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I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
L;DR: I used Arch Linux for nine years as a daily driver on non-Apple laptops. I received my new M4 Pro MacBook Pro yesterday.
Filing, reading and annotating scientific papers using Zotero; Writing code in Zed, a fast text editor with first-class support for LSP and Tree-Sitter, GPU acceleration, Rust-powered multithreading, and, non-negotiably, vim bindings; Doing most of my computer interaction inside of a zsh shell with a featureful prompt such as Starship(previously, grml-zsh-config or oh-my-zsh); Managing Python projects using Astral's uv; Writing bespoke command-line utilities in Rust; Using JAX and PyTorch for numerical simulations and deep (reinforcement) learning; Doing exploratory development using local Jupyter Lab notebooks; Firing off longer-running jobs on remote compute resources, using on-premises workstations or larger SLURM clusters; Writing down notes in my org-roam personal knowledge base; Writing papers and slides in Typst or LaTeX (if I have to); Collaborating with colleagues on Zulip, Slack, or in person; Attending scientific meetings in-person or virtually (and taking live notes in org-roam); Staring intensely at a whiteboard/wall/ceiling when I'm mulling over a problem (no tech required); Debugging anything and everything: driver issues on compute workstations, sub-millisecond timing code in psychophysics experiments using custom Teensy photodiode contraptions, shared object loading in proprietary camera software, etc. While the UNIX backbone of Mac OS X made it a great introduction to computing, I eventually grew frustrated with the developer experience, exorbitant repair costs (what do you mean, everything is glued or soldered? From day one, I embraced the Arch spirit, consistently running either i3 or sway as my tiling window managers of choice, complete with a panel of shortcuts allowing me to get much of my computer use done at the speed of thought.
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