Here is my current system and my long journey in Linux, the operating system of a life time with all the good and the bad, on and offs.
The journey
- RedHat - 1997 - this was installed on all university's computers and I did not have my own personal computer at that time
- Windows 98 - 1998 - bought my own Pentium 166 MHz PC, mostly for StarCraft: Brood War :)
- Slackware - 2000 - because I was never happy with RPM package manager but I enjoyed the simplicity of Slack
- IuLiX - 2002 - my own Linux distro based on Linux from scratch and Slackware philosophy
- Gentoo / Windows XP - 2003 - starting to slip away from Linux, don't know, maybe Gentoo source based distro was too complicated/time consuming for me at that time
- Windows XP - 2005 - no more dual boots, coincidence or not, this was also the low of my professional career :(
- Mac - 2008 - Mac era because all cool dudes had moved to Mac and iPhone
- Arch - 2019 - and back to my first love, should I get a "Linux per sempre" tattoo on my arm?
The motivation
Why Arch?
- it's a KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) and DIY (Do It Yourself) distribution - base install takes 15 minutes or so then you get a black screen and TTY prompt and the configuration party begins
- rollout releases - life is too short to wait 1, 2 years for next major release, in software industry you either "go big, go fast and go hard or go home"
- community is awesome and Arch Wiki is one of the best Linux documentation sites out there
The Arch
Arch journals and dotfiles that still need a lot of cleanup and fine-tuning but so far it works quite well and I am pretty happy about it.
For the curious minds, here are the most important tools that I use on daily basis:
Window manager - i3wm
I was never a big fan of complicated Desktop Environments (DE) like Gnome or KDE and i3wm is exactly what I need: a non-intrusive tilling window manager.
Status bar - Polybar
This is still work in progress as I need to add more tools but for now only WiFi, battery and clock.
Terminal emulator - Kitty
Application launcher - Rofi
Browser - Brave
A fork of Chromium that is focused on privacy/security without Google's non-sense.
Window compositor - Compton
In case you don't know what a window compositor is, here is a short desc: just a cool daemon that adds shades and transparency to windows. Enjoy the sunset background of Vernazza, Italy thanks to Anders Jilden
