A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about my decision to switch to Windows 11. I weighed the time investment for Linux against data privacy and, at the time, opted for the time savings. An important, unmentioned factor was also Destiny 2, which Bungie intentionally keeps off Linux. A year later, I no longer play Destiny 2, and Microsoft is heading in a concerning direction with Recall and AI. A good reason for me to rethink my operating system once again.
As mentioned in the post linked above, I was a bit worried about the time commitment. On a whim this week, I put Arch Linux on a USB stick and installed it using archinstall. This time, even the drive encryption with LUKS worked without a hitch. Selected the partitions, entered the password, done. It might also be because I chose ext4 instead of btrfs. The latter seems to offer much more than I need.
You can install Arch Linux completely by hand, or you can just use archinstall - it comes with the ISO image and provides useful tools for installing the operating system.
The installation was over quickly, and as always, I chose Gnome as my desktop manager. Installing yay was one of the first things I did, followed by all the essential programs. While the stuff was installing, I tweaked the design a bit to make it more consistent with my MacBook Pro. For that, I used the WhiteSur-GTK-theme. Remapping the keys to a macOS layout with gnome-macos-remap-wayland unfortunately didn’t work for my Logitech MX Keys S. This might be due to the special key mapping of the keyboard combined with the German keyboard layout. No big deal, the keys on Windows are also different from macOS.
What drove me a bit crazy was Variable Refresh Rate, or VRR for short, known on Windows as Freesync (AMD) or G-Sync (Nvidia). My Gnome 47 was supposed to have it as an experimental feature, but I just couldn’t enable it. At some point, it occurred to me that my monitor might not be recognized as VRR-capable. My suspicion was spot on; Freesync Premium was disabled on my monitor, for whatever reason.
Another thing that has changed since I last used Arch Linux is the integration of the Elgato Stream Deck. The Streamdeck-ui software was discontinued, but its alternative, StreamController, has emerged. This is a good thing, as StreamController is significantly better than Streamdeck-ui ever was. There’s even a plugin store, though it’s still quite empty. But it also has dynamic keys that can change their state and even execute different functions for each state. I believe that’s even more than what the official software on Windows and macOS can do.
However, it’s still a bit early for a final verdict. The installation was even easier than last year, the software has noticeably evolved, and it’s not Windows. My first attempts with Elite: Dangerous were successful, but also very brief thanks to being sick. I hope I get better soon so I can put the system through its paces.