I love using Arch Linux (as a newbie).
>> Gorgeous Tux and sick Arch
I won’t say that I’m tech illiterate, but I have no professional experience using a computer. All of my knowledge comes from trying new hobbies that require tools, that I don’t know how to use, until the tools themselves become a hobby.
Linux was that tool that became a hobby.
Back in 2019, I wanted a media server. I was reading how Windows was trash for servers for a whole plethora of reasons, and how much better Linux was for the task. This rang in harmony with my hatred of Windows and I said screw-it and decided to install Ubuntu onto my server machine.
Now, I knew fuck-all about Linux. It was an anomaly that always intrigued me when I heard about it. At the time, it wasn’t as prevalent as it is today. Most moderately tech-savvy people at least had it in their vernacular, but for me, I only recognized it as a less baked alternative to Windows and MacOS.
So when I set out to make a media server, I needed the right tool for the job. That job wasn’t going to be easy for me. I started with the simple stuff like making a bootable flash drive, and flashing the OS. Then I threw myself into the deep end setting system services, configuring firewalls, writing shell scripts, making cron jobs, creating backups, managing permissions, setting up reverse proxies--
And the list just never stopped. I never accepted “I don’t know how to do that” as a reason to not do it, and I am so glad that this is just my personality.
I’m happy with my server, but what I really wanted to share today was installing Arch Linux on my main desktop. I had a year where I was on Fedora, but Linux wasn’t quite ready for my workflow yet.
A few weeks ago, I finally installed Arch Linux on my main machine, and holy shit, it is a breath of fresh air. I fucking hate Windows so much. It’s not even solely philosophical; I just hate interacting with that stupid OS that is always begging for my attention and breaking. Arch Linux is a breath of fresh air.
The experience installing it was a bit spooky, but after all the experience I gathered from the server over the years, it wasn’t bad. I went with the niri window manager and the noctalia-shell. The hardest part of the entire install was actually looking up all the names of the packages that were required to get this thing running properly.
Some real pain points were polkit, keyring, and figuring out how to make links inside of apps open in the browser.
I love that everything good and bad that happens to this machine is likely something that I did to it myself. Even pushing an update through too soon is still something within my power to prevent.
I will admit, it is kind of annoying setting up everything from scratch, but what really makes it worth it is that you only really suffer once. You set up your machine exactly how you like it, and it stays just like that. There won’t be an AI chatbot showing up in my menu bar, there won’t be any disgusting privacy-violating programs pop-up that I didn’t put there, and my configurations will always stay the same until I change them.
It also taught me so much about the Linux computer. I still don’t know that much and if you asked me to do it all again, I probably only retained a small fraction of what I did, but it would still be much easier the second time, and I recognize everything that showed up on my computer.
Really, this just goes out to say that I love Linux being an alternative option, and Arch as a distribution is fantastic.
/squawk <~
by untitled_operator