I have a perfectly running, sufficiently specced macbook pro for my personal use, yet I keep craving for Archlinux on my X1Extreme.
No - it doesn’t have anything to do with the recent fad of people jumping on the Archlinux and hyprland. Although I am quiet tempted to try hyprland.
My association with Linux goes way back, to a time when you could request Canonical to ship the latest ubuntu release on discs for free. The anticipation of receiving the discs in and finding ubuntu stickers inside was quiet a feeling. Progressing from that to being an Arch user for more than a decade - serving as a gentle reminder of the passage of time a.k.a I have gotten old.
On paper there is nothing really that Thinkpad offers that mac can’t/doesn’t . - More RAM : 64 vs 32 - M2 vs i7-8750H - long battery life vs measly 3 hours - Apple devices working seamlessly
This got me really thinking on why I am drawn to my Thinkpad running Arch.
After walking down the memory lane and recounting various frustrating moments: - Trying to get drivers(video, audio) working - Getting X up and running - Various re-installs because RTFM was a concept that didn’t rub off me coming from the Windows world - Distro hopping in the hopes of finding a distro that would just work out of the box on my PC - Trying different DEs to see which could offer a snappy experience on my hardware - Participating in online forums asking questions and learning from other posts on how to solve my the problems I was facing. - Enless option for tools/applications to solve a problem, it was like a kid in a candy land
… to the joy of discovering Arch + tiling window manager(XMonad), endlessly tweaking and configuring to get to “the” productive workflow. Learning so many things about Linux, systems thinking, becoming a CLI ninja, discovering various tools.
Linux in a nutshell was me gateway drug to boredom. Because I couldn’t game on the PC for lack a dedicated graphics card and because I wasn’t particularly interested in doing the things I was supposed to be doing, like studying for exams - Linux was my dopamine hit.
There was always something to figure out. A configuration file to tweak, a problem to solve, a tool to discover, a workflow to improve.
And that I think is also the problem.
macOS gets out of the way! It is boring and boring in a good way. Because it contains all the tools one needs to get work done.
Whereas Linux(Arch) invites me to get inovlved.
Maybe after more than decade, I don’t crave Arch(Linux) because I need a better operating system, but rather because I miss the side quests - of hunting for an app to do x or improving my workflow using a tool.