Au revoir pour toujours, monsieur Gates

Posted 04/16/2022

I moved to Arch and finally gave up on Windows! I was one of the assholes stuck in the "but muh games camp" for too long but I had a nice push a few weeks back and I haven't looked back since. I was actually a Windows 7 holdout for absolute ages until Elden Ring concerns finally pushed me to Windows 10. The upgrade went well and I even got to keep my old Windows Pro key or whatever that I never even paid for. Unfortunately, it was genuinely the worst computing experience I've ever had. I started heavily considering a partial Linux move about three weeks in, and my hand actually was kind of forced into it. One evening, I had disabled the Windows Defender service to play with firewall settings, and had found on the next reboot that every single crucial Windows service had also been disabled automatically, and it was outright impossible to undo without first re-enabling the WD service. Which also seemed to essentially be dependent on itself. I killed an evening playing around with Google Fu and whatever came up, but no real luck. I'm no Windowsmancer so it probably was fixable, in hindsight, but it was such a pain that I immediately got my hands on an Arch ISO and haven't looked back since.

The move itself was pretty painless outside of my internet being nearly non-functional at the time; I think I spent the most time getting SystemD working with ethernet correctly, for some reason (DNS crap IIRC). I would have gone with Artix since it seemed a bit more interesting, but the internet issues made it much much easier to get my hands on Arch. After that, it was all down to LARBS, which made the post-install insanely nice, and I'm over the moon with dwm, st, etc. I've never had such a good time.

After that, the question is game support; if you've been holding off on the move to Linux because you've invested too much in your Steam library, there's no better time than now to make the jump. Turns out SteamOS has been Arch-based for a while now, and the progress they've made with Proton has been absolutely insane. So far, it seems I can 100% rely on Steam Deck verification info for decisions in buying and installing. Elden Ring has been playing nearly perfect, sans anti-cheat hitches. Really, don't let it hold you back anymore.