Background Story⌗

I have been a Linux user already in the late 1990s until switched over to the Mac in 2007. This was a time when hardware support in Linux was much worse than today. Basically, for each device you connected to your system, you had to tinker around with kernel modules and parameters, just to find out, it is not the exact same one as in the HowTo, it is not supported and will never work. After a couple of years I was fed up with this and wanted, for once, a system that just works. And since Mac OS X is also a Unix-like OS, I decided to try it out. The Mac operating system served me quite well until about 2019, when it was time to replace my iMac. It was the second one I has bought. Almost at the same time, my MacBook’s battery died, so that I had a quite high pressure to get two new devices. But things had changed in the meantime and devices like the Mac mini, the iMac or the MacBook Pro had significantly higher prices by now. On top of this the hardware itself was quite disappointing.

So I decided to go for a new approach. I bought a small form factor PC from Lenovo and was almost about to start using Windows 10 as my main OS. After some days of using it, I was missing the Unix foundation and I gave Ubuntu a try. To my surprise, everything, was working out of the box immediately. This impressed me so much, from this day onwards Windows was almost never booted again on that machine. Ubuntu served me well for one or the other year. But with their last two releases, 22.10 and 23.04, and especially the plan to switch over to Snap packaging entirely at some point, they now lost me. I was so fed up with the significantly inferior update process of Firefox compare to the updates via Debian packages and apt. That’s what an entire distribution should based on? I started looking around and was immediately fascinated by Arch. Rolling releases via a package manager and a higher level of customization. Fine, let’s go!

Rolling Release & Software Updates - Different Options⌗

One of the obvious reasons is the rolling release model of Arch. Since using Ubuntu for a couple of years, it feels absolutely welcoming to be able to work mostly with very recent software versions, which are, in this case, part of the the distribution. Up to now I was able to discover only one package that is not the latest stable release available from upstream (GnuPG). However, there was an alternative available via the AUR, which is better than the rumors you might hear about it. In fact, it’s also better than any kind of Snap crap. Of course, you need to have a tool like yay to be better able to do core, extra and aur updates at the same time. But it’s there and it absolutely works great. Now three months in to this journey, I cannot confirm any breaks yet. Maybe I have been lucky, but to me Arch makes a rock solid impression.

While making myself more and more familiar with the current Linux ecosystem, I also evaluated some other distributions after trying Arch. I briefly installed OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. I had SuSE back in the 90s and I liked it at that time. Tumbleweed was also fine and someone looking for a central toll configuring the system with a single tool like YaST2 will definitely be happier with it than with Arch. One other distribution caught my attention: “Void Linux”! The fact to not include systemd, having the possibility to even further reduce the minimal footprint, maintained by volunteers, the ability to file pull requests for packages while still doing a rolling release pattern is very appealing to me. For now I use it only on my Raspberry Pis, but I might look into it also for my notebook or my desktop.

Learning Linux and Customization⌗

What fasciated me a lot about both “Arch” and “Void” was the fact, you are able to customize the system extensively by mostly maintaining config files. This was something I was missing with SuSE in the 90s and also again with OpenSuSE Tumbleweed today. Touching a file in /etc and immediately being greeted by a header telling you “autogenerated, plese do not touch” and “default config, only change if you know what you are doing” frustrated me. Both distributions have in common, they ecourage you to apply changes directly to the config files. This doesn’t only seem more flexible to me, but it also teaches me a lot about the inner workings of the system in general. I like that!

I finally got to know the system best when configuring a fully encrypted system also supporting secure boot. It took some time to figure it out,but it satified me a lot. It made me really trust the security entire solution, instead of just enabling FileVault or Bitlocker and just trusting some company, that they did is secure. Finally I decided to remove Windows entirely. Thath concluded my journey back to Linux after almost 20 years of absence. And I am happier than ever with my personal computing devices!

Feedback & Sharing⌗

If you like this little story, please feel free to share it! If you have comments and suggestions, please do not hesitate to approach me. There are various channels in the footer of this page, be it mastodon or just plain old email. In particular I would be interested which par of this story you would like to hear in more detail. It would help me to focus on the most interesting topics. Looking forward to hear from you!