How I was so fed up with Windows I installed Arch, By The Way
Have you considered it recently too? It's okay to be open source-curious, shh, I won't tell anyone. I'll make the start.
In the last weeks alone I noticed quite a bunch of people online, friends, acquaintances, and a whole lot of random users between this or that platform, sharing their intent to switch to Linux, to ditch Discord, and to dismiss the umpteenth corporate solution. Someone wants to find back a trace of the "old internet". The next one doesn't really want to mess up years of established workflows, but wonders, phew, are there no alternatives? Another person wants to just get away from shitstorms and doomscrolling of this or that platform. But the most commonly expressed wish of these people was to get some of their online and offline space back, somehow. Most recurring was, apart from Discord-specific drama, the idea to try Linux.
I mostly followed it from the sidelines, but every once in a while I chimed in.
"So you switched to Linux too?" someone would ask. "Yes. I did," I'd say, or something to that extent. Occasionally, the follow-up question was an inevitable: "What did you go with...?", which was, once in a while, followed by: "...and can you suggest me something for my usecase?"
No, I couldn't, because the choice I had made was also one of the silliest you could make. No, I did't bother to subject any single one person to that meme answer, which is why I do it now and here instead of the chats then. The execution of the move and what I went with boils simply down to this: I was so fed up with Windows I installed Arch, by the way.
Now That we Got That Cleared Up
Would I suggest Arch of all things to anyone? No, not really. Linux generally? Sure, give it a go. Arch Linux, though? Especially a cold restart from Windows right into that madness? No, not if you wish to have a workflow, seamlessly picked off from where you left off. Not if you're reluctant to mess around in the console or with the config files. Not if you're intent on keeping it simple and easy to navigate. Not if you prefer to never touch the innards of the system or learn about them.
But it taught me one thing I found incredibly helpful in making the call. The Linux world has a whole universe of stuff I absolutely love, but loathed its absence(s) throughout years of Windows. So let me turn that phrase around, and maybe the first conclusion was this: Let your dismay guide you, if you wonder whether to make the switch and where to. Pick candidates by exclusion. You might know very well what you want by it being something else than what you're stuck with right now. Have you already looked at what's all out there?
Windows 7 doesn't really support Windows 7? What surprise! Thanks for suggesting that search, Search Engine Company. Where do I find the user who searched for this?
But maybe I got to start in the stone age, if you want my own viewpoint through some quarter of a century. For a while, Windows seemed like a neat solution, at least where I was in userland. I am simplifying a lot here, but let's see: no more managing hi-mem and lo-mem, you could have multiple things open at the same time (theoretically), and juggling different autoexec.bat's would be soon entirely unnecessary. Of course, it wasn't for a while, because some things really required to be assigned their IRQ tidily, and once you went messing around between MS-DOS and Win-Dos, well, things got interesting real quick.
Do you want mouse support or rather have soundcard output when you fire up that old DOS game again? From the Win side, connoisseurs with enough system resources could at least stick a few new system sounds into the mess, slap a theme on it, and call it a day. What I mean is that it seemed to go forward, right? Throughout the next iterations, Windows got slightly better, step by step. Or so it seemed, emphasis on seemed. With the next quarter century, the problems became more evident too.
The pitfalls of explorer.exe regularly drove me up the wall. The wretched thing didn't remember what had been open the last time, let alone where I positioned things, and sometimes it thought I might like this or that folder view better than the previously configured one. Consistency was a nightmare for all things in Windows, generally speaking. Seeking the ancient scroll of settings and options, hideously hidden, miles deep in an interface that hadn't been cleaned up since ages, and your torch shone upon some old "fax adapter" roaming around in the wastelands of grand-grand-grandfathered-in Win 3.11 interfaces, until the one really needed dialog box came into view, beyond which loomed a paywall labelled "You didn't buy the Home Super Extra Special Elite Admin Edition, did you?" Well, too bad, I didn't.
Plan the Move!
So the first recurring thought was that I wanted to use my computer again more efficiently. Or should I say "get back to use it at all"? Maybe have tabbed directories, that'd be neat. I considered being able to just compare two files, for I could certainly not tell anymore which of the two I had revised differently how. I wanted to get away from the cluttered singular desktop with all its icons, and every odd program dumping a new icon into the taskbar; some of which were easy to disable in the settings, others not so much. There are reasons for that, but we'll get to that later. I wanted to have back tools to at all run a computer properly.
