Chapter 1 — nari418
I'm a teapot. I use Arch, btw.
Until a little over a month ago, I had barely used Linux.
One of the things that nudged me toward it was seeing, somewhere, that
Linux seemed to be gaining market share.
Huh. Linux is getting more popular?
That was about the depth of my analysis. I also happened to have an old
Dell laptop collecting dust.
Well… why not put Linux on it?
I knew Ubuntu. By which I mean: I knew the name Ubuntu.
A little over a month later, I have manually installed Arch Linux eight
times.
No, installing Arch is not my hobby. At least I don't think it is.
I did it because Hyprland refused to see my keyboard, and eventually I
really wanted to know why.
Also, minor detail: without a keyboard, the PC was not exactly useful.
I'm 53. I don't work in IT. I live far closer to ordinary rural life
than to Silicon Valley.
I know what ls and cd do. echo is still dangerously close to
'eh-cho?' in my head. I know Tab completion exists. I've pressed Tab.
Results have been mixed.
I only recently started using the Up Arrow like it was a revolutionary
new feature.
So how does that person end up manually installing Arch eight times in a
month? It starts with that unused Dell.
It Started With an Old Dell
I had an old Dell laptop sitting around and thought, 'Let's put Linux on
it.'
I'd heard of Ubuntu, but since I was already looking things up, I asked
the obvious question: what else is there?
Fedora came up. I read that it tends to adopt newer technologies
relatively quickly.
Okay. That one.
Looking back, my selection criteria may have been broken from the
beginning. I wasn't choosing what sounded easiest. I was choosing what
sounded interesting.
I installed Fedora. It worked. I poked around.
Huh. Okay.
That was roughly my reaction.
Fedora Introduced Me to Workspaces — Before I Understood Them
Fedora's GNOME desktop felt very different from the Windows workflow I'd
used for years. One task on a screen. Move between workspaces. Keep
things separated.
Conceptually, I could see the point. In practice, I had no instinct for
using workspaces yet.
When I wanted another app, I'd go back through the Overview, find what I
wanted, and think:
Why am I going through this screen every single time?
Now I understand that this was much more about GNOME's workflow than
Fedora itself.
At the time, I didn't even know what GNOME was. 'Window manager' wasn't
part of my vocabulary. Fedora basically equaled GNOME in my head.
And honestly, I wasn't hooked on Linux yet.
Then I found another unused machine.
Then I Put Linux Mint on a Surface
I had a Microsoft Surface sitting around too. I figured Linux might turn
it into a nice lightweight machine, so this time I searched for
something lightweight and easy to use.
Linux Mint kept coming up.
I installed it. My first reaction:
Oh. This feels like Windows.
That made it immediately understandable. After years of Windows, I knew
where everything was supposed to be.
But after using it for a while, my completely subjective first
impression was:
This feels a little like… discount Windows?
Mint users: please lower the pitchforks.
I'm not claiming Mint is inferior to Windows. I'm describing what a guy
with maybe a few days of Linux experience felt at that moment.
I've since discovered that Linux people can have Opinions. Capital-O
Opinions. Occasionally I have to remind myself we're discussing
operating systems and not theology.
I've only been here a month. Please give me a little more time before I
join a distro holy war.
…I'll probably get there.
The Surface Was the Rabbit Hole
The real problem wasn't Mint. It was the Surface.
Bluetooth keyboard weirdness. A very Surface-like display resolution.
Small things that kept producing the same question:
Why?
I didn't know, so I searched. That answer introduced another Linux term.
I searched that. Which introduced another term. So I searched that too.
Somewhere around here, something changed.
Using Linux was fine. Figuring out why Linux was doing something became
more interesting than simply using it.
And during one of those searches, I found Arch Linux.
Arch Linux? That Sounds Interesting
I read about Arch. Minimal base system. Install what you need. Build
your own environment.
Oh. That sounds fun.
So I installed it. Manually.
Why would a complete beginner manually install Arch?
Not because I had developed some grand 'real Arch users install
manually' philosophy.
The reason was much simpler: I didn't know archinstall existed. Or
at least I hadn't researched far enough to notice it.
So I did it by hand.
In retrospect, this should probably have been a warning sign about my
personality.
And Then I Found Hyprland
While researching Arch, I came across Hyprland. I watched videos and
looked at screenshots.
Tiling. Animations. Keyboard-driven. Very slick.
I want that.
That was basically the entire product evaluation.
So I installed it.
And I had absolutely no idea how to use it.
I didn't understand the controls. I didn't understand the configuration.
It was far removed from the desktop model I'd used for years.
Eventually, I installed KDE Plasma instead.
A note about this article: I use AI to help edit my writing, but the
experiences, tests, mistakes, and opinions are mine. I'll occasionally
jump in with notes like this when the cleaned-up version starts hiding
how little I actually knew at the time.
For example: at this point I genuinely didn't know what a WM was. I
thought Fedora and GNOME were basically the same thing, and I didn't
even know Kubuntu existed. I was finding things in search results and
thinking, 'Sure, let's try that.'
KDE Plasma Was Almost Too Easy
I still remember launching KDE Plasma and thinking:
What the hell? This is easy.
It just worked. There were settings. I could do things in a GUI. At one
point I honestly wondered whether it was easier than Windows.
I used KDE for a while. It was comfortable. Nothing particularly
bothered me.
Then I noticed something: I had almost stopped opening the terminal.
For most people, that would probably count as a feature.
My brain chose a different response.
Wait. What am I doing differently from Windows?
Technically, of course KDE and Windows are different. That wasn't the
point. Windows was already sitting right there. I hadn't started this
experiment because I needed another way to use a computer exactly the
same way.
So I went back to Hyprland.
