I switched from a riced out Arch + DWM setup to a MacBook. It’s stable, fast, and reliable. But I miss Linux anyway.

This is how I got here, and why I think comfort can be bad.

Before I got a MacBook, I had a crusty old Asus laptop. Windows 11 was too much work for it, so I decided that Linux was a good choice. Since then I got stuck in the Linux rabbit hole. I tried every window manager, every desktop environment. I riced window managers here and there, and nothing felt right, except DWM. I just loved it. The simplicity, the stability. It’s written in C. It’s minimal. And it just clicked. So I decided that this would be my setup.

Eventually I published my dotfiles with an installer, hoping someone could use it and thank me. And I actually reached that! It had 2 active users at the time. I was happy.

It was a big deal for me at the time. It gave me a sense of purpose: to maintain it and keep it reliable. I was putting a lot of effort into it. Even though I knew almost no one was using it. It was for the fun, and for that feeling.

It worked fine. There were some problems and Arch wasn’t always stable, but that was most likely a skill issue on my side. On top of that, I was starting to work on serious projects at my real job, and my laptop was getting slow. The projects were getting bigger, and it just couldn’t handle them. So I decided I needed something new.

Let’s go back in time. Here is Mohamed, he had a project that day, he was going to shoot the demo video for the project he made. So he brought his laptop, but he forgot something important. The charger. As you’d expect, he couldn’t continue, since his laptop just worked for 1 hour then gave up.

Lesson learned. Most Windows laptops battery life is just… unbeatable. negatively.

Back to the main line. I was choosing something that could fit me, my personality, and my passion.

I looked at ThinkPads.

• Wow! Linux is so great on those!
• Wow, they are so upgradable!

But the battery life on the models I was considering didn’t really wow me, and the same went for the display and build quality on some of them.

Same for system76.

Ok, so I won’t get a Windows laptop ever again.

Wait a minute …

So, let’s complete the circle and get a MacBook, right? And that’s what I did.

Two months later, macOS is great. It’s stable, reliable, and gets the job done. I was watching a ThePrimeagen video. I looked at his neovim masterpiece, his Linux setup, his window manager, and I was like… that’s me… I am losing myself. I did all of that and enjoyed it just a couple of months ago. I was so jealous.

I can’t say I regret getting a MacBook. It’s the opposite actually. Battery has been great, performance is a piece of cake. I just want that Linux taste though.

I loved ricing window managers, playing with configs, learning languages just to configure editors. But now in macOS it’s just an empty room. There are no patch conflicts to fix like in DWM. There is no window manager that will make me feel at home.

And yeah, I know about yabai and AeroSpace. I tried them. You can tile windows on macOS, you can even fake a tiling WM. But it’s not the same. SIP fights you, it’s all emulated, there’s no C source to read, no recompiling after I change one line. It feels like a costume, not the real thing.

Sometimes you don’t realize it: comfort can be bad. Sometimes joy comes from friction, from the things you learn along the way and the experiences you live through. In the end nothing is black or white. Macs have their strengths, which I’ve definitely seen and benefited from at work, but sometimes your heart drifts back to something you were connected to. I miss the Arch days. I have to get myself some pain. I’m still figuring out how.

Please send me a free ThinkPad
- Me