From Ubuntu to Arch linux, the feeling of a great transition…

With my growing interest for Linux and after being a ubuntu user for a long time, there was an urging desire in me to switch to a new Linux operating system. Now again I was back to the most difficult question, which Linux distro should I install? Now reading normally makes things easier, but for this particular question, the answers keep widening and just lead to more confusion. Finally, after a long battle in my head I decided to go with Arch Linux, one of the most interesting ones, so let me share what installing it felt like.

Why Arch Linux?

So obviously you will ask why I chose Arch Linux. Well, the reason is simply that everyone who ever talked to me about arch said it’s great. The people I meet in daily life, people from open source communities, chats and forums on the internet, all these places seem to share the same thought, Arch is very good. Some people even claimed it is the best. Usually, people who claim a distro is good or bad are distributed equally. But that was not the case with Arch Linux. It just had an overflow of good comments and reviews. But many people it seems were not confident about just installing it. My friends told me it is a very difficult process, and they were not ready to lose data for an experiment of installing Arch Linux. Arch gives you nothing. Whatever you want you have to install. You have to pretty much build your own kernel. That does sound very cool, until the process starts…

Installation medium — the dark screen

Installing for most things is just clicking on “next” for a coupling of times and then clicking “finish”. How hard can that be? The only place you spend time is while creating partition and in most distros even that is taken care of automatically. So yes, “next” a couple of times and then “finish”, that is the exact mindset with which I booted through USB and to my shock this is what I got …

So when people said arch gives you nothing, it also included GUI. Technically all you have is a terminal with a black background stretching to the entire screen. No “next”, no “finish”, no pointer. So that’s when i figured out why people hesitate. It does not take a couple of bad decisions or actions but one command to finish off everything you did in the laptop. But that did’t stop me. This is a chance to build a own distro that suits me, so I just decided to move on and do it, all the darkness of the screen did not scare me.

Partition and Mounting

You are given a few things, a command-line tool to create partitions and nano text editor. So we do have the fundamental tools to go to war and it was a very different experience. You could actually see and understand what happens since you have to give in every piece of information about the partition as input. So that’s one way to learn about partitions are created and maintained and yes creating means you will also have to mount it yourself. I did three standard partitions, The EFI file system, the root and home with ext4 file system. You had to literally generate every file from locale to complex configuration yourself. It was tough, but it was worth spending time on because this really helps you understand the file system of Linux.

Packages

Just search the internet for pacman, the package manager of Arch Linux. You will get a whole lot of comments, forums, and blogs on how amazing it is. Less typing, clear, and with rolling updates technique pacman provides you amazing features. Even though arch is a community maintained, it does not fall short of packages, It has every package you can think of open source and proprietary. If you don’t find it in pacman, you should find it in Arch User Repository(AUR). That’s how active the community is.

Bootloader

I chose grub, but you are not restricted. You can choose anything you want. Freedom, maybe that’s what makes Arch Linux so beautiful and popular.

GUI

This was my favorite part. You can actually choose what you GUI you want to use. I never imaged not giving you a GUI can turn out to be so much fun. You are not forced by distributor to use what they give by default. I mean you can change your experience in other distros but not the entire UI. Here you get to choose what you want to use. Ubuntu 18 gave you a mixed gnome environment with their default one but pure gnome is a gem. So i went with gnome but there were so many options available that people can choose from.

Conclusion

Arch gives you freedom and a fantastic package manager. It was a absolute bliss getting to create your own distro for your use. I personally felt it was not as difficult to install as many people think it is. It just takes a little more understanding and doing. So for people hesitating I would say just go ahead and try it out, it seems a tough task but you will catch the flow. At least I did and if I can you can too.