Hyprland Made Workspaces Click
The second time was different.
First: keybindings. I don't have to grab the mouse, hunt for an icon,
and click it? I can just press a key?
Then tiling. I don't have to arrange windows myself?
Then workspaces.
Wait. Workspaces are ridiculously useful.
The thing that had confused me on GNOME suddenly made sense. My reaction
changed from 'Why am I switching screens?' to 'Why wasn't I doing this
years ago?'
Eventually I started wondering whether I even needed a traditional
desktop at all.
At the same time I was thinking, 'Wait… I actually use the terminal
quite a lot now.'
That's roughly where I am today.
Then Linux Changed the Way I Use Windows
I haven't abandoned Windows. I still use it for work.
But after spending time in Hyprland, something weird happened when I
went back.
I started using Windows virtual desktops. I'd barely touched them
before. Then I started setting up keyboard shortcuts. Then I noticed I
was opening PowerShell all the time.
Why wasn't I using PowerShell before?
Please don't ask me, 'So what can you do in PowerShell now?' To me
that's like asking, 'What can you do with a computer?' I don't have a
neat answer. Linux users may understand the feeling. The measurable fact
is simple: I open terminals a lot more than I used to.
I thought I was experimenting with moving away from Windows. Instead,
Linux changed the way I use Windows.
Apparently I wasn't looking for a Windows replacement. I was looking for
a different way to use a computer.
How Did I Get This Far in One Month? AI.
At this point you may reasonably be asking: how is someone with one
month of Linux experience manually installing Arch?
One answer is AI.
When I didn't understand something, I asked. When I got an error, I
showed it. When I didn't understand a command, I asked what it did. I
had AI help research packages and documentation.
I used ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
Without AI, I don't think I could have gotten this far this quickly.
I also learned something else: AI is perfectly capable of being wrong.
Confidently wrong. Sometimes several AIs can march confidently in the
same wrong direction together.
At one point, while I was investigating Hyprland configuration, all
three were steering me the wrong way. A guy with one month of Linux
experience ended up arguing with three AIs:
No. Go look up the Lua config.
Something about that situation felt backwards.
So I stopped treating AI output as the answer. AI researches. I touch
the actual machine. I observe what happens. If reality disagrees, I tell
the AI, 'Nope. Here's what actually happened.' Then we investigate
again.
That workflow seems to fit me.
AI got me here faster. Blindly trusting AI probably would have prevented
me from getting here at all.
Then I Tried to Build a “Pure” Hyprland Environment
I wanted an Arch + Hyprland setup without KDE Plasma — as little extra
stuff as practical, adding only what I actually wanted.
This is probably partly Linux philosophy and partly just me. You know
the kind of person who buys a new PC and immediately starts uninstalling
the manufacturer's preloaded software? I'm apparently that guy, taken to
my current logical extreme: start small and add only what I choose.
Along the way I've also developed a growing respect for open source, and
a mild suspicion of black boxes. Then something happens and that opinion
flips around and I think, 'Okay, hardware and OS vendors are actually
doing an absurd amount of work for us.' I'm still figuring out how I
feel about all of that.
Anyway, I manually installed Arch. Then Hyprland. Then Kitty.
I launched Hyprland.
The desktop appeared.
Nice.
I pressed Super+Q.
Nothing.
I pressed it again.
Still nothing.
The keyboard wasn't working inside Hyprland.
So I checked what input devices Hyprland could see:
hyprctl devices
The result was effectively:
Keyboards: 0
Mice: 0
Hyprland was running. The display worked. But as far as Hyprland was
concerned, my input devices did not exist.
Why?
I didn't know it yet, but chasing that one stupid little question would
eventually lead me to manually install Arch Linux eight times.
Most of those installs were typed by hand.
For the record, I still wasn't properly using Tab completion.
So… Do You Actually Want Chapter 2?
That's where one month of Linux has taken me.
I'm not a Linux expert, and I'm not trying to cosplay as one. I still
occasionally stare at basic commands and think, 'Wait, what does this
one do again?'
But there is one thing I can do: document what actually happened.
What worked. What failed. When AI was wrong. When I was wrong. And when
something can be reproduced, try to reproduce it.
That's what I did with this Hyprland problem.
Once. Twice. Again. And eventually, on the eighth manual Arch install, I
narrowed it down to this: installing one particular package changed the
machine from 'Hyprland sees zero input devices' to fully working —
immediately, without even rebooting.
I'm stopping this chapter there.
Not because I want to hide the fix behind a paywall. I don't. The
investigation from that point onward became technical enough to deserve
its own article.
If you're currently staring at an empty hyprctl devices output and a
dead keyboard, Chapter 2 will publish the solution and the evidence
openly.
But first I want to find out whether anyone actually wants to read it.
In this first month alone I've also built a server, played with
networking, used Tailscale, and made plenty of mistakes. At this rate, I
will almost certainly break more things.
If your reaction is, 'Okay, what is this 53-year-old going to break
next?' — leave a comment or reaction. If I've gotten something wrong,
tell me that too. I'll check it, and if it needs correcting, I'll
correct it.
And if something I write eventually saves you enough time that you feel
like buying me a coffee, I'll happily drink it. If enough coffees
somehow turn into a test SSD someday, even better. If they ever turn
into another test PC, that would be objectively hilarious — because I
will almost certainly break that one too and write about it.
For now, though:
Do you want Chapter 2?
About the Author
nari418 — 53, non-IT professional, rural Japan. Linux experience: a
little over one month. Manual Arch installs: eight and counting.
Learning by asking questions, testing on real hardware, and occasionally
arguing with AI when the machine says otherwise.
I'm a teapot. I use Arch, btw.
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