It’s a new year, and I think it’s time for a new OS. Ubuntu has been great for the past few years, and it really eased my transition from Windows to Linux. However, I’m not really excited about the direction Canonical is taking development, and it’s reached a point where it’s actually easier for me to go with another operating system than it is to tweak Ubuntu to my needs. I think I want to leave Debian altogether.
The Arch Way
After quite a bit of research, I decided that Arch Linux would be the best OS to try out. In reading about the Arch distribution, I was immediately drawn in by the design philosophy, as encapsulated by the following principals:
- Simplicity
- Correctness over convenience
- User-centric
- Openness
- Freedom
One of my biggest pet peeves are “idiot-proof” systems. Idiot-proof is a pejorative way of saying “tamperproof,” or “we’ve decided the best way to do things, and we’re limiting your options to do anything else.” True, you can use these systems and feel very safe, but you’re limited by someone else’s imagination.
I personally perform much better, and learn much more, when I’m free to experiment. So when systems like Ubuntu mask complicated operations behind a simple interface, I get grumpy. I have no idea what the system is doing, and no clear way to change the behavior if it’s something I don’t like.
Arch is the opposite. There is no easy install wizard, no sleek interfaces, and everything is out in the open. You run it without a safety net, but you get a system that’s built exactly the way you want. Awesome.
User resources
The other great thing about Arch is the wiki. The Arch Wiki is without question the best resource for Linux documentation anywhere. There is an entire Beginner’s guide to walk new users through the process of setting up Arch. It’s not as easy as some of the more popular systems, but it takes you through the process step by step and explains how and why to do things. You’ll learn a lot about how your system works, which will come in handy if you need to troubleshoot anything later.
The Arch Wiki also goes into great detail on subjects like Encryption, systemd, system administration and so on. Users of other operating systems would find the information there extremely useful.
Arch users themselves have a reputation for being fairly responsive and knowledgeable, and the forums are also a great resource if you run into problems. Chances are that if you’re experiencing a problem, others have already asked about it and reached a resolution. Along with the wiki, it is extremely unlikely that you will have a problem that can’t be fixed quickly.
My experience
I downloaded the current ISO over BitTorrent and burned the image to a bootable USB drive. From there, I simply followed the Beginner’s guide to configure and install the system. For the most part the process was relatively straightforward. I did set up block device encryption, in case the computer were to get stolen, and that took some extra reading. But the relevant wiki pages were straightforward too.
Networking, both WiFi and Ethernet, worked immediately and I was able to start adding and upgrading packages within a few minutes. I have plenty of RAM, so I didn’t bother with swap space. I did set this up on a machine with multiple hard drives, and I was able to configure fstab to mount them. All told, I think it was maybe 20 minutes of work, excluding the time spent reading up to understand what I was doing.
Arch doesn’t ship with anything graphical interfaces, so it’s up to the user to decide what they want to use. I actually love this idea, since I hate what GNOME has turned into over the last few years. I’m also not a huge fan of KDE; LXDE and XFCE aren’t too exciting either. Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME that was made for Linux Mint, which seemed like a good alternative.
One thing I learned in this process was the difference between a desktop environment and a window/display/login manager stack. Desktop environments provide a consistent user experience from start up to shutdown. But everything is very tightly integrated, which can mean it doesn’t work quite like I want. I want this computer to dedicate its resources to whatever I’m doing, not drawing eye candy that I’ll just ignore anyway.
I opted instead to set up a lightweight login manager and a tiling window manager. I picked SLiM and i3. What I love about i3 is the ability to configure exactly how my applications are displayed. I don’t have to waste any space on my screens. Also, it runs scripts, so I can configure multiple workspaces to launch when I log in. I couldn’t have dreamed of doing that with Ubuntu.
Final thoughts
I never thought a Linux distribution could actually make me feel giddy, but Arch is simply amazing. It lets me do exactly what I want, it’s easy to configure, and the internals are all easily accessible for me to look at and learn from. I probably learned more from this exercise than I have in all of my time with Ubuntu combined. I definitely plan to continue using Arch for now, and I would recommend it to anyone who cared to ask.