Getting-used-to-inconvenience is how windows workflows feel, little as one wants to call them anything remotely resembling a "flow". Instead of a flowstate, it's either a turbulent river or a still lake. Separate workspaces are absent (though, for a while, you could get around some limitations by tossing explorer.exe out of the window(s) and insisting on using litestep or something like it). Windows had, however, its precious ways of nagging about whether you already did this or that. No, computer, shut up and behave. Where'd the option go to tell it to shut up? Oh, it was budgeted away. Or wandered into another menu. Or it's generally not possible, never been, and was just a fever dream, dear user.
I forget who dispensed this wisdom first, but a system should service the user, not the other way around. The "Reverse Centaur" comes to mind, though not necessarily in the usual framework, but it's close. You're at the behest of MS and their updates and occasional brickdates. I'm lucky enough to have made it through all the years without a proper brickage... at least there's that. No, wait, there was that one time...
...anyway, the point is that I found myself with a washing list of things I really wanted to be different. Give me back my customizations (can I also display it like this...? No.), don't put Persistently Unwanted Programs into my start menu (oh, hey, Candy Crush! Go die in a gutterfire!), don't bug me while I'm busy (Don't you get the message, Redmond? Get out of my living room already.) - all of that and then some more. Some of it was so quietly nagging I don't even mention it here... or the post would get even longer.
Besides, having said "get out of my living room", there's an important realization I had at the time. I wanted none of these corporations' ideas of home in -my- digital side of home*0, simple as that. The spic-and-span ad sceneries that the companies envision their customers to live in does quite frankly not exist anywhere but in a studio in Bay Area. That perfect customer is certainly not me, and the ad agency vision of boredom with a whiff of stock footage is not one I enjoy particularly much either as mere artwork. We're not going to ever be compatible, Sillycon Valley and I.
Most of all, you got to wonder at that point... are you making a move to another home, or are you simply taking back part of home?
*record_needle_scratch.wav*
What I really wanted back was my own damn space. I had tried Windows 10 on my laptop, but it'd been unfeasible, slow and janky. My desktop computer doesn't play nice with the requirements Win 11 would bring with itself (because sure enough Win 10 is also EOL), and the hardware situation, no, let's not talk about it now. That meant sticking with MS for longer wasn't an option at all. Mac? Ah, hell, no.
And so the list of desired changes grew, often motivated by everything I thoroughly loathed whenever working with Windows. But one can convert the energy of that fury, catalyze it, redirect it into the question "What should be different about this?" What would turn nuisance into niceness?
Not like anyone would want to run it that long, but one could. It sure meant another stupid long uptime in which I could've installed a better OS. Why I didn't quite yet, that's a whole other story...
My girlfriend was at the time busy with EndeavourOS and, with that, inevitably considering to wander off to Arch proper. For a time I could see solutions and comfortable workflows right there before my eyes, with system updates happening when intended, an actual file browser with - behold! - tabbed views. So many small and nifty things, which I guess fall under Convenience of Life features, and they're all rather hard to name if you'd ask me, but once you make use of them, they're unintrusively there. And a good tool should blend away, so that you don't even notice its presence unless necessary.
Imagine picking up a pencil. But the pencil can't be used to draw quite yet, it keeps complaining you have to sharpen it first with the Approved And Compatible sharpener, or else it just won't do its job today. You eye the pencil, and it sure enough seems to still have a fine tip. You try it on the paper and it leaves a trail of wood chips, impossible as that may have seemed. You sigh and move the pencil over to the Approved And Compatible sharpener. The sharpener promptly eats the pencil and refuses to deliver it back, but it also crumples up the sheet of paper in the process. That's a Microsoft Pencil in action.
For what it's worth, it's not that much better when you look around other companies and their idea of what tech you should use, and how you should do so. Some of them sell you crayons, but with apple taste. No, you can use them only on paper that also tastes of apple. Google had a theme of candy and sweets going for their Android line, for a while, but since they gave up on it after the roaring success of the competitor's Candy Crush, let's just say their equivalent would be a candy cane pencil that wants to constantly talk home to the candy store.
All of these play a similar playbook, locking the customer into their ecosystem. They're harvesting the pencil's data while you're doodling, and they'll want to know where your eraser went, and, without telling you, they have a perfect copy of the real unfortunate step in between when it looked like a Hokusai piece. They'll make sure that their pencil is the only one you use, and you get Pencil-as-a-Service in a subscription model if you pretend to like it hard enough.
