From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent
47 comments
·August 19, 2025harshitaneja
I have been on an M1 macbook pro since launch and while I love the hardware, easily my favourite device I have ever owned but MacOS has just always been the thing to be the faustian bargain coming from being a linux person. I spend a lot of time SSHed into more GPU capable linux machines for most of my work and thus get an escape but after driving a friend's linux machine I started looking for a way to daily drive a linux machine. I tried Asahi Linux and also tried to find some non apple machines including with Snapdragon X Elite ones but so far I haven't found anything with good battery life and a decent linux driver support. So far Asahi linux with the reduced battery life seems to be the best bet. I don't mind tinkering. I love tinkering. I am not looking for "just works" but something which I could get to work after putting in the hours. If someone has suggestions please share. Edit: Sorry to go somewhat off topic.
heavyset_go
> If someone has suggestions please share.
Stay away from ARM laptops and SoCs, they aren't there yet when it comes to Linux. If you like to tinker, go for it, but expect hardware to just not work, or worse, you'll get stuck on a kernel fork that never gets updated.
If you want a good Linux machine, buy one from a vendor that explicitly sells and supports machines with Linux on them.
IMO you can tinker as much as you want without forcing hardware compatibility issues upon yourself in order to have something to tinker with.
E39M5S62
The Thinkpad x13s is more-or-less there. I've been using it as my primary machine (and laptop) for the last month, and it 'just works'. All day battery life, fanless so it's dead silent, and a crisp screen with decent DPI. KDE and Vivaldi run as fast as my i7-13700 desktop.
harshitaneja
That seems to be the conclusion I have been avoiding to reach. With graviton and other arm based linux server machines being a good bulk of my work I hoped I wouldn't have to worry about multi architecture docker builds. Ah well.
Any suggestions for something well built but lightweight and that one could figure out how to get 8+ hours of actual daily usage battery life on?
nextos
> If someone has suggestions please share
A recent ThinkPad with one of the latest AMD Ryzen U CPUs should have a very decent battery life. You just need some custom udev rules to set the right power saving states for different devices. Powertop should make this straightforward. IMHO, this is a great compromise, because you stay on x86_64 and Linux, you get within 3/4 of ARM's power efficiency, and hardware support is perfect. I've squeezed more than 11 hours from some models.
One thing that is often discounted is that Safari is marvel of power efficiency, which adds up to the efficiency of Apple M chips. IMHO, there should be dedicated Chromium and Firefox builds with compile flags and options that optimize efficiency. To counter that, running a barebones Linux setup is a good option. Keeping your CPU wakeups/s low lets you cross the 10 hour barrier.
elteto
x86 Thinkpads + Fedora work great. Hardware support out the box is almost perfect (I would say perfect because I don’t recall anything not working, but I may be missing something). In fact, Thinkpads used to have Fedora as an OS option, which is why I think the support is so good.
Outside that maybe something like system 76. They advertise 14h for one of their models.
spangry
Oh darn, I thought they'd gotten Arch running on an M1 but they actually switched to a ThinkBook.
I somewhat regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me. For the first time in my life I feel like some tech-illiterate grandpa trying to figure out how to make his blasted computer do stuff.
0xfaded
Same, I have a Mac at work and can suffer the horrible window management by just having more physical monitors (3 + the built in screen).
I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.
ahepp
It was not super difficult to get Gentoo running on an m1 MacBook with the (unsupported) instructions some of the Asahi folks left around. I guess Arch might be a bit more difficult in some ways, given the weird status of arm64 being a different project from core Arch?
rogerrogerr
Curious, what is it that doesn’t make sense?
sarmasamosarma
What’s so hard about it?
johndoe0815
What IMHO is more interesting than the article itself - what is this little cyberdeck-style mini notebook on the left in this picture that is part of the article? Does anyone have a link?
https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/arch-b...
throwup238
Looks like a MicroJournal Rev 2: https://www.tindie.com/products/unkyulee/micro-journal-rev2-...
articsputnik
It's a distraction free typewriter (https://www.ssp.sh/brain/distract-free-typewriter/). That particular model is a MicroJournal Rev. 2 with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 in it.
Check it out here: https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal/blob/main/micro-jo...
johndoe0815
Thanks a lot for the hints - the Micro Journal Rev.2 seems to be quite a nice device!
throwawee
For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.
That was years ago and I'm still on it.
sauercrowd
Hardware support in the last years has really improved significantly. I was using arch a lot back around 2016, and it was a nightmare. On every kernel update had to recompile a kernel driver cause my laptops chipset was something bizarre, nvidia drivers were mostly half working and it all just felt like a fragile card house.
Ubuntu was by far the best option to actually use my system rather being constantly distracted by another little piece that fell out the wall
boppo1
What do you like better than debian?
margalabargala
I run multiple arch systems and multiple Debian systems in my house.
Debian is great if what you want to do, is something that has been easy for 5 years. You set it up and forget it.
Debian breaks down whenever you try to do something new that requires some new dependency. Oh you want to run a Go program written in 2023? Now you have to download and install the new version yourself because the latest version in apt is 1.19. On arch stuff like that is generally not a problem. It's the best supported distro after the Debian based ones.
throwawee
Don't know if you responded to the right person since I didn't mention Debian, but I did try it and the other major distributions a long time ago. Honestly, distros mostly felt the same to me apart from their repositories. Debian soured me by keeping its repo perpetually out of date. It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.
kylemaxwell
I swapped from Linux to MacOS when the M1s came out, and I love the integration with all the iCloud stuff (particularly Messages). Occasionally I miss being on Linux, as somebody who did so for 20+ years before making the switch. But on Mac, stuff actually does Just Work.
Reading this makes me a little misty-eyed and I miss my solid old Thinkpads from 10-20 years back.
jasoneckert
I think the biggest takeaway from this blog post is that developers and other professionals should take more note of the tiling window managers available on Linux like Sway and Hyprland - they are insanely fast and customizable to exactly what we need to be more productive.
I'm a Sway user (ironically on Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac) and I won't have it any other sway... er... I mean way.
articsputnik
Why I ditched my M1 MacBook for a $1000 ThinkBook running Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Distro.
notpushkin
I’m waiting for the second hand Arm ThinkPads to drop. Fingers crossed.
Eldandan
Second hand as in used from this generation? Or second generation? I can't wait for windows on arm to finally fully get there.
notpushkin
Used ones, yeah. Companies used to sell off entire fleets when they upgrade, sometimes pretty cheap. I’ve bought a perfectly usable T420 for something like $50 about 10 years ago. (Naturally, it was 4 years old at that point, but still.)
Also curious about Windows on Arm, but my plan is to run Linux mainly (which hopefully gets better support at that point!)
kace91
coming from an m1, and given they're awesome as hardware goes, wouldn't asahi be the natural choice? honest question.
abhinavk
The author ditched the M1.
nomdep
Best thing about Omarchy is that is just a set of config files for Hyprland and Waybar plus bash scripts (even the screensaver is a bash script running in fullscreen )
joshdavham
How confident are people that Omarchy will be well maintained in the future?
I'm considering making that same switch from MacOS to Arch, but I'm not sure if I should have confidence in something like Omarchy which is relatively new.
Power management in all aspects is one big thing that I wish was better in all distros. Hibernate/fans/shorter battery life are real usability things. I only use windows when I am at risk of being fired for not using it and macos is 'acceptable' but there are soooo many little things that make me cringe about it (.DS_Store littering every drive I touch is close to the top) but if I knew I could get mac hardware, including MPS backend working well in pytorch and battery life, with a solid distro guaranteed to work I would definitely buy that over all the pc hardware out there.