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.