Linux

In my pursuit of efficiency that started with emacs, I became aware that you can run linux on apple silicon machines. As such, I’ve been using Asahi Linux on my M1 MacBook Air for a while now, and I have to say, it’s quite interesting. At first, I used the Fedora version that is officially supported by Asahi, but I quickly switched to Arch Linux because I wanted to use the latest and greatest software (read AUR packages) and because Fedora is for noobs and I’m a real programmer. Especially trying to use Hyprland window manager, which is a bit of a pain to set up on Fedora. The very intelligent people who maintain the Asahi Arch linux repository have made it very easy to install and use Arch on Apple Silicon Macs. They even have a version that automatically starts with hyprland, so I don’t have to install it from another window manager and then switch to it. Of course, as with all productivity tools, I must suffer for my art, and the smooth, clean, aesthetic laptop I have now comes at the cost of a steep learning curve and a lot of trial and error.

Hyprland

Hyprland is a dynamic tiling window manager that is highly customizable and designed for performance. Tiling window managers improve productivity by having all the windows on your screen at once, and their extensive configurability means you can change it to basically whatever appearance you want. I use it because it looks cool and I’m on a mission to intimidate my future coworkers with my terminal skills. To become a 10x developer, it’s basically a necessity that half the features on my laptop don’t work. I’ve yet to figure out how the keyboard backlight works, and connecting to wifi (especially my school wifi) is a massive pain. But hey, who needs a graphical interface anyway? It’s not like I’m trying to be productive or anything. Luckily, there are many many resources online, and other people have done the hard work of making a cool rice for me. I use HyDE, but it doesn’t support mac (who does?) so I had to make many changes and install many packages to get it working. I was gonna use dreamy, but it’s a bit old and I’m waiting for v2, which I’ve seen some amount of activity on. HyDE comes with a lot of themes and wallpapers, but I deleted the ones that I didn’t like and added some more wallpaper options. The anime wallpapers are a bit much for me, but I kept a few in case I ever need to be extra performative about my technological superiority.

Browser

Unfortunately, a lot of the software I use isn’t available on asahi alarm, so I can’t use spotify or discord except in the browser. Speaking of browsers, I use Zen which is a fork of Firefox that is designed to be more privacy-focused and has a lot of features that I like (such as being niche and therefore better). It doesn’t support widevine, though, so I have to use firefox for spotify. I installed some mods to make it look very nice, and now it’s transparent and matches the aesthetic of the rest of my setup. I’m pretty on page with the whole “minimalist” thing, so I don’t have a lot of extensions or anything. One good part about the lack of apps and programs I can install is that I have no choice but to work, so I guess it does increase my productivity.

Terminal

I spend a lot of time in the terminal, and I’ve customized my shell to be as efficient as possible. I use Zsh with Oh My Zsh, which provides a lot of useful plugins and themes out of the box. Of course, every time I open the terminal there’s automatically a fastfetch so I can take a screenshot (joke because screenshotting is impossible on linux) and post on r/unixporn. I also use Starship as my prompt, which is a cross-shell prompt that is fast and customizable. I have it set up to show my current directory and git status.

Lockscreen

The lockscreen is pretty important since whenever I leave my laptop unattended, I have to lock it. It’s also the most visible part of the setup since other people look at it whenever I’m not using it. To make it look nice, I use the anurati lockscreen, which is a simple and clean lockscreen. I moved some of the elements around to make it look nicer, and I added a greeting at the bottom that changes depending on the time of day. The one issue I have with the lockscreen is that whenever the font says “FRIDAY”, it looks like “FRDAY” since the font doesn’t have a vertical bar for the D so it looks like the I is that bar. Other than that, though, the font looks really cool, and it’s definitely much better than the normy glass lockscreen on mac.

Conclusion

Overall, using Asahi Linux on my M1 MacBook Air has been a fun and rewarding experience. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you’re willing to put in the time and effort to learn how to use it, you too can become the ultimate workplace menace. Of course, everyone knows that Arch is for normies and real programmers use nixOS. Unfortunately, I think I would get fired if I tried to use nixOS because I would spend too long trying to figure out how it works and then I’d have no one to show it to anyway. So for now, I’ll stick with Asahi and Arch, and continue to enjoy the benefits of a highly customizable and performant operating system. Plus, I get to feel superior to all my friends who are still using macOS or Windows. It’s a win-win situation.