Buy the Mac. If you’re using Arch and Linux feels like “trouble” instead of a breath of fresh air, it may not be for you.

That being said, if you really want to be persuaded, give Linux a little more time, and accept some friendly advice. First of all, make sure you’re running hardware that’s not going to give you trouble. If you have the resources to buy a new Apple laptop, you can afford a refurb from eBay with compatible hardware. Don’t overthink the specs, Linux runs better on 10 year old hardware than windows did when it was brand new on the same machine. Steer well clear of NVidia. Their hardware is nothing but trouble.

Second, XMonad is a weird choice if you’re just starting out. It’s Fun with a capital F, but trouble free it’s not. It (a) still doesn’t support Wayland, which means you’re bound to the increasingly creaky and unsupported XOrg and (b) last I used it, XMonad was configured by recompiling a Haskell program. If you’re not a committed Haskell user, this adds a ton of friction. Just use sway if you want a tiling WM.

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abhixec 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sorry i should have made it clearer in my post, I have been using archlinux and xmonad for more than 10 years but i do reevaluate the choices i make/made. While the power settings has gotten a lot better over the course i was wondering if there is any laptop+os that gives close to macbook battery life.

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fxtentacle 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The issue in most cases is that hardware that also runs windows will only support S5 Sleep so that Windows 11 can download fresh advertisements while your laptop is “sleeping”. In some cases, you can patch the DSDT tables in the firmware to reenable S3. But also many recent laptops will just not fully support deep sleep. And that means the MacBooks are superior on the hardware level and there isn’t really anything that Windows or Linux can do.

	▲	ofalkaed 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>The issue in most cases is that hardware that also runs windows will only support S5 Sleep so that Windows 11 can download fresh advertisements while your laptop is “sleeping”. That explains some things. When I got my new laptop I played with Windows for awhile before installing linux, was surprised by how much the battery drained when unplugged and supposedly asleep. Was also surprised by how poor battery life in general was with Windows. Linux solved both issues, guess I got a laptop which properly supports deep sleep?