Hello, Arch! Hello Hyprland!

My early Linux days were... eventful. I remember spending days or weeks hunting for drivers: graphics, wireless, sound, and so on. One particularly painful memory was trying to run Compiz on Ubuntu. I spent over a month figuring out the right mix of kernel and NVIDIA drivers. (Yes, I was that committed to wobbly windows.)

Back then, almost everything needed manual compiling and cryptic shell commands I barely understood. It felt more like sorcery than computing.

Once I joined the workforce, I stopped chasing broken setups and went with a simpler route: bare-bones Ubuntu with just the essential drivers. After Unity came out and I wasn’t a fan, I jumped ship to Linux Mint.

The “adventures” didn’t stop, but they became rarer. I even got Linux Mint to boot from a RAID 0 SSD setup (please don’t try this at home). I flirted with different desktop environments, dabbled in overclocking, and then met my final boss: installing Arch.

The minimalist, do-it-your-way appeal of Arch was too tempting. I started with confidence (I'd been running Linux for a few years at that point), but ended up defeated.

I don’t even remember the exact issue anymore, but after a week of driver drama and desktop plumbing confusion, I gave up. My hardware wasn’t very Linux-friendly, and the overwhelming number of options paralysed me. So I went back to Linux Mint. Eventually, I defected to a MacBook. It had a command line, and at the time, that was good enough.

Photography became a hobby, and the software I liked was macOS/Windows-only. So Linux stayed in the server closet: running on Raspberry Pis, home servers, and occasionally at work. But not on my main machine.

Still, buying another Apple machine didn’t sit right with my views on right-to-repair. And Windows 11? Somehow, it finds new ways to get worse. So the idea of switching back to Linux slowly took root.

Then along came Omarchy by DHH. Suddenly, that spark came back. I wanted to try it. Bonus motivation: Zed.dev doesn’t even support Windows, and I really want to try it.

I installed Arch again. On my Slimbook. Dual-boot. After a decade of avoiding it. 

Hello Arch, Hello Hyprland!

So here I am, typing this from a fresh Arch setup running Hyprland. And I’ve got thoughts.

The Good Stuff

archinstall: The TUI installer made things easier, even though it's still nowhere near what Ubuntu and other distros offered... 15 years ago. But hey, progress is progress.

Omarchy: Pretty slick. Needed some personal tweaks, though - like changing display scaling back to 100%, and switching my default browser to Firefox Developer Edition. Small stuff.

The Not-So-Good (aka “Challenges”)

To get here, I jumped through quite a few hoops. Here's a quick rundown:

• Tiny EFI partition? Big problem.
  Make it at least 512 MB or 1 GB. Mine was too small for initramfs. After much jiggery-pokery, I made it work (and I can write a blog post only about this), but I eventually gave up and reinstalled Arch on a second NVMe drive. (Luckily, I had one.)
• Omarchy is... opinionated.
  Which isn’t bad, but it didn’t play nice with my manual install flow. If you’re not ready to debug things yourself, stick with the archinstall route.
• LLMs saved my sanity.
  ChatGPT and Claude helped me navigate weird partitioning setups and system tweaks. Without them, I probably would’ve rage-installed Windows again.
• Running SSH in the live environment? Game changer.
  Copy and pasting commands from chat into the terminal was so much easier from my main computer.

Tips for Fellow Adventurers

• Use archinstall to create a working setup on a clean drive.
• Save the resulting JSON config.
• Modify it (with help from an LLM if needed) to fit your custom partitioning.
• Re-run archinstall with your custom config.

Now I just need to fix GRUB so I don't have to boot Arch via Windows recovery tools (yes, really). But that’s a story for another post.