Why I Switched to Arch Linux

Everyone seems to have a post about why they ended up with Arch. This is mine.

I recently made the switch to Arch Linux for my primary desktop and it’s been great. If you’re a Linux user with some experience, I highly suggest you give Arch a try. The installation is a little bit of a pain, hand partitioning, hand mounting and generating your own fstab files, but it teaches you a lot. It pulls back the curtain so you can see that you are in fact the person behind the curtain, you just didn’t realize it.

[Updated July 2021: Still running Arch. Still happy about it. I did switch back to Openbox instead of i3/Sway, but otherwise my setup is unchanged]

Why Arch? The good old DIY ethos, which is born out of the realization that if you don’t do things yourself you’ll have to accept the mediocrity that capitalism has produced. You’ll never learn; you’ll never grow. That’s no way to live.

I used to be a devoted Debian fan. I still agree with the Debian manifesto, but in practice however I found myself too often having to futz with things and figure out how to get something to work. I know Arch as the reputation of being unstable, but for me it’s been exactly the opposite. It’s been five years now and I have never had an issue.

I came to Arch for the AUR, though the truth is these days I don’t use it much anymore since I don’t really test software anymore. For a while I ran Sway, which was really only practical on Arch. Since then though I went back to X.org. Sorry Wayland, but much as I love Sway, I did not love wrestling with MIDI controller drivers, JACK, and all the other elements of an audio/video workflow in Wayland. It can be done, but it’s more work, and I don’t want to work at getting software to work. I’m too old for that shit. I want to plug in a microphone, open Audacity, and record. If it’s any more complicated than that — and it was for me in Wayland with the mics I own — I will find something else. I really don’t care what my software stack is, so long as I can create what I want to create with it.

Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety percent of the time I’m writing in Vim in a Urxvt window. I need smooth scrolling and transitions like I need a hole in my head. I also set up Openbox to behave very much like Sway, so I still have the same shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, I can’t tell the difference. Well, that’s not true. Vim works fine with the clipboard again, no need for Neovim.

My Arch setup these days is minimalist: Openbox with tint2. I open apps with dmenu and do most of my file system tasks from the terminal using bash (or Ranger if I want something fancier). Currently my setup uses about 200MB of RAM with no apps open. Arch doesn’t have quite the software selection of Debian, but it has most of the software you’d ever want. My needs are simple: bash, vim, tmux, mutt, newsboat, mpd, mpv, git, feh, gimp, darktable and dev stuff like python3, postgis, etc. Every distro has this stuff.

I’ve installed Arch on dozens of machines at this point. Currently I use a Lenovo x270 that I picked up off eBay for $300. I added a larger hard drive, a second hard drive, and 32-gigabytes of RAM. That brought to total cost to about $550. It runs Arch like a champ and gives me all I could ever want in a laptop. Okay, a graphics card would be nice for my occasional bouts of video editing, but otherwise it’s more than enough.