From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

Summary

I switched my five-year-old MacBook Pro M1 Max for a cheap (comparable) Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G7 ARP (AMD) laptop, running Linux (Arch btw, or better, Omarchy. And I am having a blast. But not everything is perfect. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This is a short recap after using it for one month on and off (due to repair 😅), and the last 2 weeks full time. I want to share what I learned, what I like about the new setup after working for 15 years plus on a MacBook, and on and off on Windows at work. And maybe what is still a little rough. Getting Ready for the Switch Before I could make the switch, I had some pre-requirements I needed to be able to use it as my full-time machine. Here are some: ✅ Obsidian notes ✅ fuzzy finder in raycast to open up my favorite files or folder, e.g. if I need to open my Offers template folder ️✔️ screenshot like Snagit ✅ photo program ✅ daylight adjustment like f.lux ✅ next calendar events in top bar ✅ Hibernate machine ❌ one time backup to store files and OS, or only files? And most important, instant workspace navigation. The reason why I was upset with Apple: with the latest update, Yabai didn’t work flawlessly anymore, and also all the updates and constant asking if I want to do this or that got in my way. During that process, I noticed that many things I was having, like Setapp Apps with all the apps like Bartender, VPN, and other apps are nice and useful, but not needed. Or mostly there is a similar, or sometimes even better, alternative out there. The Tradeoffs While I’m super happy with the switch, here are some direct comparison from apps and workflow from macOS to Linux. Photo Capturing Snagit, my beloved screenshot-taking tool. I haven’t found a similar replacement yet that can cut out in-between the image or store all the captured images in a library. Even OCR search worked out of the box in Snagit, across all my images I took over the years. You’d say, but who needs this? Yeah, kind of, but it’s super handy, especial...