Being Constructively Fed Up
Long story short, companies make it real easy to be fed up with the so-called solutions they've spoonfed the user with. If you feel more and more like rejecting their ideas anyway, you can use that momentum to make a different choice. You're anyway already at the point of wishing for something better, right? The leap requires a bit of faith, sure enough, and I won't say it's all easy, nor is it all flowers and sunshine on the penguin side of the fence.
But you just make sure you wrap up your email accounts and important data, and you'll find that you can bootstrap your functionality back up quite quick *1. All in all, I think that I've come out with more functionality and features than I had before. Programs that Win 7 suggested weren't working due to hArDwArE run perfectly fine again. I have again freedom on my own damn screen without programs phoning back home (to their idea of home, at that!). It's all made up of my own choices. Don't like something? Rip it out and put something else there (within some limitations, of course). No company logos reminding me nonstop that this is the product I'm using, no more sudden surprises with Candy Crush in the start menu, and not a single overnight reboot with surprise update-or-brick roulette.
So my eyes were anyway set on Linux. KDE was already on my mind, yes, please, give me a flexible desktop like I haven't seen since Litestep... Speedy BTFRS partition to run the system on? Sounds good, let's take that. ...but why Arch of all options?
It has some twenty years of track record, a boring long time, and I don't mind boring if it means calm. I don't mind tinkering either, so Arch is fine, if not even perfect, as I finally get to look at system bits (and bytes) that Windows kept categorically closing off from userland over the years. Instead of feeling like the OS makes me dumber by the iteration, I get to actually read up on what the individual parts do, and can make informed decisions *2.
On that notion, I feel Windows doesn't just dumbify users, it outright infantilizes them. I much rather have an intimidating bluescreen in an ugly monospace font because that's the last fallback the system could manage to present me with (and hopefully an error code I can follow), than receive a generic "Awww! :(" in Comic Sans *3. On top of it all, like this, you're being nannied into only doing the approved things on a system that is inherently MS-messy as fuck, so don't buy any of the spiel that it's all for your security, dear user. Microsoft can go tell ducks about sane environments to deploy Dynamic Duck Liabilities in, and duck off. They'd probably manage to tell you it's emission-neutral or something. Now with CO-2Pilot, buy now.
A rolling release with updates that I fetch when I want to I also don't mind. It means I get to learn over time why these packages are there, and why I would need them. My Win experience was to be called "structured" only in so far that, up to my last day with it, I found myself wondering about the one or the other process if it was legit or if that must be so... yes, yes, someone at MS thought it was. That, indeed, was the structure: utter absence of structure from version to version, for which you had to get used to new runtimes and processes.
The open source world has a general overlap with the LGBQT world, but then I find Arch wallpapers like this. I'm sold.
Most of all, I don't mind a hint of documentation now and then, the rest we'll figure out as we go, and if not at once, we can figure out how to undo the mess we just created. Ideally, we first figure out how to undo it if it goes wrong in the first place, sure. But while sprawling, Linux documentation is generally more sane than the insane crawls that I found myself on to troubleshoot some Windows-specific abomination.
Just follow this KB2936873762 entry. Oh, cool, a new interface I haven't seen MS use yet. Is that legit? Advised to follow through to KB293569345936, we end up in a web jungle last kept up by Bill personally. The linkthrough references a KB293862963720023862365 update you may or may not have or need depending on whether you have already installed KB230682386237209306293827023. No, the answer to your problem is to just do something else, which you can find on a forum not really affiliated with MS, but some guy in Karachi says this works.
Make the Move!
If you do mind this all in the slightest, Arch isn't a thing I'd suggest. It's only with plenty of support by my girlfriend that I even got that far, that much I can say. The topic of documentation all by itself is something to pluck apart later, but for starters let it be known that sometimes its nice to know where in between wiki entries, manuals, and other assorted readme's you have to look. I suppose I would've done something similar on my own, but it'd have taken longer, and it would have meant way more pitfalls fallen into like ET on an Atari Cartridge Dump. Most of all, I would've blown up the universe by accident. But now we're into the second month of the Arch adventure, and it all runs stable... seems fine to me.
Now this rant got already much longer than I wanted it to be, and yet there's a simple thing I'm trying to convey here. Feel encouraged to find out what irks you about the comapny... I mean, company solutions that you're being presented with. If you can answer a good deal of them with utter reject...
