btw i use arch

I’ve finally got around to installing Arch Linux on my laptop. Installing Arch was simple enough, the only problem that I’ve had was understanding the difference between a boot partition and a ‘boot partition’. A BIOS boot partition is a type of a partition, whereas a ‘boot partition’ is a partition you create for your /boot/ directory - you don’t actually need a ‘boot partition’, while a boot partition is more or less required - manually telling your boot loader (most likely GRUB) where everything is located is way too tedious.

Programs I run

The first thing that I installed was GNOME3. I run GNOME on my Ubuntu desktop and it works just fine, I especially like the DE; it looks nice out of the box and the Activities tab is amazing. But that’s mutter36 (mutter is the GNOME DE). mutter40 is nothing like it. As of now I run xfce4 on my laptop and it’s alright, albeit a little retro. Actually, xfce’s so vintage that it might be the best desktop environment for an eldery person, but that’s neither here or there. I’m actually thinking of switching to dwm or i3, but I’m yet to decide which one is better. For the login manager I’ve chosen LightDM - it just worked.

I don’t run NetworkManager, because I have no need for it - just connecting to wi-fi with iwd and running a dhcpcd daemon in the background works for me. I also installed an iwd frontend program, because some normal person might have to input a wi-fi password into my laptop someday.

I use udisks with udiskie for automating USB mounting. I also run gvfs, so I can have a Trash bin (which is less useful than I’ve thought). gvfs also seems to provide an alternative to insync, but it remains unclear whether you can actually use gvfs effectively without all the GNOME bloat.

I use CUPS directly for printer manging. I even have a desktop shortcut to a chromium app that starts the CUPS web gui.

I also considered installing a cron-like program (most probably anacron) and running a simple pacman update script, but after a little research, I’ve decided to postpone creating such cron job. If after a while of updating nothing breaks, I will surely consider it.

Final thoughts

As of now, Arch Linux is my favourite distro; it boots faster than Ubuntu, it eats a lot less RAM (which is cool, becouse now I can brag on the internet about how little memory my setup needs) and the package manager seems to be full of useful programs, especially compared to apt. Also, there’s AUR, which looks like a both more managable and faster version of snap,