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I made a similar jump over the past few years out of frustration with stagnating apple hardware (pre-m1). I spent a year with a hackintosh, which worked pretty well, but became disenchanted by the continued locking-down of the OS.

For the most part, daily driving Linux as my desktop has been great - no small thanks to Electron. Slack, Spotify, VSCode, etc. all just mostly work.

Going the arch-route took extra upfront work since you're effectively building a desktop environment from scratch, but the benefit is knowing exactly how -everything- works. If I press my "volume up" shortcut and the overlay volume bar isn't displayed, I know exactly which sway config and executable to look at. It's refreshingly simple.

The downsides are that upgrading is a bit anxiety producing (will I break anything?). HiDPI on Linux is still (in my experience) a bit of a mess. If you run wayland, you need to patch xwayland/sway/wlroots if you don't want blurry x11 apps. And there are some quirks- like, I can't drag files into Slack. Maybe it's fixable, but at some point you become satisfied with "good enough".

discuss

thesuitonym|4 years ago

>The downsides are that upgrading is a bit anxiety producing (will I break anything?).

I don't understand why Arch users put up with this. There are plenty of distros that you can build your DE on your own with, but that have regular releases, and are extremely stable.

flatiron|4 years ago

arch users don't really "put up" with this. every computer i run (besides my work windows machine) is arch and they have broken exactly 0 times. i update once a week, 0 problems.

pkulak|4 years ago

For what it's worth, when one of my Macs upgrades, and starts rebooting 8 times over the course of an hour, I get pretty damn anxious too. At least with Arch it's just a bunch of packages being replaced and then a reboot. Plus, if you run a snapshotting filesystem like btrfs, you can always just roll your whole system back a few hours if things are really borked; though I've never personally had to do that. No option like that on Macs. If you upgrade and something important stops working, you're shit outta luck.

jjulius|4 years ago

Because it gives me more chances to learn how something works than a stable OS.