Arch

For whatever reason I decided to switch to Arch Linux on my primary laptop. I had been using Manjaro somewhat happily for a while, and figured I could use a change. Also, there was a weird week or two where my audio controls just randomly went haywire. I’m not sure it had anything to do with Manjaro, but the maybe was enough to get me to start thinking about other distributions. Some similar impulse was how I ended up on Manjaro in the first place (previously Debian).

I had bailed on an Arch installation before, but I figured, if I wiped my main laptop and went for it, I’d have no choice but to go all the way. I figured, as long as I got into a GUI and a web browser, I could handle the rest as I realized I needed it. What I didn’t realize was that it would be another 3 hours of typing at the CLI before I finally figured everything out.

It has you start from formatting your own boot partition. Having spent some time repeatedly formatting and partitioning SD cards for my Rasperry Pi stack, I wasn’t super worried about this.

Things got annoying when I realized the network doesn’t come set up out of the box, which is a problem because you need that to install stuff on an OS that comes with nothing installed. So that’s when I learned me some iwctl. It’s actually a pretty handy tool and I’m probably actually going to come back to it some day for a real-world scenario, but also takes an extra step to get it to handle DHCP. Even now I don’t fully understand Linux networking. Every little function and layer is split up across config files and daemons all over the place.

And then it came time to get the GUI going. I think what I have here is the Plasma desktop environment, on top of an Xorg display server, using the SDDM display manager. Something went wrong along the way and I found myself looking at the X windows without the Plasma layer on top, and wow that was pretty horrific.

Anyway, I think I’m out the other side, almost to the point where I was in Manjaro. Maybe need to tweak some themes a bit. Jury’s still out on this Gruvbox console theme.