This week was a holiday for me, fortunately. Technically, my work doesn’t offer standard holidays, except for the usual summer break in university education. However, after the merger with another local university, our new colleagues brought with them a lovely cultural shift: the assumption that the education-free weeks are holidays. So many of them take this as just a right, that our employer has basically given up and accepted this is a holiday week for educational staff. Part of that, I suspect, is the fact that 1 in 5 employees in education suffers from some sort of burn-out, according to the Dutch national statistics centre, CBS (at the top of that first graph, “Onderwijs” means “Education”). I imagine that this certain lax attitude towards the enforcement of certain policies is just considered risk management – the potential damage of formally enforcing this as not being a holiday would likely outweigh the financial benefits of having teaching staff available during this week.
So, I finally had some time and energy on my hands to do some things I’d been looking forward to for a while. One of which was to transfer my desktop PC over to Arch from Manjaro Linux. I’d originally kept my main PC on Manjaro based on the idea that I wanted a PC that just worked without much fuss, and assumed that personally maintaining Arch would cause more issues than having a more curated OS. Ironically, over time, my Manjaro-based desktop ended up having issues more often than my Arch-based laptop. Every so often, an update to Manjaro would prevent me from logging in to the X Server (an update to NVidia drivers would end up conflicting with lightdm-slick-greeter, or reset a configuration file), and I’d be left fixing that. Alternatively, I’d set things up exactly the way I wanted to on my laptop, and when I’d go back to using my desktop, I realized that it had a different setting or program that I did not prefer at all. So, with some more time on my hands, it was time for a change.
As I’d written before, I’ve installed Arch Linux a number of times over the past years, so the installation itself wasn’t that much of a problem. I was, of course, irrationally worried that I’d irreparably mess something up but that’s just usual nerves; the reality is that very little in Linux is irreparable. In fact, the process was surprisingly smooth and easy. Particularly given how Linux separates out files in its system hierarchy, it was incredibly easy to change the OS and still keep my old files and even installed games. So, now I finally fully run Arch Linux as a main driver, and I’m happily configuring and customizing when I want and as I see fit.