Is there anything more boring than an operating system?
Allow me to start this post by saying that, I still need Windows. As I have said before, I still need it for Photoshop and Lightroom, because the open source alternatives are laughable compared to the tools that Adobe have built over the years. I must remain subscribed, but I can limit my time in Microsoft's operating system.
I had been doing that, in the lead up to Windows 10 losing support and software updates. For a time, I ran Linux Mint as my primary operating system, and played games, browsed the web, but I grew dissatisfied with a bug that saw games have their frame time ruined after a few hours in a gaming session.
So I swapped to Bazzite. I ran Bazzite as my primary operating system for about 6-8 months. I enjoyed my time, I played PC games without issue. I browsed without issue. But there were issues. It was difficult to get flatpacks and other containers to interact with my network storage in a persistent manner, and I was frustrated at the fact that if I wanted to have cloud storage integrated into the operating system, I'd need to do a lot of tweaking.
I considered going to full-fat Fedora, but a wise individual told me not to. They said "you'll end up on Arch eventually, so just go there to start." And here I am, and I couldn't be happier. Using Arch requires you to read, and this is certainly no guide, because I am not appropriately qualified to provide advice or guidance on how to do, especially in light of excellent documents such as the Arch wiki.
I have Arch installed on its own SSD. I have a partition for my home directory, on that same SSD. I downloaded the Arch iso, threw it on Ventoy (which is a way to make ISOs bootable from a USB stick - super useful if you're distro-hopping!)
And off I went to the glory of ArchInstall. Arch takes no prisoners. You need to know what your computer is, and what you want it to be capable of, because there are many things that you wrong, especially if you don't read things.
Once you get through the installer, you get dumped into a very basic, very bland desktop environment. (I chose KDE Plasma.) Then the fun begins. Arch is very bleeding edge. It is also lean. So lean, that in order to install anything else, it is best to start by installing git, so you can pull down other packages, and to get the AUR working.
What the hell is the AUR? Arch User Repository. For things that are not official Arch packages, they live in the AUR, and it gives Arch an enormous amount of versatility when it comes to available software. What blows my mind is how much of it is free, amazing, and open source.
One of the things that I always thought that I would miss about Windows was Notepad++. The default text editor on KDE is Kate, and over the last few weeks, getting to know Arch better, and spending a lot of time in Kate - I can say... wow. Notepad++ feels like a toy. A powerful toy, but the things you can do with Kate. Dangerous things.
If you want to install something on Arch, you won't be using a graphical user interface. You will do it via the command line, and either use pacman, or an AUR helper. I've been using yay, because it is quite satisfying to type yay when you want to install a piece of software.
And then there was the matter of finding little alternatives to all the applications I normally use on windows. Like Notepad++, I thought irfanview was an incredible piece of software. But then there's something in the AUR which is great on Linux. It is called XNVIEW. It even uses libraries that come packaged with the operating system.
As I explored further and further (and tried to get feature parity with my Windows installation) - I discovered just how easy it was. Not only could I refer to the Arch wiki - (which goes into EXHAUSTIVE detail about various options and alternatives to common software packages) - but I found my system booting LUDICROUSLY fast, and there being absolutely no problems with launching games, thanks to the fine work open source maintainers have done to the likes of Proton, which allows windows games relying on that infrastructure to run in a linux environment.
I can even get non-steam games working via Heroic Launcher - and if I want to, there's amazing options for emulating gaming consoles. I am trying to keep the system as clean as possible, only installing packages and libraries that I need to make my stuff work. While Arch doesn't "come" with a lot of packages, I found that I didn't need a lot to get everything else running.
One of my biggest frustrations with Bazzite was also fixed, without me needing to do anything special. In discord, screen sharing just works. In fact, the person I was screen sharing with didn't even notice that I wasn't in Windows. That's great.
I kept track of all the little changes and bits and pieces that I did to get Arch up and running and working for me, and I turned it into a shell script - which means that If I ever need to reinstall (or more realistically, set this up on a new computer, or try to get my wife over to Arch linux) - is that all I need to do is run a script, enter some basic bits and pieces, and I'm up and running with the 3rd scariest flavour of Linux that there is.
For the record, I think the scariest versions of linux are:
- Linux from Scratch
- Gentoo
- Arch
I escaped unharmed, and I love my computer even more now. If you want to love your computer even more, too, go get started
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
But don't blame me if you lose your data, or any hope or joy you have for computing. Realise that learning anything takes patience, research, and a whole lot of questions - none of which I can answer. Sometimes you just need to find the answer for yourself.
No btw I use Arch meme? XD
But why.
I mean there's advantages to using btrfs, I don't know anything about the other one, but that should be why you're using it, bugger anyone else XD
My desktop is Arch + KDE :)
I mean, I've used Arch, btw, since I had my unraid box set up about 5-6 years ago now :P
Then , through SteamOS on my steam deck. :P
But now, for the first time - on a daily driven desktop!
I am using rclone to mount my google and one drives. I wrote a bash script to mount them, that i was running on boot (manually). Then I added it to my "launch on boot" stuff, and broke my desktop environment, because the rclone script tried to run before the fuse service it relies on launched.
So I needed to figure out how to reverse those steps from the log in screen. Turns out you can open a console and log in from there, so I cd'ed my way in, and sudo rm'ed the offending script, rebooted, and fixed it, without guidance other than a frantic google of "HOW TO OPEN TERMINAL FROM LOG IN SCREEN?"
Because I knew what I broke the moment It did't get tot he desktop environment
I feel like those are the "I use linux, btw" moments :P
LoL ahhh good times XD
I haven't had those problems for a while but it's also been a good bit since I last had to (very carefully and with a lot of terror) edit fstab. And on the bright side it's probably only insane people like us that would need to be doing too much of that level nonsense.
I would love to step back into Linux. When I was a comp sci student, many moons ago, I switched to Red Hat and used it mostly full time, with the exception of when I had a professor here and there who required, for unknown reasons, that we use VC++. After awhile I switched to Gentoo linux, compiling the entire OS from scratch following their very loose and confusing guide. I loved that system and used it for a few years.
I switched to Mac some years later not because of being bewitched by Steve Job's reality distortion field, but rather because I had always found myself wasting far too much time on Linux just fiddling around, and with kids on the way and increased job requirements, I didn't want to fiddle anymore. Mac appealed more to me than Windows because of the BSD core and ability to dig in and install Unix apps.
Alas, I have no time now. But I would love to step back into Linux sometime in the future.
I love my M2 macbook air - its such a high quality piece of hardware, and does an excellent job.
I already have a mage-powerful gaming PC, and very much did not like the direction Windows 11 was going in, so it was goodbye as my day to day OS.
I still need the windows partition for photoshop, powerbi, and lightroom (too slow on my laptop compared to a 4090 and a 16c/ 32 thread cpu) - but I can make do.
I even got davinci resolve working on arch, which was a bit trickier than I anticipated due to codec issues. ffmpeg to the resuce, as usual :)
What the hell is the AUR you say? What the hell is Bazzite and Fedora as well.
:D
AUR = Arch User Repository - think of it as the app store, but anyone can contribute.
Bazzite is an "atomic desktop" (a feature used in Fedora) designed to be an operating system optimised for noobs that play games.
why don't you just use the normal ones?🙃
'cos I hate what Microsoft is doing to Windows 11. The AI, the web of advertising. The freedom to not do what I want on my computer, how I want. Many reasons.
To also make my brain hurt a little bit more, because using a Windows PC is not nearly as challenging as it should be.