I casually mentioned I use arch btw yesterday, and promised to blog about it. Well, here’s that blog! Not that long, but still.

I was running Windows 11 on my laptop, same as many people, just because it was preinstalled. To be honest, if your device is powerful enough, and you don’t push it too much, the experience is “fine”, especially with PowerToys.

However, I do sometimes push my laptop pretty hard, and the idling resource consumption was bothering me somewhat. If I’m away from my laptop, I don’t want the fans to randomly spin up, nor do I really enjoy a warm laptop for no reason.

Previously, I’d used Ubuntu on a laptop. That was on an older machine, and I’d done it out of performance woes on Windows 10, not having enough RAM to multitask properly. It wasn’t a bad experience, but I like trying out new things.

After searching for a bit, I found the name CachyOS mentioned quite a bit. An OS purpose-built to ensure it goes fast seemed like a good thing. Arch, which was a bit scary, but then again - it seemed like CachyOS came with sensible defaults, I had AI in case I needed casual help fast, and I had some experience with Linux (albeit all Debian-based / Ubuntu). Also helped that I was going to dual boot, so if the worst happens I can always reboot into Windows.

So, I memorized sudo pacman -Syu, downloaded the ISO and put it on my Ventoy drive, backed everything up just in case and installed.

And it was pretty good! I managed to stick with it, running KDE Plasma and mostly the default settings, though I did install yay not knowing paru was already on the system. The AUR is a very interesting place…

Anyways, since then, my reboots to Windows reduced drastically as I began to do most, or rather nearly all of my daily computing on the CachyOS side. It really does feel like Linux either came a long way since my last time using it, or there are just more tools available to me for help since then.

I’ll probably write about the various customizations I did later - there are many I remember and probably many I don’t.