Luckily, as usual, I’d documented every step of the install process in excruciating detail.
My first install was completely ruined when I got to the (literally) last step and realized that I’d forgotten to create an EFI system partition ( ESP), so I started over. The first day was mostly spent getting up to speed on changes in Arch in the past few years and the current best way to handle LUKS/dm-crypt encryption on an EFI system with NVMe storage. My odyssey of getting Arch Linux - my desktop distribution of choice for the past six years - installed on the new Dell laptop took me thirty hours or so (conservatively) over the course of one work day and four afternoons/evenings. I was pleased to find out, though, that the internal hardware of the Precision 5530 is extremely similar to the XPS 15 9570, including having some of the same issues. I’d asked about an XPS 15 as those seem to be on par with the MacBook Pro in terms of price and specs, but when you work at a company with 34,000 employees and they tell you “our developer laptop is a Precision 5530” and you’re a developer, that’s the laptop you get. Last week I picked up my new new work laptop, a Dell Precision 5530. So I threw in the towel and requested to be re-platformed to a Dell laptop, and listed my puppet-archlinux-macbookretina module as unsupported and in need of a maintainer. Unfortunately, as is described in detail at Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux Issue #71 as well as numerous other places online, because of the T2 security chip acting as the storage controller for the SSD, it’s currently impossible to install Linux on the built-in SSDs of the latest generation MacBook Pro.
I’d been dual-booting my previous MBP between Linux (for any real work) and MacOS (for Netflix and quick Googles while at home) as I’ve been doing with MacBook Pros for almost a decade now, and loved it.
Two weeks ago my company replaced my four-year-old (mid-2015) MacBook Pro 11,4 (original install notes) with a shiny, brand-new MacBook Pro 15,4 A1990. Well, it’s nearing the end of March, so it’s a good thing I didn’t make any formal New Year’s resolutions! In general I’ve been really busy at work with some esoteric big-company stuff, and really busy in my personal life as well with a new car and a bunch of projects around the house (including trying my hand at building a small shelving unit completely by hand, including some simple joinery). One of the… things that, around the beginning of the year, I tentatively planned to do more of this year… was to share more of what I do and resurrect this blog.
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