Tag: Arch

I use Arch, BTW

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.

Arch Linux and Regular People

Often, when I read about Arch Linux online, there is an odd sense of gatekeeping in comment threads and articles. Arch Linux is seen as a hardcore OS to use. In fact, a common post on /r/archlinux is a proud post describing how somebody spent several hours, trying multiple times to install Arch until they finally managed to make it work. Hardcore fans disparage users of Manjaro as though using Manjaro is a display of weakness. It’s gotten to the point where “btw I use Arch” has become an Internet meme. And yet, I would really recommend Arch.

It’s easy to think that Arch Linux is for programmers; many of the posters online are, or at the least work in IT or have studied Computer Science, or something similar. I am no such thing. In fact, Linux use has taught me some basic programming skills. A common point of praise for Arch is the ability to tweak the system completely to your liking. For some, that means squeezing the absolute most out of their machines: I once read a post where people almost competed to have the quickest boot-up times, arguing over miliseconds as though it was a speedskating event. For me, it’s more about knowing what’s on my laptop. I enjoy the experience of wanting to do something, then just immediately installing a program to do it, and then to go and do that thing. What’s on my laptop is what I put on there, because I wanted it to be.

Doing things this way has taught me about computers, however. Having to learn to program taught me a little about how computers work. Having to understand the Linux filesystems has taught me about the implicit choices in filesystem hierarchies. Having to learn about user and group permissions have made me consider sharing options in Windows as well. Basically, using Linux has made me think about things that I never bothered to think about, even though it’s good to have done so.

I find I reap the benefits of this at work. Now, when we have to switch to a new system, such as when we had to make full use of Office365 when the COVID-19 lockdowns hit last March, I found it easy to adjust to new systems, because I was used to analysing how they interacted. When we needed to set up new interactions between these (such as, let’s say, Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Lists), I could see some analogues to Linux systems, and I could recognize a type of WYSIWYG-interface that tried to abstract code in the background. Despite not working in an IT environment, understanding just a little more of how these systems work has helped me bridge gaps there that I couldn’t have before.

And, on top of that, using Linux is just fun. When I’m back to using Windows 10 on my day-to-day work laptop, it surprises me how clunky Windows is as a system, and how I never noticed that before I really started optimizing my workflow on Linux using i3WM. Let alone that I never bothered to think about workflow before doing that. So, even for us non-programmer, non-IT, non-computery people, I really recommend using Linux.

Experiments in Arch Linux

For the past couple of years, every so often I try to install Arch Linux on one of my laptops to see if I can reasonably work with it. Over time, every time I’ve installed it, I’ve made it more and more functional. Usually, I would into some practical problem that would prevent me from doing what I’d want with it, and I’d end up installing Manjaro on it to just have a working system. The first time, I got stuck on trying to get networking to work (NetworkManager or iproute2 are the answer); the next, I was stuck in the commandline interface (installing xorg-server ended up being the answer); after that, I got an Xorg server running, but couldn’t properly install a desktop environment (I ended up going to i3wm); and so on, and so on. This time, however, I’ve gotten farther than I ever have.

Ever since I fully switched my desktop over to Linux, I’ve had to solve more and more issues myself. Pretty much every time, the real issue was just my ignorance – I’d have updated something without properly reading what the consequences where, or something would break because I didn’t do a simple fix, or things along those lines. The consequence of solving these, though, is that this time around when I installed Arch Linux, I didn’t really run into many issues anymore. Or, more accurately, I encountered the same thresholds, but I’m not getting stuck on them anymore. Sure, I had no sound after the first boot, but that just made sense, because I had no drivers installed. So, a quick install later, some referencing of the Arch Wiki, and I was done.

Similarly, this time around, when I ran into features that I was lacking, I at least had some idea of what I’d want. I’ve experimented a little bit, so I know a program or two that does what I need, and I can more accurately decide which of those I want. Or, as I have been noticing now, I have obtained decent enough skills to implement a minimal fix myself. Running i3wm from a basic install meant I didn’t have my media buttons active yet. No big problem, I just needed to reference the i3wm documentation to see what the syntax was, reference my keyboard layout to see what my key names are (just to confirm it was the default), and them implement a simple volume-up and volume-down key combo. Then I noticed there was no feedback to using those. Well, install a notification daemon, use pactl to list a bunch of info that includes my current volume, grep out the volume, awk out the exact number, pass that to dunst, and done.

Implementing that made me really feel comfortable with Linux. That was a moment when I really saw a set of separate skills come together into a single solution to a simple problem that just a year ago would have me reinstall Manjaro Linux rather than work it out myself. This is the point where there’s a Souls-like enjoyment: I’ve butted my head against the problems long enough, and thanks to my perseverance, I’ve now gained enough experience to start netting a win here and there.

Now, on to solving the next little thing I want to improve in this setup . . .