What I Use 🐧 (2024-07-23)

I realized I've yet to discuss what it is I use day to day in terms of Linux. This is a quick post dedicated to my setup.

Desktops/Laptops

On the desktop and I use Arch Linux. Arch is a rolling release distribution which means packages, including the kernel, are the latest available versions... which can lead to some issues. I've had small issues over the years using it mostly relating to dependencies breaking on updates. Usually manually holding back a package in /etc/pacman.conf fixes these issues. Random issues like some files not being deleted properly by the package manager preventing an update also arise but usually the issue can be manually fixed by reading an error message and investigating. All that being said the nature of Arch means that package availability is incredible. Not to mention the aur or Arch User Repository which is a repo consisting of packages packaged by users and developers themselves. While these may be inherently less trustworthy than official packages, I've almost never run into a situation where what I as looking for wasn't available on Arch.

Window Manager

My previously favorite window manager was dwm. I liked dwm but the philosophy involving manually patching source is very tedious and arbitrary. It seemed like core functionality was missing by default. So I decided to switch to hyprland because I wanted to switch to Wayland as my display server...protocol. Hyprland is technically a compositor that manages windows. Wayland has been amazing for me. Beforehand I was plagued by screen tearing on Xorg. However, I had to get an AMD gpu for my desktop for Wayland compatibility, but I needed to upgrade that anyway. Hyprland is amazing too. It is fast, clean, and offers amazing functionality. Very cool animations, great defaults, and the config file is easy to read and edit.

Servers

For server I either use Debian, Rocky Linux, or PiOS if I'm running things off of a Pi.

Dotfiles

My dotfiles are available on my Github.