the push

I followed a typical path:

  1. desktops and laptops that came with Microsoft Windows installed
  2. Building my own machine - what OS to use? Oh, I’ll try Ubuntu. Works well!
  3. Minor frustrations with Ubuntu configurations. Aha, its derivative Linux Mint is much better!

Then, the final realisations:

  1. so often when I seek answers to a Linux question the Arch Linux wiki comes to the rescue
  2. the Debian upstream has a rare limitation - in my case, in 2015, it was Debian being stuck on an old version of lippng (TeX Live news: 2013 frozen, 2014 pretest, 2014 Debian), which percolated some limitation that I’ve now forgotten down into Linux Mint

So the jump to Arch Linux.

Oh wow, It takes days and days…

My first Arch install took weeks. It was winter, I had no heating and no work, and I plunged in. Inbetween morning runs alone by the river and evenings by my friend’s log fire, I learned how to install Arch, and loved it. I could’ve installed it much quicker than I did, but I wanted my install to be repeatable, so I worked at semi-automating what I was doing. Several years and a dozen installs later, I still install slowly because I still take time to improve my understanding of what I’m doing - of Bash, of Unix utilities, and of the many hidden components that make up a useable Linux system.

and it doesn’t get any better than this

I could install Linux Mint with a useable desktop environment in an hour or two, and I could live with the frustration of not being able to easily tweak it to my preferences, but I prefer spending the time to install Arch exactly how I want it, benefitting too from the excellent software repositories.

Apart from buying into Apple’s walled garden, as all my non-techy artist friends do for good reason, I can’t see how I could get any better OS than what I have with my minimalist CLI-heavy Arch installs.

My Arch Linux installation notes are here OS-ArchBuilds.

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