So when the old Zenbook’s screen died I started considering buying another laptop, but what I really wanted was that great macbook hardware paired with my personal favorite OS. I work remotely, so the form factor makes it a great portable machine to go work in libraries, coffee shops or in a park during summer, and the battery life is good enough to be away from an outlet for an extended period of time (although not quite an entire work day). I also think it is the best laptop - the best computer - I’ve ever had, for my needs. I work as a freelance Go developer, and the overwhelming development platform of choice for the clients I work with - mostly startups - is macOS, so to make it easier for me to integrate to development teams (tools, setup, sharing installation information, etc.), my work machine is a mid-2015 13” Macbook Pro. I quickly started appreciating Arch Linux’ minimalist approach where you can relatively easily configure your distro to your liking, backed by an amazing wiki, rolling updates and an extensive, user-friendly package manager. At the time, I purchased a used 13” Asus Zenbook on ebay specifically to toy with different distros without risk for my work laptop.

Since then, I tried a variety of distros and Unixes, such as Fedora and FreeBSD, but it wasn’t until early 2015 that I first installed Arch Linux. I started using Linux more seriously around 2010, with Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), if memory serves me well, although I did play around with Corel’s Linux way back when.

Arch linux macbook pro retina mid 2014