It’s July 2025, little over a month since my last post.

Last time I ended with the declaration that my new PC would be using Linux.
What I didn’t tell you was that I had already installed Linux on the new PC by that point. I was writing that very post from the new PC!

Like many newbies to Linux, I agonized over what distro to use, how can I know what is right?
My prior experience with Linux is mostly following cookbook-style recipies for setting up Ubuntu VPSes, and then mostly leaving them to do their thing.
I did some research, and started to feel like I could put distros on a sort of scale of user-friendliness, with Mint on one end, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Manjaro in the middle, and Arch to the DIY-and-dont-f-up side. But where do I fit on that scale?
I don’t mind a little DIY, heck, I get kicks out of doing something “sweet”.
I want to game, so good compatibility is a must.
I will be running fairly new hardware, so good support is needed.
And I want as little bloat as possible.

Well, Arch is DIY, it’s Valve’s choice for their handheld gaming device, it’s rolling release and gets support earlier than many other distros, and in being DIY it has very little bloat. So looks like a good fit!
But the most interesting argument for Arch came from a feeling I was getting from seeing a lot of people who outline their distro-hopping journey, many seemed to settle on Arch Linux. That suggests to me that there is something there, and that I too would likely end up on Arch sooner-or-later anyway!
But is it to hard to start with? Can I break into it or will it break me.
I finally asked some friends and colleagues, one in particular said Arch would be a good fit for me.

So that’s a lot of stars aligning for Arch Linux.
It is settled then! I will try Arch first, and if it doesn’t work out then I’ll just run some other distro, right?

I will have to disappoint the the stereotype purist out there, I used archinstall.
In my defense, I really wanted to get a system up and running, to make sure that the parts that I had bought weren’t defective or anything. I did go back to read the steps for a manual install on the wiki. And hopefully I can win back some credibility by doing a manual install anyway later on (see below).

I chose to use Wayland, as it appears to be the future. LightDM because it is minimal. KDE Plasma as it is a windows-like experience. I also installed Hyprland to have as an option and to experiment with.
Hyprland confused med initially, so I have let that rest for the time being, and stuck with KDE as my daily drive for now.

I was surprised to see that it did not take long at all for me to start feeling at home!
Once you have your password manager, a text editor, a file browser, your files, and your browser of choice, then you’ll quickly forget that you are running another OS entirely!
There are still some unpleasant reminders that I run into frequently, such as not having working Auto-Type from my password manager. Apparently that cannot be done in Wayland at present. The other thing is me not yet being as used to Gimp as I was to Paint.net, but at least that is something I can expect will sort itself out in time. Although I could probably make Paint.net work with Wine, I opted to switch as I would rather use something that runs natively, and use the opportunity to learn something more well known and more feature complete.

I did have an issue where sometimes, perhaps about 30% of the times that I boot and log in to KDE, I get an indefinite black screen. No response to switching TTY or anything. I reached out on the newbie forums and got excellent help. We believe it to be a race condition between LightDM and Wayland, and… it’s a problem that is documented on the Wiki. I did and still do read on the wiki after I did my archinstall, but not knowing what to look for was the problem, I suspected hardware or driver issues and was looking in the wrong place! If I had done a manual install of LightDM, then I would have to read the LightDM wiki page and would likely have seen the troubleshooting section mentioning this potential issue with the particular software combo I was running.
Lessons learned
1 – If you don’t install it yourself, you’ll miss the little edge cases that are in the wiki.
2 – It’s in the wiki!

Other issues I’ve seen include sometimes getting volume set to zero on the right audio channel after boot or resuming from sleep. Haven’t seen that happen again since I uninstalled pulseaudio while troubleshooting the black-screen problem above. So once again something that wouldn’t have been an issue if I did a manual install following the Wiki and had to make the conscious choice between pulseaudio and pipewire.
I still have the occasional issue where the right-side display (i run two monitors) shows the mouse cursor offset from it’s real position, though it feels like it is less common now.

But! There are reminders that I’m on a new OS that are positive too!
For example, I love using a package manager to handle software! Any of the usual things I might want is just one command away, once you know what software you are after. Compared to browsing for the right installer and running a setup wizard.

Gaming has worked flawlessly so far as well!
I still have only tried four titles: FTL, Shadow Gambit, Cyberpunk and Divinity Original Sin 2. But not having any issues with these is very heartening! And the future looks brighter than ever what with Linux getting more attention as a serious gaming OS thanks to Valve.
(Well, ok, FTL had one issue, it did not detect my steam saves unless I run the windows version of the client via Proton… ironic that the only game to have an issue would be the one that has a native Linux client)

Right, so what more can I tell you?
I’ve run some experiments with Stable Diffusion on the new PC, but details on that will have to wait for it’s own post.
I got some cheap IKEA shelves to put on my desk, so I can stash away my keyboard and laptop underneath and simultaneously keep letters and notes on top of it. Even more desk-space!

One thing I have noticed as my recent search history starts to skew my Youtube suggestions that way, is that there are a lot of content creators out there switching to Linux during these last 12 months. Biggest profile is Pewdiepie. And I am seeing a lot of content creators covering Linux now that were simply invisible to me before.
I am aware of the context bubble that Google creates around each of us, but rarely is the switch this noticeable.
Should I de-google too? I might, but replacing Youtube is a hard one.

As I’m starting to feel comfortable and secure on my new PC, I’ve put the old one up for sale, and started to look through my wardrobe for old hardware to repurpose or throw out, because I’ve been bit by the Linux bug and have a bad case of tinkeritis right now!
I found an old laptop from 2007. Tried bringing it with me on vacation with a USB to see if I can install Arch on it. That one ended up in a catch22 where I need internet to get some very specific wifi drivers so I can get internet… Nah! I deleted all partitions and ran shred on the disks, then I sold it for about $10.
I found another old laptop, this one was from 2015. For some reason I could not get it to detect and boot from USB, but I saw network boot was an option, how hard is it to set up PXE-boot?
Well, in theory it is particularly hard on Linux. But in practice it only takes two commands, one to install pixiecore, and one to tell pixicore to host a default Arch-image. No configuration necessary. I run them on my new PC, and the laptop picks up the PXE and boots into a live environment same as if I had used the USB, no hassle.
Awesome!

Now, for my redemption. For this laptop, I will install it on an encrypted disk, using only wifi (once I’m past PXE that is), and I will not resort to archinstall. And you know what? That wasn’t too bad! Sure you will be tinkering a lot more the first time, but there’s a feeling of understanding your system better as a result of having tweaked the bootloader to run the right microcode and to decrypt a device.
I figure I will use that laptop to experiment with Hyprland, and to use it as test-pilot for any risky changes to my main PC. I have a feeling Hyprland will also be in it’s own post sometime in the future.

Feels good to explore! Feels good to get stuff done!
Now I’ll try and keep up the tempo.