project's code within the environment I described.
A few days of work doesn't matter over years.
Yes it does
Even if it takes you a full 2 days, that's literally 0.1% of your time over the 5-year life of a machine. Sharpen your axe before you go into the woods.