I’m a little bit underwhelmed, I thought that based off the fact so many people seem to make using this distro their personality I expected… well, more I guess?
Once the basic stuff is set-up, like wifi, a few basic packages, a desktop environment/window manager, and a bit of desktop environment and terminal customisation, then that’s it. Nothing special, just a Linux distribution with less default programs and occasionally having to look up how to install a hardware driver or something if you need to use bluetooth for the first time or something like that.
Am I missing something? How can I make using Arch Linux my personality when once it’s set up it’s just like any other computer?
What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?
Makes sense. Do you find that by having the same install for so long (including transplanting it) that you have accumulated a lot of bloat? One of the things I really enjoyed about a fresh install was that I knew there wasn’t a build-up of digital junk files, but with Arch fresh installing every once in a while just seems impractical.
I’ve been using Arch for about 15 years or so, and yes, I build up cruft… in my home directory ;-). The system itself is remarkably good at keeping tidy. The one spot to keep an eye on is /var/cache/pacman, as that’s where it stores every package you download before installation and it won’t delete it without you asking it to.
Any new config file will be saved with a .pacsave extension, so you’ll want to keep an eye out for those, but that’s basically it
Not in any bothersome way. But if you really want to reinstall often that is valid as well. You can very easily script the arch install process to get you back to the same state far easier than other distros as well. Or you can just mass install everything except base and some core packages and reinstall the things you care about again which almost gives you a fresh install minus any unmanaged files (which are mostly in home and likely want to keep anyway).
Most of the junk accumulates in /home and I did a cleaning once, where I got rid of a couple hundred GB there, from stuff that was either already uninstalled or still installed but unused for years.
In the other root directories, I didn’t find much tbh. My / (excluding home) takes up 40GB and I don’t think it was significantly lower years ago as the bulk of it comes from necessary program files.
