Oh man, piping dd through ssh! This brings back a fond memory: I was learning Unix at the time, but never used pipes for anything serious (cat | grep, not much more). I had to clone a machine at my internship; all the Windows guys used some specific tools for that, but this was a Linux box, so their tools wouldn't work. When I had the idea of piping dd through ssh, I thought I was so clever! I was really impressed that it actually worked, too. That's when I realized the power of the Unix philosophy.

Thats a good idea- I do have an old Air kicking around, but it seems a shame to lose a mac in order to gain a Linux. In any case I would like something new and purpose built.

Macs are unstable and lack of some features under Linux. Read about compatibility before putting any distro on it.

That's the genius of going with ArchLinux - everything is unstable :)

I guess dd is convenient if you want to keep the same partitions, but it's not generally necessary to do an exact bit copy to copy a Linux setup. You can use rsync or cp to copy, and then run update-grub on the target to make it bootable.

shh | dd? How does that work? Please say more.

Boot both machines via usb†, start ssh server on one

Depending on where the ssh server is (source or target):

    dd if=/dev/sda | ssh -C 1.2.3.4 dd of=/dev/sda
    ssh -C 1.2.3.4 dd if=/dev/sda | dd of=/dev/sda

† or mount the source / as ro, or systemd-switchroot to a ramdisk. Just make sure that source / is not getting writes. Or not, if you don't care.

I presume, something like...

    ssh old_mac "dd if=/dev/sda" | dd of=/dev/sda