Two Months with Arch Linux: Lessons from a Former Windows User

• Hello everyone, feels like ages since I wrote my last blog, but in the meantime, I was doing important stuff (like playing games and scrolling Instagram). Enough with my grumbling — as you must have read the title, I have officially switched to the “I use Arch, btw” syndrome!!!

• Now, if you don’t know about me, I am Ashish, and I have been a Windows user since I started using computers, which is nearly 15 years ago. But recently, I’ve thought it’s as good a time as any to switch to Arch, be a real programmer, and add it to my resume so ATS can go crazy over it. (Yep, you’re thinking right — this is how delusion looks like.)

• But, in all honesty, my laptop is 6–7 years old, and even when I haven’t started anything, it’s still using quite a lot of memory and CPU. God knows where all these resources are being used, and God forbid if I open VS Code — it goes crazy. Have you ever heard the sound of a helicopter? That’s exactly the sound the fans of my laptop generate.

• So, blaming all of this on Windows, I decided to switch to Arch. Now, this is some crazy shit for me because I have never used Linux (except in college labs). Therefore, one might say, “Go for something beginner-friendly like Mint or Ubuntu, or something intermediate like Fedora or Debian.” But rational decisions are never my forte, and I am here for experience farming, so let’s go with Arch to maximize experience farming.

Breaking the system more == more experience.

• Well, now enough chitchat — it’s time to switch to Arch Linux. Yep, you heard it right: no useless research, let’s jump directly into it... (I ended up doing a lot of research in the end, but this was my attitude in the beginning.)
• We will be discussing why and how I switched to Arch Linux, and also the problems I faced while doing so!!

Problem 1

• Even before I started the Linux boot, I ran into a problem: I didn’t know how to access my laptop’s BIOS mode. The F1/F2 button press trick didn’t seem to work on my laptop???
• After spending 2 hours finding a way to access BIOS, I figured out Lenovo has gone out of their way to add a kind of hole on the side of the laptop, which, when pressed using a pin, activates BIOS mode. WOW — peak example of overengineering.

Help Resources

• Video: Arch Linux Installation Guide
• Arch Wiki: Main Page

I followed instructions from this video, had to Google a few things, and did some wiki reading. Actually, after watching the video, the wiki started making sense. I don’t know how this happened lol!

After dealing with iwctl (Linux way to connect to Wi-Fi), rfkill (Linux way to block/unblock Wi-Fi/BT drivers), and many more commands, I had to decide the most important question of my installation process…

Desktop Environment

• Which desktop environment should I choose? If you have no idea what a DE is, it’s basically the GUI (graphical user interface) for your OS. There are many options like KDE, GNOME — but all of them are user-friendly (BLOATED). Like, what do you mean there’s a Settings app, image viewer, and notification system inbuilt? Sounds BLOATED to me!
• So I went with Hyprland, a standalone desktop environment. It’s barebones — comes with hyprland.conf and nothing else. You need to set up everything by yourself. Now, that feels like the true Arch Linux experience 😉.

Docs

• Hyprland is a tiling window manager with one of the coolest websites, aesthetics, and docs I’ve ever seen. Check it out here: Hyprland.

Problem 2

• I forgot the partition where I had my Windows installed and where I wanted to install Arch. I had to cancel the entire process, log into Windows again (dual boot benefits), check the partition name, and restart the installation. Finally, after manually partitioning and running the Arch install script, I can now say I’ve achieved the “I use Arch, btw” syndrome.

Problem 3

• Now I faced a new problem: after typing my password on the login page, it just didn’t work. God knows why — did I mess up the installation?
• After hours of research on Reddit and the Hyprland wiki, I found a solution: log into TTY (terminal) using Fn+Ctrl+Alt+F3, enter my username and password, then type hyprland to log into the Hyprland environment. Whoever thought this was intuitive deserves a raise.
• Reddit posts blamed SDDM, but who cares? We are now in Hyprland <yet another emoji insert>.

