I am back to using Archlinux and back on XMonad. Like i mentioned in a previous post, I have a love hate with XMonad. The hate part is mainly because I never really put in the effort or time to get iron out my workflow. Know thy workflow, is the motto when it comes to TWMs. And as a stacker I had never really gotten to using workspaces the right way. In the coming months I plan on prioritzing learning Haskell, reading Programming Haskell by Graham Hutton. The hope is that once I have enough knowledge to read and write Haskell I would be in a better position to mend XMonad to my needs, rather than relying solely on IRC and hoping that someone has a tweak that I want on their config.
Why did I come back to Arch?
This is mostly a familiarity thing. I was happy with PopOS, but an update broke it. I was unable to boot into Popos. Usually and rarely when it happens like this for me on Arch I would just boot into archlive usb, arch-chroot into my arch drive and running mkinitcpio -p would fix things for me.
But PopOs was unfamiliar territory and I was just too lazy to lookup how to fix this. First sign of trouble and I came running back to Arch. Also PopOs shop had a mix of flatpak and deb packages. I am so sploit by pacman + AUR because of using it for 10+ years that anything outside of it just seems too much work :D
I agree with Linus, when he said that the one thing that he would like to see is a universal package management. I can’t agree more. Flatpak, Snap, deb, rpm,etc. It is a pain to keep up with how each works. I know the proponents of Open Source and Linux would argue options is why people like Linux but too many can too quickly become paralyzing.
XMonad (hands down best TWM)
I always keep coming back to tiling and xmonad no matter how much I convince myself that I am done with TWM. I am not sure why? Well I do, it is probably because deep inside I feel like I didn’t really get in and follow the TWM paradigm properly. Over the course of the next weeks or months as I get a better hang of Haskell I am hoping that I would be able to configure XMonad to my needs much better way. fingers crossed.
Just like Org mode for emacs, scratchpads and Org prompt for XMonad =).
Getting it up and running in under an hour.
I have installed Arch so many times over the course of my 10+ years run with it that I know exactly the parts of the wiki to follow to get me up and running. My first install of Arch took me close to 3 days-partially because I had a really slow internet back in India + I hadn’t read the wiki properly so I would miss some detail and bork my install half way prompting a full reinstall. But now it just takes me an hour or probably even less to get everything up and running for me. I think I should at this point write scripts so that the process becomes even faster(yet another task in my long list of nice to have todos).
Pains of HiDPI
I am currently having problem getting font scalling work sanely for me on a 5k monitor(everything is so small but gues I have to deal with it currently). The suggestions on ArchWiki don’t seem to work too well. If anyone knows of how to get it to work well please shoot me a mail at contact at thewebsitename