Adventures Through Arch

A cartoon image, from the shoulders up, of a curly brown haired white woman wearing glasses, a purple top, and gray dungarees. Behind are large stripes in black, gray, white and purple, with faint stars. Jessica
Word Count: 2390
Reading Time: 12 Minutes
Category: Basement
Tags: Setup Linux

A couple of months ago, I was given a laptop by someone I knew, an old Macbook Pro with a busted charging port (“it works when constantly plugged in with this exact cable positioned at this exact angle and you can’t ever unplug it…”). I decided to play around with some different Linux distributions, known as distros, and desktop environments and compositors. In this long post, I’ll go into what I was tried, what I liked, what I didn’t like, as well as how all this affected how I wanted to use my desktop on a day-to-day basis.

Into The Deep End

Not entirely sure what compelled me, but I decided to go right in and install Arch Linux with the Hyprland Wayland compositor, and gradually built up the accompanying hyprland.conf to include keybindings and auto-starting applications, which led to me playing around with staples of Hyprland, such as kitty, Dunst, awww, rofi, Starship and Waybar. As a novice, this took me an extremely long time and I made plenty of mistakes, resulting in a few fresh reinstalls. However, I really liked having complete control over customisation, and I loved how I navigated through the desktop environment through keyboard shortcuts (SUPER/meta + F, to open my file browser, for example), using rofi like Alfred or vicinae to open unbinded applications, and how windows management was auto-tiled. On a laptop, where room on the screen is a premium and without a mouse, I found it particularly great as I found myself reaching for the touchpad less and became more used to operating and navigating the laptop just through the keyboard.

When it came to Arch itself, finding and installing what I needed piece by piece was quite an experience, and although I again made lots of mistakes, I also learned a lot and became very acquainted with the command line! One of the aspects I liked the most was the package managing, running sudo pacman -Syu for updating everything. Although I had used an Arch-based distro a few years ago, I had forgotten how great this feature was. The official repository had most of the software I wanted on a laptop, and if not, the gaps were filled by the Arch User Repository, or via Flatpaks, so I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything.

It was hard to assess performance of Arch or Hyprland on old hardware, and the battery was always going to be awful whenever that cable did pop up the loose charging port, but what I could assess, I was really happy with. As such, after swimming around in all things Arch and Hyprland for a while, I began to wonder about using it on my desktop as my main distro and desktop environment. Admittedly, Hyprland did take an effort to set up, but most of the customisation was done through that .conf file and various settings found in ~/.config, which could be easily copied-and-pasted over to other devices - in fact, the community have dubbed such files as dotfiles and they’re shared all over the internet as people showcase how they’ve customised their set ups.

Baby Steps

I began more sensibly this time. Instead of just wiping my daily driver and going all in, I decided to first overwrite my Macbook Air laptop (older and with worse specifications, but less issues around power and charging) that was running openSUSE Leap, just to see how easy it would be to migrate everything over. It was actually a bit of a disaster, I think the laptop’s age made all sorts of issues with compatibility and so it just didn’t work with Arch. Not to worry too much, I decided I could use an Arch based OS with some added assistance, and chose to go back to Endeavour OS (the distro I was using a few years ago on this laptop), which worked much better. Hyprland however, still wasn’t happy, and I’d done this migration at the worst time possible - right during a changeover from the hyprlang .conf file being the main driver of customisation, to a new lua based file instead. As such, of course, nothing really worked, and I encountered so many errors - thank goodness I didn’t wipe my main desktop and try all this!

Yes, I could, of course, have spent time migrating and converting the files over to the new format, but I wanted a working laptop and the Macbook Pro was no longer booting up after the charging cable fell out and it discharged quietly over the past couple of days. As such, I decided to reinstall Endeavour OS and choose a desktop environment I was comfortable with and understood, KDE, which is used with Fedora as my main desktop. It worked straight away, but muscle memory kept trying to run keybindings and I missed the auto-tiling on my small screen. So, I went searching, surely there are ways to bring these aspects of Hyprland to KDE? Indeed there are!

KDE

First, KDE have a whole section in their settings for keyboard shortcuts and can be easily modified - though be prepared for lots of messages telling you about random conflicts as you set everything up! Secondly, I came across Kröhnkite, an auto-tiling add-on for KDE. I noticed it was quite old and hadn’t been updated in a few years, but it had good ratings in the KDE store, so I decided to give it a go, and it works fine! I then began customising KDE in more standard ways, such as organising panels, widgets and general theming. I decided to go for something nice and cohesive, and despite my extensive manual customisation from before, I went for the Global Theme of Utterly Nord, which was a simple one-click install, and everything began looking gorgeous, though I swapped out the icon pack for my beloved Yet Another Monochrome Icon Set. Lastly, I finished off by integrating some of the applications I had discovered on my Hyprland journey, particularly kitty and starship, and I was easily able to just plop the relevant dotfiles into my set up to get them working as they were on the Macbook Pro.

