I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
54 comments
·July 19, 2025w10-1
c-hendricks
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.
WhyNotHugo
Consider Alpine, if it fits your needs. The ARM support if first class.
minton
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.
trueismywork
What do you mean by direct data on branch prediction (as opposed to sampled one, presumably you mean from perf)? An example?
Sytten
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!
NERD_ALERT
You should use pyenv instead of relying on homebrew for your python version
yberreby
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.
yoyohello13
Nix Darwin is the solution.
dbalatero
Nix completely broke on my security locked down work laptop, so I had to revert to symlinks, bash, and brew.
wyager
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
bigyabai
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.
subjectsigma
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
jasoneckert
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).
vouaobrasil
What about support for graphics? Does it work?
qudat
Why not just run an OS in a VM and full screen it?
moribvndvs
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.
st3fan
> 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 ...
shakna
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]
rob
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.
shakna
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.
yberreby
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.
tambourine_man
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.
skydhash
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).
c-hendricks
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
fernandojose
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.
bee_rider
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?
WhyNotHugo
Why do you prefer x86? If another architecture offers better performance with the same hardware support, isn’t that good enough?
bee_rider
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.
xelxebar
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?
shmerl
I'd stick to Linux/KDE.
Liquix
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 :~^)
babuloseo
thats cool been to mila before, anyway OP we need to get CachyOS on Mac Os immidiately
SanjayMehta
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.
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...