Arch Linux...time to say goodbye?

Hey there, my gorgeous friends on the internet. This past year or so, I made some pretty big changes to how I work as a software developer. And one of them was switching my editor from VS Code to Neoim. A lot of you guys recommended me to do that. And it's been nothing but fantastic. My god, can't believe I went this long without it. Uh, my workflow is much better. I got my own custom setup. I actually like how everything looks. So, it's been great. But another thing I did was I switched my operating system over to Arch Linux. And my god, uh, I'm getting that itch. I'm getting that itch. It's down here. Do you think I should call the doctor? Um, I'm getting that itch to switch over to another operating system. And I'm not sure if it's Windows or or Mac OS. Maybe we can figure it out this episode. Uh, but there's been some struggles. I want to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. Your furniture is ugly that comes with Arch Linux. Probably my favorite thing when it comes to Arch Linux is the tiling windows. I never ever have any more problems of having different windows stacked on top of each other trying to find where is this, where is that. It's really seamless. So, I use basically the super key and you hit enter and you got your terminal open. And then you can just switch windows. So, I can have this on two. I can go up to three up here at the top. If it's hard to see, that's because the resolution scaling is weird on Arch, but that's another problem that we're going to talk about. Uh, but it's really nice, right? So, you got your terminal, boom, you go here, you got Chromium, you can test your application out. Super cool. And you can switch. If I want to move this over there, boom. It's like I don't even need to do anything with my right hand. It's free to touch whatever I want. It It's great, right? So, tiling manager is fantastic. But using this as my main operating system, I've noticed that I don't really rely too heavily on this. Whilst it's a really really nice feature and I prefer it over the other two operating systems, it wouldn't be a deal breakaker if I'd lose this. Why? Because when I'm working most of the most of the times I'm just opening up T-Max and I have two three terminals here and I pretty much do everything in this one window. So I wouldn't need to switch over anyway or have multiple windows here showing. Uh so it's not that big of a deal, but it is a really nice thing to have. Another thing I really like about Arch is just how little resources it uses. Like my god, what's happening over on Windows side? Uh it's I'm not even joking. It's like four times less uh in like memory, CPU usage. It's just like everything that you open is is instantaneous. And another nice thing is that it's Unix based. So just anything regarding programming is super nice and super easy to do. But once you start moving away from this and you want to do more stuff, I feel like it's falling a bit apart for me personally. Uh, let's talk about it. So, people been complaining that there's a buzzing in my videos. So, I listened to it back and I was like, "Oh, crap. There is a buzzing." So, I was trying to identify what it was. So, I ended up going out and buying another XLR cable. Don't know why I'm showing you the empty package. It's here. Right. So, this is the old cable here. And this is the new one. I plugged it in. I'm like, "Okay, that should probably be the one to fix it." So, I plugged it in and I was listening to it and I could still hear it. Penetas, is that you? I was hoping not. Turns out it's it's the drivers, the pipe wire or whatever it is in Arish Linux that are causing me this problem. I plugged it into my Mac. No problems whatsoever. So, okay, fine. Okay. I'll try to update the drivers. So, I go in, open up the terminal, update all the audio drivers. Same problem. I don't know how to fix this thing. I just accepted that I'll have to record everything through the Mac, which is what I'm doing right now. I'm just capturing the the screen here on Arch. Uh, but I cannot use my setup right now. I literally don't have a solution. And that's kind of the problem uh that I keep running into with Arch is that I spend so much time troubleshooting stuff rather than actually doing any development. And I've done this with Nvidia drivers as well because for the longest time I'd whenever I have Chromium open, I'd get like big flickering on the screen. And I never got it resolved. I I got it resolved by turning off the hardware acceleration. Uh but it wasn't working for the longest time. So that's like a couple of hours I spent on that. Anyway, initially when I installed Arch, I was dual booting with Windows. Uh and that had kind of its own advantages because I still had all my apps there. So it was really easy to kind of transition over if you want to say that. So I do all the filming here uh on my art setup. And then you'd have this really cool feature where you could just grab all the videos and literally drag it over to the Windows side. And then I had like Da Vinci Resolve, which is a video editor, uh that I could just do all the editing there because I had the paid version and everything. So I didn't really want to move everything over. But I was like after a while, I decided let's commit to it. Let's do single boots. No more dual boots. And now my one of my feet is always cold. It's a big problem. Uh, but I decided to do Arch Linux with Omari, which is what you're seeing here. This is the setup, which has like some really cool features. Uh, it's all kind of integrated for you, so you don't really have to customize it too much yourself. Uh, and it's really nice cuz like installing apps is really easy. Uh, picking styles, it has a bunch of fonts already integrated in it. But when I did the install, I ended up formatting my whole drive and now I'm left with this. So, I was forced to pretty much install all the applications that I was relying on here, and it just hasn't worked out for me. So, I do most of my editing in uh Resolve, and that's kind of the only one supported here on on on Linux anyway. And whilst this tiling manager is cool, it breaks in so many of these applications, they just don't know how to handle it. I have this in my OBS happen as well. Uh, but mainly here can be pretty jarring. Uh, where you open up some sort of popup and it just it