Linux 3

I got around to reinstalling Linux on the laptop. Sayonara, Manjaro.

As I alluded to in the previous post, my usage was limited enough that Manjaro had been perfectly adequate and I had not run into any problems. But it wasn't shiny and new anymore.

As planned, I'm now running niri, with the linux-surface kernel. Instead of handrolling a status bar and launcher, I've opted to use the 1.0 release of, uh, DMS. Aka, DankMaterialShell. Despite the name, it seems to be a competent piece of software without too much in the way of pointless cruft.

Certainly the combination of niri + DMS feels like it can become a much better solution to the *marchy pitch. It looks great, and with a bit more iteration it'll be a very usable desktop environment. There are some minor issues and improvements I'd like to see - for example, saving the state of bluetooth being enabled/disabled through reboots.

As planned, I did not bother setting up snapper or anything more complicated than a quiet systemd-boot. I did briefly consider using a unified kernel image and signing for secureboot, mostly because the surface boot sequence shows a big ugly red padlock if secureboot is disabled. I may still do that, but so far I've not bothered.

For installation, I did a minimal package archinstall, and then ran the DMS install script on top, which took care of pulling in niri as well. I would still much prefer a normal package or metapackage, but it was smooth and does use the package manager.

I've done some minimal configuration on top, adjusting hotkeys, theming, and a little bit of functionality. Cleaned up .desktop shortcuts for programs that I will never want to launch in a hurry, so on and so forth.

Having installed from the minimal Arch package set, I have very little junk on the system, which feels great. So now with everything basically setup to my preferences (though I do miss my dropdown terminal quite a bit, and I might revisit it), it's basically time to get on and use it day to day and see what I'm missing.

Linux has been treating me very well on my desktop as well, and I'm becoming increasingly comfortable configuring and troubleshooting it.

For now, I'm hard pressed to imagine any good reason to return to Windows for more than the occasional game with egregious anti-cheat.

I have more to ramble about, but I'll save that for a future post.