Being a cheapskate works out sometimes
In 2017, I bought a refurbished 2014 Macbook in South Korea and it's served me almost 10 years: from my spare evenings going into TeamTreehouse to learn Javascript, to getting my first job as a software engineer, all the way to completing a PhD - it's been the best of companions. Prior to getting the Macbook, my laptops had always been Windows ones, and would barely make it past the 2-3 year mark. They were bad, bad, bad.
Looking at my little Macbook, it's been a warrior. It served me longer than I had ever expected. That's why it broke my heart so much to consider retiring it when inevitably it started to get clunky: the battery barely last, the speakers stopped working, and its 8 GB of RAM struggled when opening a website with a lot of junk ads. It also didn't help that new macOS were too bloated for this machine - and let's not get started on incompatible features.
I knew it had reached its end of the road. I just didn't want to accept it. There's also something inherently infuriating about being dragged into this cycle of buying new tech that will eventually become obsolete (that's exactly what the system is built for, anyways).
So, obviously, I was looking for ways to savage what I consider my chippy-friend.
Wait, Linux is actually GREAT now?
My most recent and significant memory of Linux was from over 15 years ago when I was in high school and our IT class computers ran on Ubuntu, and to be honest, it was a clunky, text-heavy mess. You practically needed a computer science degree just to get the drivers working (which is ironic, considering I now have a PhD, but still). I always assumed Linux on a laptop meant sacrificing usability just to prove a point - the point for open source, which now I totally appreciate.
When I started my masters in scientific computing, circa 2019, my faculty gave me a laptop with Ubuntu installed. It made sense, since I was going to learn how to run simulations on HPC clusters, that I go all-in into the bread and butter of it, which is Linux. Perhaps with more development experience under my belt, I realised that I was actually quite comfortable using the terminal for most operations, and that a lot of GUIs were not that much help anyways.
So when my Macbook was about to give up on me, I started looking into modern Linux distros, refusing to let Apple tell me my laptop was dead. That's when I fell down the rabbit hole of Arch Linux, and more specifically, a setup called Omarchy.
I'm becoming an Arch fan and a hoarder and I'm actually quite proud about it
If you follow tech, you might know DHH (the creator of Ruby on Rails). He is a questionable person, not going to lie, but no one can deny he is brilliant. He recently went all-in on Arch Linux and packaged his hyper-optimised setup into an opinionated installer called Omarchy. It promised the slickness of macOS with the efficiency of Linux (plus all the configurability of course). I figured if it was good enough for him, it was worth a shot on my dying machine. So wiped macOS, and took the plunge.
The installation itself was a breeze, and suddenly my 8 GB of RAM wasn't being suffocated by background daemons and bloated extra apps bundled with macOS. Arch Linux is notoriously lightweight, and Omarchy builds on that with Hyprland, a tiling window manager that looks like something out of cyberpunk. Almost everything is keyboard-driven, which took a bit to get used to. I should touch upon that in the future because I do feel like I've been missing out on so much productivity because of the mouse. Anyhow, on Omarchy, the bloat is less significant, albeit it could be much better (most of it is coming from DHH's own apps, which he is obviously promoting as part of this distro). I obviously got rid of them and it was easy peasy.
Anecdotally, my laptop's speakers, which seemed fried before (they stopped working in the past at some point) suddenly work again?
I love keeping old tech alive. There is a deeply satisfying feeling in looking the tech industry’s planned obsolescence right in the face and saying, "Not today cabrones." The media about the landfills where all the disposed tech ends up in and the testimonies of people handling them are very tough, so I have lots of motivation to minimise my contribution to it. At the same time, why drop a bunch of money on a new MacBook when this 12-year-old warrior can still run my dev environment, write my blog posts, and browse the web perfectly fine? It traded its bloated Apple OS for a sleek suit of armour, and honestly, I'm smug about it.
Better of all, now I can claim I use Arch.
