# MacBook Arch

My MacBook Air 2017 got its final update of MacOS 12 Monterey in October. It's
still a good machine apart from the battery life, which I certainly shortened by
using it as a clamshell for a few months, but my real concern was end of support
for Homebrew and oh, about 40 G of system data I couldn't exorcise in any way.

Notoriously, the biggest firmware headache with Apple laptops is wi-fi. I knew
this going in and had this bookmarked:

=> https://github.com/badgumby/arch-macbook-air

But I was stubborn, and still bitter over MacOS bloat, so I first tried to
install Alpine, which I run on another laptop. It went well with a Thunderbolt 2
display and LAN hub plugged into a wi-fi repeater, but the Broadcom firmware
insructions from the Alpine wiki did not work for me.

=> https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Wi-Fi#wl

Despite my experience with installing Arch several times over, I was too damn
tired to deal with it after the Alpine headache, so I instead flashed Manjaro,
EndeavourOS, and ElementaryOS on to every flash drive I could find. The worst
two days of my Linux life were on ElementaryOS, frankly, but that's mostly since 
I hate a desktop environment and especially GNOME, and I haven't used a
Debian-based distribution since 2010 Ubuntu. I'm sure ElementaryOS suits
someone else fine. Manjaro's installer didn't work at all with either LAN or
finding Wi-Fi, but neither did Alpine on second attempt.

My only complaint with the Endeavour installation is GParted was stubborn about
overwriting the partitioning it had *also* just done for ElementaryOS, but
otherwise? Truly painless. There is no reason to go through the Arch
installation just to prove something to no one. I chose X11/i3. I don't even
remember if Wayland/Sway was an option, but I won't switch until X11 dies.

So far, so good! It's been running for a week now. This is the only OS that's
been honest about my battery information, whose max capacity is apparently 73%,
which is better than I thought. I'm currently beefing with `xdg-settings` over
my default browser. I use LibreWolf but need Chromium solely for collaborative
work in Google Docs, which doesn't behave on Firefox or any of its forks. I also
can't find the package to turn on my keyboard backlight, which is such a minor
problem.

What's been interesting is comparing ash on my Alpine laptop to bash here, and
by interesting I mean frustrating as all hell since I only now realize how much
of bash I take for granted, but I'm determined to get the hang of ash because
I'm attracted to its small footprint.