Why I uninstalled Arch (btw)

Yesterday, I spent more than 12 hours just trying to fix my Arch linux environment. Reinstalled it & set everything up from scratch 4 times. Every time something or the other kept breaking.

After a lot of research & trying configurations, I finally decided to settle with Manjaro with GNOME on top, still Arch-based but I read that it comes with a lot of sane defaults & a GUI. So even if something breaks & I have to reinstall it, I won’t have to type 10 commands just to setup the WiFi driver.

I had been using Arch + KDE as my daily driver for about 6 months. It all started with my frustration with Windows taking half of my RAM in idle, aspiration of having a Mac-like experience and running a full Linux system (not WSL). Even after trying Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint & Deepin, my pursuit for the ultimate optimisation & customisation didn’t stop. I finally sat with the 2 hour installation video & my notebook. Back then I didn’t understand commands, I just tried to follow the order. After 2 days of struggle I had my first stable arch setup. Something else also happened in 2 days, I stumbled across the rich community of Arch users. Then every few weeks tried new configurations, tools & customisations. At some point I got it to look & feel almost like MacOS, thanks to KDE’s customisability & community.

Then I got busy & everything was smooth sailing. Unless I wanted to use adobe tools or play games, I never booted windows. I was a proud Arch user with no regret until one software update. I started facing bugs, the perfection I worked so hard for started vanishing. One day suddenly my dock won’t show up, sometime the whole thing would freeze, my fans won’t spin up & multiple UX glitches. All fixable but I couldn’t afford to spend time reinstalling my audio drivers because they stopped working before a meeting.

It was time I start looking for another distro. I also started realizing the cons of desktop environments like KDE & XFCE. My priorities shifted from customisation & control to reliability. I was never able like debian-based distros for some reason. They are supposed to be stable but that also means that if something is broken, it stays broken for longer. With Arch & its community, everything is bleeding-edge. That’s the reason why I ended up with Manjaro + GNOME, bleeding-edge but lesser odds of bleeding myself to death.

However, this was my journey. Let’s see how it goes. This was one of those rabbit holes that I’m glad I went into, so many learnings. I can only imagine how nightmarish it would’ve been if this was a server instead of a PC.