I had a laptop refresh at work and decided to try running Arch Linux for the first time. I’ve used Ubuntu for workstations at a few other jobs, but not all of the places I worked supported this. The challenge I had for myself was to get a basic setup within a weeks time and then decide if I wanted to switch back to Ubuntu. A week turned into a month, but here’s some of my experiences.

Initial Impressions #

Arch has a reputation as being a challening linux distro to get up and running. I’m no stranger to running linux, but I would in no way consider myself an expert. So I was expecting my learning curve to be a bit steeper as most things worked (with a bit of effort) out of the box. With a little bit of effort largely meant reading through the installation guide and tweaking things to get it to work.

First boot #

What was fun about Arch is that the install gives you a kernel and very little else. During installation you can install packages, useful ones being networkmanager|(n)vim|sway|firefox, however there’s no recommendation on what do to. After that you’re dropped into a tty screen and if you (hopefully) setup an admin password(passwd) or regular user, you can login. Otherwise, it’s back to the boot media to create those users. Once you’re logged in, you’re basically given what I would consider a server.

At this point, I think it’s totally fair to wonder why you wouldn’t just install Ubuntu or Debian. You’d likely already have a working machine with all of your tools setup.

Without installing extra packages, the following things do not work:

• display manager
• networking
• bluetooth
• audio
• laptop clamshell functionality
• basic keyboard shortcuts like volume up/down
• network discovery for things like printers

Despite all of this, what I found most enjoyable was going through each of those components and learning a little bit deeper about how they work.

Tools learned #

Here’s a bit of what I learned in the first week.

• accessing wifi without a gui(nmcli, networkmanager)
• setting up disk from scratch(lsblk, fdisk, cfisdk)
• encrypting full disks(dm-crypt, luks, lvm, (pv|vg|lv)create, cryptsetup)
• filesystems(mkfs.$, mount)
• bootloaders(grub)
• audio/video(pactl, pipewire)
• bluetooth(bluez)

Biggest Surprise #

Arch has a well earned reputation for it’s learning curve. If you’ve used any Linux system before, then there’s a good chance you could piece things together. But what suprised me is how reasonable it was to get to a decent spot. Arch has is one of the better curated wiki’s with documentation for almost any problem you have. If that doesn’t work, they have a fairly active forum(though this is daunting). I used tools that I normally wouldn’t have considered(strace) to debug problems I was having. Every now and then I find setting things up easier on Arch then on Ubuntu(obs + scarlett focusrite).

Sharp Edges #

One of the more sharp edges that I’m having is around Sway + Wayland. A considerable amount of Gui’s are built with some form of QT. So for some reason, when I launch some GUI based applications, I run into some weird states. Chromium + Signal I need to launch with a special flag. I’m sure there’s a good reason for it, but to me it’s a bit magical.