Arch on Macbook Pro

There’s a ton of articles about this , and a lot of useful info around , but i wanted to write a little about this.

I’ve been rather annoyed at osx later , the whole permission to install from un-trusted sources , homebrew path change etc etc , for a while I’ve used OSX because it gets me “there” quicker , as in , i don’t need to do any configuration (wifi / multiple screens / fan control / thermald / etc / and I’m a bit OCD about this) .

I’ve decided to give arch a go last week , i have a macbook 11,1 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro11,x , it’s a late 2013 with retina. I have a some experience using linux on laptops i knew this wasn’t going to be easy , but i hoped for the best and gave it a go.

I didn’t partition , I’ve decided to use the full drive for Arch so no EFI magic , I’ve used Arch purely and merely for AUR as I’m too lazy to clone from git sometimes and it’s the best to be cutting edge (which I was sure i was going to need for broadcom chispsets)

Anyways this is the list of problems i’ve faced:

• Retina (xfce needs a custom theme to be usable) [use xfce hidpi themes]
• Vtty Fonts too small [ vconsole.conf ]
• broadcom wl 4360 , random disconnections [yaourt]
• hibernate/suspend to ram works!
• trackpad …mtrack does a decent job … not comparable with osx [yaourt]
• battery life (im starting to accept i won’t get 9 hours , i get 5 with tlp powertop mbpfancontrol and others)
• this can be my ocd again but on idle is 10 degrees hotter than osx [:S]

Before i started all this i knew there will be some sacrifices to make , as we all know some things don’t work as well when drivers have to be reversed engineered (4360) etc , but overall im happy with it. It looks amazing and the things i need work pretty much out of the box (multi screens , wifi , suspend)

These articles helped me

and finally

Sorry about the images :)

Overall I’m excited to have full control of my laptop again and I am surprised how many things didn’t fail and work out of the box , you should give it a go .