Distro hop to Arch

Last week I made the decision to switch Linux distributions for my primary and secondary notebooks.

My primary notebook had been running Devuan since October 2023, and my secondary notebook had been running Debian stable since July 2024.

What prompted my decision was something I’d read the week before that Debian had decided to cease posting on X because X doesn’t reflect Debian’s ‘shared values’.

Pardon me, but I would think that a community or project (as they describe themselves) responsible for developing, maintaining and promoting an operating system would want to promulgate their ideas and communiqués on as broad a range of platforms as possible and to garner input from an equally broad base of developers and users.

Apparently virtue signalling is a higher priority to some in leadership positions in the Debian community than systems development. That doesn’t bode well for a sensible future.

Because of my desire to quit Debian and its derivatives, that automatically excluded Debian, Devuan, Ubuntu and Linux Mint¹. So I looked around for some other distros: ArcoLinux, OpenSuse, Manjaro and Arch Linux. Arco, Manjaro and Arch are all Arch or Arch-based. OpenSuse runs its own race.

I opted for an Arch-based system and decided I may as well run base Arch. I had run Arch on both of these notebooks previously (for 20 months on my primary notebook in 2021/22, and for most of 2023 on the secondary notebook).

I grabbed the iso, fired up my notebooks and installed Arch with QTile as the Window Manager. I decided to use the archinstall script. It was quick and quite strightforward. I didn’t settle on using QTile, per se, but only enough to install my patched version of dwm on the primary notebook and OpenBox on the secondary. Added to that was restoring my collection of scripts, documents, emails, web bookmarks and cloud storage ‘stuff’. The process took a couple of hours for each notebook. Both are working and working well. The primary notebook has 855 packages installed.

How long will I stick with Arch? No idea. Perhaps six months, perhaps one or two years. I would like to come back to OpenSuse one day, and maybe Gentoo, and perhaps some BSD derivative. But for the moment it’s Arch.