My experience with Arch Linux
Tired of Ubuntu and its variants, I decided to switch my working environment to Arch Linux, with a highly customized minimalist setup. This was the first and only entry on my old blog, originally in french.
5 August 2020 – Goulven CLEC'H
At the beginning of the year, I was tempted by the release of System76’s Pop!_OS 20.04, their Ubuntu-based distribution.
This distribution indeed has many appealing features, starting with one of the simplest and fastest installations available, a cleaner default Gnome (the window manager) experience than Ubuntu, but with some welcome additions like a tiling system (which doesn’t always work perfectly, especially with Gnome applications, but it’s still in beta) and a more comprehensive app store.
However, this distro is still based on Debian/Ubuntu, whose questionable technological choices and often outdated packages (NodeJS more than a year behind!) created a lot of daily friction for me. I was also frustrated with Gnome, which is very difficult to customize: most GTK Themes and extensions aren’t up to date, and making them yourself is unnecessarily complex and requires a lot of maintenance. Moreover, despite improvements, this WM continues to have many performance issues and some design elements are a bit dated or clunky (I’m particularly thinking of the app drawer and keyboard shortcuts).
Let’s be clear, I sincerely believe that 90% of users won’t have any problems with Pop!, it’s one of the best mainstream Linux distributions, which I would highly recommend to my friends and family.
But for my part, determined to get rid of daily frictions and frustrations,* I decided to finally abandon Ubuntu and Debian-based distributions. And to give Arch Linux another chance, but this time without using Manjaro. Thanks to 
Erika ‘s help, I managed to install and configure Arch fairly quickly, even though the process is obviously more complex and time-consuming than on PopOS.
I particularly struggled when, a few days later, I attempted (without my friend) to install Arch on my laptop. Indeed, while getting Internet on my desktop was as simple as plugging in an ethernet cable, I was forced to use wifi to connect my laptop but couldn’t find an up-to-date tutorial! The utilities they recommended had just been removed from the Arch installation ISO a few days earlier, and it took me some time to understand that I was supposed to use iwctl. Fortunately, the latter is very easy to use and its wiki page is already very comprehensive, I suppose the tutorials available on the Internet will gradually adapt to it.
Were all these adventures worth it? Absolutely.
First, we should put things in perspective by noting that this installation, while more complex, allows you to better understand what you’re doing and how your machine works. Also, during this installation you only install the software you want, which allows you to have an OS as light as you want it, with no dubious technology that someone else imposed on you!
Secondly, and this is the main reason for my return to Arch, I’m rediscovering Pacman, the AUR and Yay (the AUR Helper I use). It’s an incomparable experience with any other OS (Linux, BSD, MacOS, Windows combined) and for a developer it completely changes daily life: you have access with a single command line to any (free) software in its latest version (or any version you prefer), from a secure source.
Also, I’ve completely fallen in love with i3-gaps, which is a window manager that’s both minimalist and performant, allowing for a beautiful, easily customizable, ultra-minimalist desktop, while boosting your productivity with great keyboard shortcuts…
I spent several hours customizing my environment, and I’m very happy with the result. It’s deeply inspired by Horizon Visual Studio theme, and a minimalist aesthetic that I particularly appreciate.
The only thing I think I’ll change in the near future is the absence of a bar. Indeed, while currently on my setup with one screen, I prefer to have the cleanest desktop possible and force myself to use keyboard shortcuts I plan to install Polybar as soon as I have a second screen again (and only display it on the first one) to be able to occasionally navigate more easily with the mouse. And I want to try Fish as a shell to see if it helps me use the terminal more efficiently.
I never installed Polybar, who needs a bar anyway? But Fish was the best decision I made, and it’s still my favorite shell today.
In the meantime, I’m using the incredibly efficient and user-friendly Rofi as my keyboard-driven application launcher and window switcher. I love how simple it is to configure and customize, fitting perfectly with the minimalist philosophy of my setup.
To conclude, Arch will always remain a distribution to recommend only to the nerdiest among you, but for me it was a real breath of fresh air and allowed me to be much more comfortable with my computers these past weeks. If you’re interested, feel free to check out my configuration files (dotfiles) for inspiration!
Three years after writing this article, I fell to the Apple Silicon hype. While I’m very happy with these laptops from a hardware and price/performance perspective, and appreciate the comfort of a mainstream OS… Sometimes I face Apple’s software bullshit, like Liquid Glass, and I’m nostalgic of my Arch Linux setup.