Westerhof

Earlier this year, during the Trump - Zelensky meeting in February, felt like a real wake up call on Digital Sovereignty for me. As a European, I feel like I rely on tech originating and exposed to US law an enourmous amount. The meeting, and the resulting fall-out such as Trump halting intelligence sharing during the Kursk offensive, made me feel like I should make a change.

But this was not easy. I’m a big appreciator of gratis software provided by big tech. Google search, Outlook, Windows and Instagram. All by companies that fall under US jurisdiction and rely on it’s pro-business political sentiment.

But I felt that the kitchen was on fire, and I was very eager to look for alternatives. I’ll be writing more about my experience with the other aspects such as Ecosia, but for now I want to move away from Windows.

Distribution

There’s so many distros to choose from. It was hard to pick one that spoke to me. Looking at my daily tasks, I needed to program, 3D model and play video games. I figured I’d either go for Mint, Arch or Ubuntu.

After meeting a good friend of mine in the pub, an avid Arch Linux user for a long while. After a beer or two he told me that Arch can do pretty much ’everything’ these days. Gaming? Not an issue. Animating and 3D modeling? Not an effort. And fully customizable to your liking too. And best of all, if I had any issues he’d offer me tech support.

Even with that assurence I felt quite nervous. Starting something new. Arch had this reputation for being quite ‘difficult’.

However, it was incredibly easy to install. The Archinstaller script guided me trough it, and a great video tutorial helped me get a system up and running quickly.

Mistakes

I was able to install my tooling as needed. Steam, Blender, Davinci Resolve and the associated video games all worked great. But it wasn’t long before my PC started crashing.

This made my spirits drop immediatly. It had been a long time since I had experienced a crash on my system. The desktop had run Windows 10 without an issue for over 6 years. After a quick check-up with help of my friend, it appears amd-ucode was not being loaded. In fact, it was missing from the system.

This seems like such a small issue. Install it using pacman, add it to the config file and you’re good to go again. But it was the occurence for me that made it annoying, snowballing quickly into another issue where my familiair silcer for 3D printing had issues getting to work.

It’s the little things

I’m familair with the difference systems: yum for Redhat / Centos, apt and deb for ubuntu / debian, etc. - however, arch was different here. The inclusion of the AUR and using yay to install packages is great, including having them built on the machine. But even here I ran into a misconfiguration.

For 3D printing, I used to be able to use Orca Slicer with no problem. Yet this non-unified way to install felt unneeded. Flatpack, AUR, AUR-bin… great! But as I tried the flatpack and the bin, they all did not seem to work on my system. As such, I resolved to building it locally.

But, as it ran through the process, it froze my computer. Having had to do digging here again, it seemed nice did not set any limits whatsoever for the compilation. Computer froze, and crashed. A hard reboot was needed.

A small thing that was quick to be fixed with a ‘simple’ config file change… again.

Horizon

I’ve mentioned only two examples thus far, but this was a trend that kept comming up.

Some thing does not work -> Try to find the issue -> Fix in config file.

While it’s great that this is possible, to be able to quickly go into .yaml, .conf or what have you, and fix it, I felt that it was not the out of the box experience I had grown to expect from an OS. It slowly felt like Arch Linux was becomming my hobby, while it’s supposed to be the platform I do my daily tasks on.

Having to learn Linux became even more clear as I started using Blender on my new machine. It’s a great piece of software that is fully cross platform, used for 3D modeling, animating and more. My experience was without issue on my Macbook and Windows 10, yet on Arch it quickly gave me ‘Out of Memory’ errors such as CUDA buffers being full during rendering.

Issues between Linux and Nvidia were something I had read about before, making me quick to blame drivers to be the culprit. But from a user perspective, as somebody who never had these issues on Windows, it blew my mind.

This culminated even further as I went to fix the issue. It wasn’t long before just using Blender caused my computer to completely freeze and required a hard reboot to resolve. Discussing this with my friend, he had me check for swap, as it was very likely my RAM was full. Sadly, this wasn’t the cause. A small swap was in place, but as a partition. Adding a swap file on disk double the size of my RAM did not solve the problem.

The Straw

Sadly, I felt no choice but to go back to Windows 11. I wasn’t very happy to do so, felt ashamed. But the culmination of issues that have to be fixed unintutively. Digging through config files, the bad UX on some open-source, the hardware driver issues, the stuttering bluetooth and digging through different bluetooth manager, not being able to use desired software or digging through wine or proton configs.

Maybe I shouldn’t have picked my distro whilst drinking.

So Arch was not for me. But, a collegue of mine spoke very highly of Fedora, and it certainly peaked my interest. Maybe I should ask him if his favorite passtime is using vim on config files…

Nontheless, I will try again. But perhaps as a dual boot or a virtual machine instead, before doing another dive in the deep end.

For non-OS alternatives, expect some posts soon.