I Use Arch, BTW
(The nobrainer Arch Linux Experience)
Tuesday, 07 December 2025
Life, is getting too boring lately. Especially on a semester break. So, what should I do? go outside and touch some grass? nah. Read books? My attention span is already cooked, I can only read books for 2 hours a day. Play games? what games that can run in my laptop that always scream when I open more than 3 Chrome tabs. I’d blame win10 for this. It’s filled with bloatware who runs in the background and forced my 4gb of ram to suffocate.
Wait… Why don’t I change the OS? That’s it. I’m done with Windows. It’s time to regain my freedom. And what kind of operating system could fulfill my goal? Of course it’s the one and only, Linux.
Linux is an open source operation system, that means it’s highly customizable, lightweight, and most importantly, it’s free. But, Linux is not a standalone OS, because it’s primarily just the kernel. To use it, we need a Linux distribution. And there are a lot of choices. From the beginner friendly distro like Linux Mint and Ubuntu, to the most advanced one like Gentoo and Arch Linux.
Which one should I choose? I’m a complete newbie to this field and never touched any other OS than Windows (Android doesn’t count bro please). Of course the obvious choice of mine is…
Arch Linux! wait wha-
Okay let me explain. Uh… How do I explain…
I’m just bored and curious, I guess?
Day 1 (5:45 PM, 05/01/25): Curiosity (Almost) Kills The Cat
I’m actually doing it holy shi-
After I watched hours of tutorial content on Youtube, I said to myself “cmon man, that’s too ez”. So I pull out my USB drive, make a disk partition, Install the program, following the tutorial and the Arch Wiki, and boom. Almost fumbled at the boot menu because the tutorials I followed are either using a desktop, or an old Thinkpad.
The next problem I encountered is, my wifi is down mid installing…
waited an hour for this…
God really tested my patience here. The wifi is literally down for almost all night long. It’s so long to the point I just leave my laptop behind and go touchin sum grass (yes, I’m going outside finally).
Oh and yes, I’m using archinstall. Feel free to block me :P /jk
Day 2 (12:45 AM, 06/01/25): Regret And Reset
On the sleepless night, I’m doing research for the best desktop environment suitable to me. At first I chose Gnome, because people said it’s simple and easy to use. The problem is, I want my life to be harder than it already is, and the customization there is pretty much limited.
my Gnome interface, oh hi 787b!
Then I decided to pick another DE and it is KDE Plasma. It’s very customizable, but still easy to use, well… kind of… But it’s my best decision nonetheless.
installing KDE Plasma, took another hours…
Day 3 (03:00 AM, 07/01/25): Finally, Something…
Another sleepless night, this is where I started writing this blog. 2 hours ago, I’m just playing around with the customization. From trying the default one, to installing a theme from the net. At first I’m using Catppuccin but the window bar is too thick, and I can’t downscale my monitor size. Because it’ll make the texts blurry. (I need to know how to fix this…)
After a little bit of searching, I SierraBreezeEnhanced It’s basically the default theme, but better, and more options available.
Now, I proudly present to you, my desktop:
womp-womp…
Basic, eh? Yeah but it works for me. Aesthetically, I wish it’s better. Sadly, I’m sucks at ricing desktop. I mean, I just Installed Arch 2 days ago. Don’t expect me to make something like those beautiful shot from the r/unixporn subreddit. One day, Zen… one day…
This is just the beginning for my Arch Linux journey. So many stuff I wanted to try with this distro. My next goal is to figure out how to set up Hyprland, a dynamic tiling compositor that is currently becoming a phenomenon in the Linux ricing community.
One thing to note is, I’m a dual boot user. I still need Windows to use Microsoft Office, Phoenix Code (I can’t install it on my Arch for some reason), and some college-related stuff that is only supported on Windows.
Okay that’s it. Thank you following my uneducated attempt of using Arch Linux. See you in the next episode of “The (no brainer) Arch Linux Experience” (If I’m not too lazy to make one…)
- Dz, messed up their sleep schedule like how they messed up the system time… -