Why I switched to Linux Mint from Arch
I’ve had a pretty typical Linux distro journey: started with Ubuntu, looked around, switched to Linux Mint, went with it for a couple of months and wanted to try out something more advanced.
I decided to give Artix a try, because it was kind of Arch (I use Arch btw), but even more “advanced”, I mean difficult to use, because you had to research for solutions that work on your init system (I used OpenRC, but it seems to me that there is not a really bih difference between the init systems from the user’s point of view).
I loved Artix. The Arch base is a blessing, if it is used right.
The thing that shines the most to me, is Pacman. In my opinion, it is the best
package manager that is available on Linux. Although you need some time to get
used to it (-S
means “install”? Why?), it makes a lot of sense, if you
understood it. And I can’t not mention the AUR, probably the most complete
software repository not only on Linux, but in general (millions of useless
games on the Google Play Store don’t count).
However, maybe the important point of Arch is the process of building your system yourself from the ground up (Artix offers GUI-installer ISOs with a desktop environment, but I deliberately didn’t choose one of them). In the end, your system is literally your system. If there would be an end. You get new ideas of what you could customize and script every single day. I ended up with custom configs, colorschemes and scripts for every single of my programs and moved 80-90% of my work into the terminal, with programs like Zsh, Neovim and lf. I loved it, because it was very efficient and time-saving. Paradoxically, I quit Artix for the reason of having not enough time for it. Tweaking everything, which was very fun for me, was just too time-consuming.
P. S.: I didn’t quit Artix completely. I set up dual-boot (trial-boot with Linux Mint and Windows to be more precise) and I’m looking into it from time to time for fun. Maybe I’m even going to return to Artix full-time in the future, let’s see.
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