just breaks. It just doesn't work properly. Not only that, like I think I spend a week trying to figure out why I cannot load videos in here and I I I realized that specific formats just won't work or you have to do uh some crazy uh crazy research to figure out why. Uh, but I never ended up figuring out why I couldn't load up uh specific formats in Da Vinci. So, I I I just stopped caring enough to spend time in here and I just offload it uh with local send. So, this is an app that I use and I just send over the videos over to my Mac and just do the editing there. Another annoying thing is just updating stuff. I really like how on Mac and on Windows you can you open up an app. Okay, we have Da Vinci here and we just prompt you with the update. You click update and you are done. Uh yes, here you can do it as well. You can do Pac-Man and then the name of the application. Uh but I just you end up having so many troubles with it. Today I tried to update OBS. Uh I wanted to have on Windows I had this feature where it would essentially cut me out. it would do like an AI screen remover, background remover, right? Because I want to do that in my videos. So, I open up and I I'm like, well, the feature is not available here. That's weird. Well, let me do Pac-Man install S OBS Studio, right? So, I run that and I see there's a new version, but it cannot install the new version. Then I get this big error saying something's wrong with FFmpeg. Okay, then. So I went down and diagnosed that. Okay, what's wrong with FFmpeg? Well, it basically asked me that this lib AV codec should be on 62 rather than 61. Okay, so I start updating uh FFM back to the latest version. Did that. Try to install OBS. It installs. Okay, latest version. This might have the actual thing, the screen remover, the background remover. Run OBS. It doesn't open anymore. Why? I don't know. I reverted back. This is the old version I'm running OBS on now again. Uh so it's really annoying. And then I did some more research and I found out that the specific driver is not supported here on on on Linux. Uh which is like okay, of course it's not. Uh so it's just so annoying when you just want things that are not available on this side of the fence. Uh, another thing I said that I was really wanted to get into streaming and when you look on Mac and Windows, there's so many great applications to be able to do multistreaming. Whenever I go to these apps, so this is one that's pretty cool called Streamlabs, but there's reream as well. And they're really cool because they put together both chats into one place and you also got transitions and other stuff, but it's never available on on Arch and that sucks. That sucks for me. Uh but there's little GitHub page that does the multistreams. It never works. I I tried this and it keeps crashing so many times and it's just so unreliable. I find myself so often seeing that one of the streams is just magically turned off and I just noticed it two hours later. So, I was stuck in by myself. It's sad. But yeah, there's just a bunch of applications that I feel like I need to rely on. H that are just simply not available, unfortunately. So, Affinity is a big one that I use for thumbnail editing and you know, you can do drawing and a bunch of other stuff in it. I don't mind that the Adobe products are not here because they're something like this. uh but again not available. So before you do the switch really like consider what applications you're heavily relying on uh because if it's not available it just might make your life really really difficult. Oh here's another annoying thing. I usually like to hold my mouse down to scroll down on the page and it just doesn't work. I'm sure there's a key binding for it. I'm I'm 100% there is one. Uh but that was not on by default. So, I either have to use the up or down arrows, which can be kind of slow because I like to go fast like that, or grab the scroll bar. But again, it's one of those things where you do something and you stop and then you end up going down this big rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to make it to your own liking and then you realize that the year is done and you haven't done any work. So, I'm not sure which direction to take this. Do I stay on this setup? because I do like coding on here. Uh, but I want my applications on another operating system. So, maybe I can get another MVME card and just do another dual boot but on two different MVMEs. That might make the whole process simpler. Or I don't know, maybe I'm I'm really thinking kind of do the middle ground and get a Mac Mini. They're really cheap. They're like400 pounds and they kind of cover both of the things that I want, which is the experience on on a Mac to to write software is is is really good. And then I have the flexibility of using my applications as well. So that could be really good. And then I I can just have this machine here uh simply for I don't know if I want to play some League or something. though League actually works on the Mac Mini, but maybe for more vers versatile games. Uh, that could be a potential. So, I'm thinking either going with the Mac Mini or actually pull the trigger and go and get a MacBook Pro uh 16 in. But these are so expensive and I already have a bunch of screens, so I'm not sure if I should go with this. This is 2,600 Mac Mini. I could have the Mac Mini here, have my PC there, and that could be a big W. But yeah, I'm kind of conflicted. So, let me know which direction I should take it. Should I just pull the trigger, get a Mac Mini, and just solve all of my problems, or should I try the dual booting setup again? Uh, I I'm just I just want to go and create videos and get back to working on my platform. uh and and just I feel like I'm I'm past that stage of my life where I want to worry about confict files and making the system look the way I want it to. I'm not that interested in that anymore. I feel like that's how I was in the past as well. I would go Android and look how much you can customize this. I think becoming a dad taught me that these things don't matter as much and now I'm just happy with the iPhone and just it's fine. It's fine the way it is. It just works. I just need it to work and I can focus on the things that I want to focus on. So, let me know what I should be doing. Leave a comment down. Drop a little subscribe and we'll see where we