I Switched Distro Distros Twice This Summer and Landed Somewhere Better Than My Arch Setup
There are people who switch Linux distros for philosophical reasons. There are people who switch for stability. There are people who switch because their employer ships them a fleet of laptops pre-configured to hibernate in a different timezone. I switch because my pacman cache had 4.3GB of orphaned packages and a partial upgrade ate my display manager at 11 PM on a Saturday, and I took it personally.
Here is the journey, in three acts, like all good tragedies.
Act One: Arch, and the Illusion of Control
I ran Arch for years. I mean years. I earned the glass house. I built my install from the documented steps and I kept it working through, conservatively, eleven laptop migrations, four battery replacements, and one incident in 2023 that I have legally reclassified as “learning.”
But the rot was setting in. Not in Arch itself — Arch is great at what Arch does, which is providing a build system and then watching, neutrally, as you use it. The rot was in my specific Arch. My dotfiles had drifted so far from any upstream that pacman -Qo /usr/bin/everything had opinions. My last coherent pacman -Syu had produced an error message so long and so specific that I printed it. I still have it. It’s in a frame. It says the same thing my grad school advisor said, which is: “the problem was you.”
Act Two: CachyOS, or the Performance Arc
In a moment of genuine optimism I installed CachyOS, which is Arch, but the repos have been pre-chewed for performance: optimized packages, newer kernels, compiler flags aimed at your exact CPU instead of a lowest-common-denominator blob. The pitch is “Arch, but faster,” and for a while, it was. Boot times improved. Package install latency was nicer. My terminal responded with the smug speed of a machine that had recently been to a CPU gym.
Things I liked about CachyOS: it’s still Arch underneath (yay/paru still work, AUR still exists, the glass house still stands). Things that bothered me about CachyOS: the performance wins came with a default kernel that got replaced every week, and the window manager, theming, and config situation was still firmly My Problem. CachyOS made the floor faster and the ceiling the same. I like fast floors. But I didn’t install Linux to be handed a floor. I installed it to work on it, and half my day was still spent fixing dotfiles that had journeyed with me from a ThinkPad with a swollen battery.
Act Three: Omarchy, and Something Genuinely Good
And then someone on a Discord server with a username I refuse to repeat and a profile picture of a cat wearing sunglasses linked a screenshot that settled the matter: their terminal font rendering was better than mine and they had done nothing to deserve it. They said the word “Omarchy” out loud, in text, at 10:30 PM, and I did the thing I always do, which was research it on my phone in bed for 20 minutes and then flash a USB drive at 12:40 AM.
For those who haven’t seen it: Omarchy is DHH’s opinionated Arch-based setup. opinionated Hyprland, a curated set of sensible defaults, Wayland that acts like it’s been tested by a real quality assurance department, and a rice that looks finished. Not “finished” the way a stock GNOME install finished. Finished the way a terminal developed by someone who gets paid to have opinions looks.
And it is awesome. I say that with my whole chest. The setup is opinionated in the best way — someone with taste made 200 tiny decisions in advance and shipped them with the confidence of a person who doesn’t need you to like their theme. Things I have not had to do since installing it:
- Choose a lock screen
- Configure Hyprland window rules by hand, from scratch, alone, at night
- Fight Wayland’s screen-sharing for the tenth time
- Rationalize a wallpaper pipeline
There is even a radio station. Omarchy ships with its own internet radio at radio.omarchy.org, because of course it does. The commitment to the aesthetic runs all the way down to the music you listen to while configuring the music player. I have had it on in the background for three straight days. My productivity is unchanged but my sense of belonging to a subculture has never been stronger.
The whole thing feels finished in the way a terminal developed by a person whose actual job is having opinions looks, not the way a stock GNOME install looks “finished.” My workflow survived. My SSH config survived. My girlfriend’s laptop survived the switch because configs maintained by someone else’s automation are more likely to be correct than ones I drifted into existence myself. My terminal still has the same 142 bash aliases. I use 12 of them. The other 130 are load-bearing memorials.
What I Actually Learned
The lesson here is not “Arch bad” or “praise the maintainers.” The lesson is the thing every sysadmin learns eventually and then pretends not to have learned: defaults are a feature. Curated defaults. Defaults that are maintained by someone with taste and updated for you are not a bald template; they are a maintenance contract. I spent eleven years hand-maintaining a rice and calling it customization. I now spend, roughly, zero minutes on rice and all my time doing the actually fun stuff, which is breaking things, fixing them, and telling the internet about it.
The full setup in my house is now, in order of loyalty:
- Homelab node — CachyOS (and the floor is fast)
- Deprecated laptop rack — untouched, running anything, no judgments
- Desktop — Omarchy (a window manager I didn’t configure, on purpose, as a treat)
- Network — still powered by spite and three VLANs named after Star Wars planets
Moral of the story: The distro hierarchy is a lie told by people who already suffered through the installation. Arch gave me control. CachyOS gave me speed. Omarchy gave me back approximately 200 hours of my life and a window manager that looks like I paid someone. All three are running in this house simultaneously, and this is the first time in years that the desktop is not the machine I’m apologizing for over dinner.