Switched to Arch Linux

12 Feb 2024

I have had enough with Ubuntu. I have been using Ubuntu since 2008. It was great. It was easy to install. It had everything I wanted out of the box.

But recently, I have been annoyed with multiple things. First one is snap package manager. It is irritating to use. Firefox is an snap on Ubuntu. It has some font issues. Firefox is too slow to use.

Ubuntu installation is around 6 GB right now. It has grown so much. I remember it used to fit into a CD. I was having a lot of hardware issues with non-LTS versions. (Laptop lid related stuff mainly)

Last but not least, Ubuntu is pushing Ubuntu Pro on desktop customers. Canonical is holding back security packages until users make an Ubuntu account. It is free up to 5 PCs per account. I don’t want that.

I tried to switch to Debian. I bought a cheap refurbished mini-PC. It came with a Wifi USB Stick. Debian didn’t like it that much.

I decided to give Arch Linux a try. The install was quick. It didn’t download a lot of packages. It came with a minimal GNOME. I didn’t like the Console app that much. I got used to it slowly. But it is suprisingly fast. GUI is very responsive. The mini-PC I bought has a 4th generation i5 processor with 8GB.

Arch Linux is easy to customize. Most of my favorite CLI tools aren’t installed. But it was available via pacman. I didn’t like pacman that much. It keeps a lot of packages in cache, even after they are installed. But you have the option to clean it.

Firefox is no longer a snap. It is very fast. I like using Firefox again. Since Arch has a rolling release, I don’t have to reinstall/upgrade the system a lot. I use Vagrant/Docker and VirtualBox for my testing. I am trying to keep my system clean and usable for a long time.

I installed an icon pack and a cursor to make it eye candy. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB to several VMs on this PC. I wish I switched to Arch Linux long time ago. Honestly, it is not that complicated to install and configure. I had very little to configure.

PS: BTW I use Arch

Reference

Tags

  • ubuntu
  • archlinux
  • linux