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diff --git a/src/published/arch-philosophy.txt b/src/published/arch-philosophy.txt deleted file mode 100644 index ff18521..0000000 --- a/src/published/arch-philosophy.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,24 +0,0 @@ -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. Arch very much feels like the end of the line for me --the bottom of the rabbit hole as it were. Once you have a system that does everything you need it to do effortlessly, why bother with anything else? Some of it might be a pain at times, 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. - -<img src="images/2020/desktop042020_uAICE8n.png" id="image-2325" class="picwide caption" /> - -**[Updated July 2021: Still running Arch. Still happy about it. I did switch back to Openbox instead of i3, but otherwise my setup is unchanged]** - -Why bother? Control. Simplicity. Stubbornness. 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 never learn; you never grow. That's no way to live. - -I used to be a devoted Debian fan. I still agree with the Debian manifesto, such as it is. In practice however I found myself too often having to futz with things. - -I came to Arch for the AUR, though the truth is these days I don't use it much. Then for a while I [ran Sway](/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-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](http://openbox.org/wiki/Main_Page) with [tint2](https://gitlab.com/o9000/tint2). I open apps with [dmenu](http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) and do most of my file system tasks from the terminal using bash (or [Ranger](http://nongnu.org/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. - -meaning I have no need to spend more than $400 on a laptop. - - -Arch's real strength though is how amazingly easy it is to package your own software. Because even Debian's epically oversized repos can't hold everything. The Debian repos pale next to the Arch User Respository (AUR), which has just about every piece of software available for Linux. And it's up-to-date. So up-to-date that half the AUR packages have a -git variant that's pulled straight from the project's git repo. The best part is there are tools to manage and update all these out of repo packages. I strongly suggest you learn to package and install AUR repos by hand, but once you've done that a few times and you know what's happening I suggest installing [yay](https://github.com/Jguer/yay) to simplify managing all those AUR installs. - -I've installed Arch on dozens of machines at this point. I started with my Macbook Pro, which I've since sold (no need for high end hardware with my setup), but it ran Arch like a champ (what a relief to not need OS X). 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. 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. |