Arch Linux

After making my own Arch based distro and while enjoying the process quite thoroughly I found that I had shifted as a linux user towards being in the command line more and more. I felt the pains of a floating window manager and was starting to understand the appeal of a tiling manager for my workflow. Over the time while I was using my last Arch spin I also picked up neovim as my primary text editor for all my software development and that further accentuated my pain points with a floating wm. I have opted to go back to Archcraft since their configurations out of the box are very beautiful and sane. I've gone on to configure most of the theming myself but Archcraft has still been my favorite out of the box experience with an Arch based distro.

As summer 2024 kicked off I wanted to learn more about my system as a developer. I started contributing to Linux Mint and was a fan of the intuitive feel of the Cinnamon DE. I decided I wanted to learn more about making and packaging a simple Linux distribution. I fired up a vm, ran though the arch linux installation and spent a few weeks writing configuation scripts and setting up the calamares installer. My goal was to make a Linux Mint feeling distro that used pacman and the AUR and to that end I succeeded. It was a fun project that taught me a lot and a decent distro to daily drive for the short while that I did. I might return to it someday but for now I've moved on for my daily driver.

This install was the time where I finally left Windows for good. I had Arch full time on my laptop but still ran Windows on my PC for gaming reasons. I wanted a really lightweight and minimal DE this time around and Archcraft seemed braindead to install and also their Openbox version was minimal and performant. I used this distro for a decent amount of time and was able to still use my PC for gaming thanks to proton while having a minimal desktop and a great developer experience.

When I bought my laptop for college I knew I wanted to be doing all of my school work on Linux. So when it arrived the first thing I did was replace Windows 11 with Arch. I had done the manual Arch install before on a few occasions but hadn't daily drove the OS really at all up until this point. I wanted to get serious about being a developer but I didn't want to have to work to hard on customizing my OS. I opted for KDE Plasma 5 for that reason and it was honestly a great experience. Plasma will always have a special place in my Linux history though I will probably never go back to it due to how my personal preferences have shifted. This Arch install lasted the longest of any I've daily driven to this day and it taught me a lot as a user and a developer.

This install was done by my high school friend who was much more into Linux than I was at the time. I just knew that i3 looked cool and I wanted to be percieved as smart for having my computer look cool too. I did not last long with this install after managing to break grub through my incompetence in the command line. I quit due to may lack of knowledge but Arch stuck with me and had planted a seed in my brain. I knew I would go back to it one day when I was better at working with my computer and luckily I did! I'm proud to be an Arch user and I'm glad my failure didn't scare me away.