Through the process, I came to understand a few things: I don’t need raw Arch, derivatives such as Endeavour OS are perfectly fine and make the process easier with the hard backend stuff, and modified KDE gave me most of what I wanted without needing to tinker with a configuration file, hyprlang, lua, or anything else. As such, although I could not get that Macbook Pro functional as a laptop upgrade from the Macbook Air (not only is the charging issue a real problem, but I also couldn’t get the touchbar working on the Macbook Pro, so I was missing all the function keys on that row!), I learned a lot and decided to keep Endeavour OS with all my changes on the Macbook Air.

openSUSE

All of this meant that I no longer was openSUSE running though, and there was still much of the distro that I liked for the brief time it was on my laptop, including Snapper for snapshots, Zypper to install most software, and YaST to configure. At the same time, although I was mostly happy with my Fedora KDE desktop for daily use, I had mucked around with it as I was finding my feet, resulting in all sorts being installed, not used or uninstalled and leaving stuff behind. It was probably due a fresh install to do things properly, and while I could simply reinstall Fedora KDE, I was given the opportunity to distro hop - again. So, why not swap to openSUSE Tumbleweed, the rolling version of openSUSE? Now, I’ve tried this before:

…but I struggled immensely with NVIDIA driver issues and then boot manager issues, so I gave up.

But surely these have been sorted out by now?

No. The answer is no. Well, I actually did manage to get the boot issue sorted, but the NVIDIA drivers with Wayland (worked fine on X11!) was just an absolute nonstarter. I spent a couple of days (yes, literal days!) troubleshooting all sorts with various NVIDIA drivers before deciding to give up. openSUSE is great, just not with my NVIDIA GPU, and I just need to accept that. Note to future Jessica reading this: Don’t do it, no more experiments with openSUSE!

Ventoy

I just want to take a brief moment here to talk about how I was installing all these various distros. Previously, I would simply burn the .iso onto a USB stick, and away I go, re-burning each time for a different distro. However, and I’m unsure if this is just anecdotal evidence or something really happening, but I found myself churning through USB sticks at a rapid rate, where I’d buy a pack of three, and all were dead in under a year - and I promise I was ejecting them before removal! Was it my constant burning of .iso files? It’s the only thing I could think of.

Thankfully, I stumbled across Ventoy somewhere along the way, a tool which allows you to simply drag and drop .iso files onto the USB stick, and are still bootable through a nice little menu! Not only do you skip the long burning (and I believe damaging 🤔) process, but you can also just load that stick up with all sorts of .iso files! So, I put all the distros I was using and considering on there: Fedora KDE, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch, Endeavour OS, CachyOS (another Arch based distro, grabbed just in case my attempt at Endeavour OS failed earlier), and Ubuntu Server (which my server runs). It’s fantastic really, having them all in one place and so easy to add and remove .iso files, I highly recommend it!

CachyOS

Anyway. Back to my broken install, I needed to fix it! So, booting into Ventoy to reinstall Fedora KDE, my eyes were drawn to CachyOS. Something I ruled out for the Macbook Air as it was probably too modern and I thought Endeavour OS would work as it did before, but I loaded it on as a backup just in case. CachyOS has grown rapidly in popularity as a more user-friendly approach to Arch with added tweaks and optimisations to improve user experience and ease of use. Again, these probably did not consider my old 2011 Macbook Air, so Endeavour OS was the right choice there, but maybe they did consider a more modern desktop PC with an NVIDIA GPU? I did enjoy Arch on the laptop, and with my KDE tweaks, I could get what I liked from Hyprland without struggling with a configuration file - plus, CachyOS ships with KDE as default.

So, I gave it ago. What’s the worst that could happen? I could easily go back to Fedora KDE if need be. But, not only was the installation process an absolute breeze, everything graphical worked out of the box with no intervention needed. What a relief after a couple of days of drama!

There wasn’t much to discover as I began reinstalling all my applications and configuring KDE as I wanted, as the end user experience wasn’t too different from Endeavour OS, but I did notice a few things:

1: CachyOS came installed with Shelly, a graphical package manager to help install, remove and update software, which was a wonderful surprise.

2: Everything is so much faster than it was on Fedora KDE. Again, I did muck about trying all sorts on Fedora and maybe that slowed it down and a fresh reinstall would have brought it back up to speed, so maybe it’s unfair to say this is a CachyOS thing, but the experience is fantastic. It boots quicker, applications load faster, animations are snappier and tasks are performed speedier, with the difference being very noticeable.

Applications

As I mentioned earlier, I can find most of my applications in either of the official and community repositories, or through a Flatpak, even though I had more software required on my desktop. Overall, here is what I’m running at the moment:

Utilities

Productivity

Graphical

Internet

Recreation

Customisation

When it came to customisation, I stuck to how my Fedora KDE install looked, so mostly Rosé Pine Dawn:

Conclusion

I had no idea I would have ended up where I did when I received that Macbook Pro, changing the distros on my main devices. Hopefully I can get the Macbook Pro booted up again and return to my Arch and Hyprland set up, as I did put a lot of time and effort into it 😅

Regardless, I really have enjoyed learning so much more about Linux through this time dabbling in different distros, desktop environments and compositors - though I probably could have done without that detour into openSUSE Tumbleweed! Although I really can never say never, I can say I am very happy with where I have currently landed up with Endevaour OS on my old Macbook Air and CachyOS on my desktop, both running KDE.

Lastly, some of you might have noticed I’ve mentioned Obsidian as my note taking application, and added Psysonic as a music player, which are new to my set up. I have draft posts on these written about what led to these changes, and I just need to finish them off - hopefully soon!