OrbitalMartian

2 Year Linux Challenge - The Beginning

📆 17 Jul 2025 20:00 UTC +01:00 📕 403 words ⏳ 3 min. 🏷️ #Linux #2YearLinuxChallenge

8 days ago, I started my 2 Year Linux Challenge using Arch as my daily driver distro for 2 whole years with no distro hopping. Even though it has only been a week, it has been a full on time of getting a nice little setup in a way that will allow me to be productive in what I do - I mainly plan on doing writing, maybe some pixel art and development too.

Over the week, I have hopped desktop and environments. Starting off my journey on DWM before moving back to i3, to BSPWM (my favourite tiling window manager by far), to Gnome to KDE (where I am today). Now, you may be wondering, why am I using KDE and not anything else? Well, that’s because I have found that it is the perfect mix between customisable and productive. I like Gnome for productivity but it sucks in a load of aspects (that will probably be it’s own blost, added to my list now), like the minimise window button is an underscore when it should be a dash (really put me off). Tiling window managers are great for customisation, but I often find myself playing with things too much to actually get stuff done. Hence KDE, gives me a stable environment that will work when I need it to but that also gives me enough customisation options to make it my own.

Will I make the 2 years? Maybe, I hope so. I have wanted to challenge myself to staying on one distro for a longer period of time and since I’ve been loving my time on Arch, I felt like it was best to start now and start learning the more in depth stuff to help me be better at being productive (and not waste time going down deep, deep rabbit holes researching how to do loads of things, like I often do).

I am also trying to use a few more Flatpaks to reduce the number of pacakges on my system, I’m at nearly 2000 packages. Which is probably quite a lot for a minimal Arch install. (I do need to go through and uninstall a load of pacakges and desktops that I have no plans to use anymore - I do a lot of testing of things 😀).

And I think that that’s about it for this blost, have a great one and I’ll write again soon. Byeeee!

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