Moving to Arch Linux

This post does not have a cute title. I'm moving my main development environment to Arch Linux from Mac OS X (10.9, although the version is mostly unimportant).

I'm doing it because:

• The Mac OS X filesystem (HFS+) is broken. Not just in a theoretical sense, but in the sense that over the last two months I've had to restore from backup / take extreme measures to protect my data three times.

• There's a huge dichotomy between native Cocoa applications and *nixy applications. This makes me uncomfortable, but more importantly it means these programs are not working as well as they could. As an example Notifications can't be sent from non-Cocoa apps without a hack.

• It uses too many resources for the shiny part of the OS and I can't remove them. A really good example is the dock - there's not even a hidden flag that can remove it, best you can do is make it small.

It's not a direct transition. I'm moving from a 2012 Macbook Air (8gb memory, 2ghz i7, 256gb SSD) to an older PC with mostly comparable specs (the CPU is older but it's not a laptop version, and there's no SSD).

I've been using it for a few days so far. I'll follow up with my experiences in another post.