My history with Debian
My Linux story begins with Fedora Core 3 and a bit of Solaris 10 back in
- Very soon after, I started distro hopping like everybody else. By 2010 I had settled quite comfortably into Ubuntu for the next 7/8 years. Over time, I felt the operating system should be more customized to my taste, without the distributor installing packages I would never use. Since I had already gained plenty of experience managing servers, one fine day I decided on a minimal Debian install and adding all the packages I was actually going to use. From that point on, I started creating scripts, programs and keyboard shortcuts tailored to my needs.
And just like that, 8 years went by. I only reinstalled once, when I upgraded the computer.
Debian’s problems
Debian is a super solid system, nobody can argue with that. But that comes with an inherent problem: the software is generally old too, since the only way to confirm robustness is, precisely, the passage of time. One way I found to get the best of both worlds (solidity and up-to-date software) was to compile from source every program I needed to keep updated: alacritty, ghostty, tmux, nvim, etc. And for a while, it worked.
I created a repository and, through scripts, automated the whole process à la OpenBSD ports. The problem showed up with the new demands of artificial intelligence projects. I wanted to try out models or projects and they generally needed updated system libraries. The alternative I found was moving to the unstable branch (Sid). But even then, it sometimes wasn’t enough, and other times I actually broke the system. Nothing I couldn’t fix, but it was something that was starting to wear on me.
Tearing down myths
I have to confess I had my prejudices about Arch. Some of them well-founded (an unstable system) and others completely unfounded (hard to install). The second myth is probably what delayed the migration the most, because I don’t like wasting time on things that aren’t worth it. I’ll talk about stability later on.
After watching a couple of videos about installing Arch — and Omarchy in particular — I realized it isn’t very different from installing Debian. I don’t use Omarchy, but the base installation of the operating system is the same. Here’s how to install it in case you want to give it a try.
The installation was tremendously easy and fast. As it should be. On a fresh
installation there shouldn’t be any kind of problem. In my case, I also have a
Windows 10 install (which auto-magically upgraded itself to 11 🤮)…
But since I’ve had several bad experiences, I keep the systems
separated on different disks, and the /home partition also lives on another
disk. That way, I run no risk of deleting something I shouldn’t. So I
guess part of that simplicity comes from having everything neatly organized.
The Nvidia miracle
What surprised me most about the installation was that it let me install the proprietary Nvidia drivers directly. Maybe it’s because Debian is rather protective about drivers that aren’t open source, but it was always a struggle for me. DKMS this, kernel headers that, etc, etc… But on Arch it was extremely easy. Pick the driver model matching my GPU and done. It installed all the drivers and configured the kernel correctly (chef’s kiss).
Bye X11, hello fluidity
Ever since I installed the minimal version of Debian, I’ve been using tiling window managers. I went through i3, dwm and finally settled on bspwm. All of these running on X11. Since I’d also been wanting to see how Wayland performed for a while, I decided to install Hyprland.
Honestly, in the time I’ve been using it, it has blown my mind. Everything runs much faster. The Zen browser, which had performance issues on YouTube, suddenly seems like a fork of Chrome (if that comparison is worth anything). The other thing was screen tearing… After years of fighting without a favorable outcome against Compton’s configuration (an X11 compositor), videos finally render without a single artifact.
Uptime: 100%
The best part of all? The whole installation process took no more than half an hour one Sunday, and migrating all the shortcuts a few hours more. Only because I took the time to polish some scripts I had been procrastinating on.
In conclusion: after 3 weeks of sailing into new waters, I feel more at home than ever. Everything works the way I want and I haven’t had a single problem with anything. I definitely should have made this decision earlier, but hey! It’s never too late.