Hyprland

• Absolutely beautiful!!!! That’s what Hyprland is. To all people, I recommend getting a tiling window manager — amazing stuff.
• But when they said I’d need to set up everything, they meant everything: image viewer, audio player, video player, wallpaper utility, notification panel, screenshot tool, clipboard manager, and much more…

Dot Files

• After seeing so many Linux “rices” on r/unixporn, the default configs didn’t feel great. I considered downloading others’ dotfiles, but decided against it because:

1. Bloat: 100 wallpapers, 50 Pokémon-themed terminals? No thanks.
2. Experience: Configuring things myself builds confidence. Also, as I said rational decisions are not my forte.

Hyprland config and tools

• After reading the Hyprland wiki and tweaking hyprland.conf for shortcuts, I needed other utilities:
• Apps: VLC, Brave.
• Terminal: Kitty (configured via docs), quite feature-rich, as it consists of an image viewer, with built-in 500+ themes.

• Clipboard: CopyQ (supports images!).
• Wallpaper: Hyprpaper.

Problem 4

• Had some weird issue with brave scaling needed to run various commands, now I seem to have lost track of what solved the issue, feels like I need to maintain a doc of which commands are getting executed or this will be the end of my linux experience.

Problem 5

• Now I just realized my mic is not working on Google Meet on Firefox, and for screen sharing on Edge.
• After doing many things nothing worked(xdg portal, other audio packages etc) but got pavucontrol which made life easy by GUI audio sources and level controlling, also brave seems to solve these problem so will leave this problem here, in future when I will have enough knowledge to battle this problem then will come back.

Problem 6

• Now, another problem: Discord seems to have issues detecting audio and screen sharing. I spent two days trying to solve this. In the end, I got Vesktop (a Discord client), and it solved all these problems. So I learned how it works—consider it an app with an internal browser where this website gets displayed. Great idea!!! https://github.com/Vencord/Vesktop

Other tools

• I tried searching whether it’s possible to turn websites into apps on Linux—and I found Nativefier, which does exactly that. It turns websites into standalone apps/clients and works as smooth as butter. I’ve already turned two websites into clients.

• Up until now, I’d been using Nano as my editor, but it’s time to ascend to the next level of the “I use Arch, btw” syndrome—enter the “I use Neovim and Arch, btw” phase.

• Now, although making rational decisions isn’t really my thing, I decided to make an exception. I installed a preconfigured version of Neovim called NvChad, and after setting it up, I have just one question: Why is everything in Linux so goddamn cool looking? Look at this!

After learning how to exit nvim and some other basic shortcuts, it’s time for the status bar:

• Like Windows has a taskbar, I decided to get one too. I ended up going with Waybar, as you can see at the top of all the images above. I found some really cool configurations for Waybar in this repo: https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar/wiki/Examples.

• I also set up a few configs for Wofi (the default app launcher) to make it look slick.

• Downloaded the FiraCode Nerd Font to improve the text appearance, and installed Blueman Manager for managing Bluetooth devices. I use feh for image viewing—though I’m pretty sure I could do that in Kitty as well.

• I’ve added Hypridle to trigger system idle after a specific time of inactivity, and Hyprlock to lock the screen after idle time or sleep. For system info, I use Fastfetch and Neofetch—they look great!

• For the notification daemon, I’m using Swaync, and Hyprshot for taking screenshots. I’ve also got some other tools like:

  • Obsidian and Cohesion (Notion client) for note-taking
  • Yazi for command-line file management
  • Starship to beautify the Bash prompt
  • autojump-z for jumping between directories
  • Timeshift to track system state over time
  • btop as my Linux task manager
  • Font Manager to manage system fonts

  I use Flatpak and Yay to install packages that aren’t available in Pacman.

2 months later

• **Now today, I complete 2 months of using Arch Linux. \ Although I had some issues with audio—both in VESktop and after a few system updates—overall, it’s been a pretty good experience.

  TL;DR: Arch is my daily driver, and it’s working quite smoothly.

  PS: All screenshots are post-configuration. See you next time!