Why do I keep falling back into Arch evry single time?

Geevarghese Regi — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 03:24:15 +0000

"I use arch btw..."

Now that's something we all have seen or heard on the internet. I agree that the Arch community can be a little bit toxic, in toxic means they expect everyone to do the same amount of research like they did and finding out a solution on their own rather than spoon feeding them the information.
Arch Linux is a rolling-release distro , yada-yada-yada we all know that. Here is why I kept falling back into Arch even after being having a messed up system , multiple times.

In my early days of Linux usage , i was limited to a very very under-powered computer. A Pentium e5500 and 4gigs of ram just did not simply make the cut. And hence i had to resort to very less resource intensive things like a custom and striped down version of windows!

That is when i met Linux. I started off with Ubuntu , and later found out that Linux can go even lighter. I went and distro hopped for a whole year trying everything from Peppermint OS , Elementary to even Gentoo! I tried sticking to Debian based distros in the beginning because i was in 8th grade and boy I had no clue what "rm -rf /*" did back then let alone a whole different package manager like pacman.

I stuck with Linux Mint for a long while until i got my solid roots in Linux. Basic bash command, what services where, X11 , window managers etc. I read a lot of things about Arch. It was not for the faint of heart, It will take time to install , very unstabel takes too much effort , VERY LIGHTWEIGHT!

Aha I found arch to be a walking flag with one green flag and I fell for it (Not the first time ugh~). Anyways , downloading arch and finding a blank tty was well disappointing. Off to a VM i went , installed arch onto it and boy oh boy was i surprised by the 450Mb ram usage of the Arch+Xfce i did back then.

After a few weeks in VM i installed arch and used it for 2 straight years. Without any crashes? Well mostly yea!! Untill and unless i decided to well change the display manager a bit , or get another DE installed , it was just basic config errors which kinda made me unable to get back in and things. (I did not know about arch-chroot could fix all this back then , shame on me haha).

In the end Arch did exactly what it had to do for me. A very lightweight distro where I am in control , which is not much complicated. You can easily daily drive arch if you set it up correctly! A proper timeshift is probably all it takes for you to get it running for years!

DEV Community: Geevarghese Regi

Why do I keep falling back into Arch evry single time?