...maybe you'll want to check a distribution that feels just like Windows used to be, or you want to try something entirely different like Niri's window management. You're not sure if your usual file formats are going to work properly on Linux? Try a bootable USB stick, no strings attached (though you can certainly attach strings to it, nothing will stop you), and see if behaves with Linux-native equivalents of your usual Win programs. You could set up a dual-boot if you're really unsure or, oppositely, very sure that something will require it: for example, the bootable-stick test yields you the knowledge that you're really married to a piece of software or its proprietary format(s), or you simply find out that some multiplayer/competitive games and their anticheat might not play nicely with your playing on a Linux system.
The last folder I saw on Windows after flashing the ISO onto a stick. Since I didn't bother anymore to make a screenshot of explorer.exe at the time, this is rather the first screenshot I made on Arch.
Why companies don't really have your best interest in mind is something that could fit another few posts of similar length. You might find it worded betterer and more concise if you take a look at, say, Cory Doctorow's excellent book 'Enshittification'. I am kind of proud of myself for this blog post turning out so long without using that amazing word, and without resorting to outright shit talking, but yes, here we are:
Windows' enshittification reached the point where I could only walk up to the shit like I had turned into a gif animation of Jeff Goldblum, standing there and taking my sunglasses off, to then admire the immense steaming pile of shit that had been shat all over my computer, and I realized how much of the customization, my own workspace, and everything else to-be-rediscovered I wanted back. So I woke up one morning *5 with thoughts similar to these, and I saw Arch running on my girlfriend's computer across the room, looked back at my own computer, still aching under the burdens of Windows 7, and I thought... "why not?" And that is how I was so fed up with Windows I installed Arch, by the way.
0 - Have you ever wondered about the terminology "this software calls 'home'"?. That's utter sanewashing, isn't it? If anywhere, it calls back to corporate HQ or whichever poor server must gather all the important telemetry and junk. If a random company is your home, I don't know if I should congratulate you to your home ownership, but myself, I couldn't imagine it. Do you get your own bedroom or is a fold-out bed by the desk enough? Anyway, keep a look out for other fascinating word dismantlements. [Back to Footnote0]
1 - Really, most time I spent on this adventure so far was customizing everything a bit to my liking, and getting at all used to again enjoy the things I like doing. Generally, I was back online about an hour after shutting down Windows the last time (the bootable stick proved already that nothing was going to hiccup, and provided internet as well). So, by then I was pretty much good to go, and could proceed to just look around and take in the new views. [Back to Footnote1]
2 - Now, this has to be taken much more nuanced. Documentation is never as complete as one would like it to be. The rest is having curiosity and time to try the stupid idea you just had. And then it's just a bit of a calculation if your having of time and curiosity sum up to try it again and see why that previous approach didn't work. [Back to Footnote2]
3 - Which, on a side note, made it really easy in a recent attack vector to simply present the users with a faux fullscreen error message, and the instruction to ... copypaste some code? Where? Oh, why, into a Powershell window opened under the fullscreened picture of the error. Not to say you couldn't do it with a monospace bluescreen of the olden times, and that was a joke on some websites for a while, but... phew! That's beyond the point! An educated user doesn't just copypaste funny things somewhere, because the errors usually encountered should never have such a stupid as fuck instruction in the first place. Jesus in a peach can. What's next? Fix this error by sending $1000 in bitcoin to this obviously legit Microsoft wallet? Genuine error messages, indeed. Microsoft wouldn't charge you for fixes, right? *4 That'd be just silly. [Back to Footnote3]
4 - Of course they would. Long Term Support exists only because some underpaid engineers are left with the ungrateful task to maintain the heap of rotten garbage while the b2b customer is charged a premium fee. [Back to Footnote4]
5 - This is an old Blues standard, sung commonly by disgruntled users, upset ad targets, and reverse centaurs who have had it. The tune became popular a year after the Fearsome Century Bug (the anticipated bug in the telegraph wires never happened on New Year 1900, but it was a common fad to be worried about it), when the Panic of 1901 swept away early Email-by-Erail entrepreneurs in swathes. A reliable replacement for coast-to-coast communications was not found until establishment of the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel a few years after the stock crash. That opening ceremony was purportedly given the variation "Weehawken Up One Morning", but that is impossible to confirm. [Back to Footnote5]
Nonspecific footnote - I had intended to link Cory Doctorow earlier on, properly and all, right to his landing page. But since Cory says the page is optimized for Netscape Navigator (I confirmed by going there via Netscape Navigator 1.0, of course), I cannot possibly make such a heinous suggestion to anyone else (I tried on Internet Explorer 1.0 too, it was really broken). You'll find your way or know it already.