Looking back in mid-March, I wrote a post about trying my hand at installing Arch Linux on my gaming PC. And it was a success . . . well, most of it at least. Here is a quick take at some quirks I had with doing it all myself.

Bleeding Edge

Arch is pretty popular for having the best software repo when compared to other Linux flavors, however it can both a blessing and a curse when rolling with the latest versions. This really wasn’t a quirk or gripe necessarily, it was more of I had a teeny, tiny worry in the back of my mind that I would “-Syu” one day and bam, my whole system would mess up. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to go with BTRFS and Timeshift so I could revert if I needed to.

Am I Missing Anything?

I tried really, really hard to keep my install to a bare minimum: KDE, Steam, VLC, Firefox, MakeMKV, XBOX One Controller Drivers (xone), and so on, but like anyone else, I always found myself missing something. Even with installing the full KDE experience, I felt like I was still lacking a package or two. For example, when using Konsole, I wanted to change some settings for font size, theme, etc, but I could never find the settings anywhere. Not in the app, nor in the System Settings.There were little things that I just couldn’t explain.

Simply put: Compared to a distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc, I never really felt like I had the complete package and that things flowed and connected well. This is probably my fault….

So What Did You Do?

I’ve had VanillaOS on my mind since I heard about it a few weeks ago. The idea of a split boot environment was very interesting, similar sounding to BTRFS and TimeShift. I installed it over Arch but quickly found that there was a huge issue: everything seemed to hang . . . everything. If I had Firefox and Steam running, nothing seemed to load or refresh unless I killed the app and brought it back up. Argh.

Someone on Mastodon mentioned Manjaro, the ol’ faithful for my previous Linux experiences. Back in 2021, I started my journey to replace Windows 10 with Linux using Manjaro, so this was nothing new to me. I don’t remember having issues with this distro before so I thought, what the heck?

I chose Majaro with Gnome since it was familiar and things have been great so far. Everything installed quickly, I still have the AUR when I need it, all of my hardware was working, etc.

Manjaro is where I plan on staying for a little while. I would like to get back to a distro where I build more of it myself and keep it as light as possible, but if I’m not going to have the “complete package” feel, I don’t feel that it’s worth it right now.