welcome to part two of my linuxjourney. i highly recommend you to read the first part, because this part will continue right after that.
to arch or not to arch
after i installed arch on my daily laptop, i really got to know linux external link icon wikipedia icon and especially arch linux external link icon arch icon . this system, i don`t remember it quite that good, but i think i have managed to keep it stable and not to break it. i am not sure. it was some time ago. but for sure i did not update it it regularly, as i should external link icon arch icon have. on the other hand, i had quite some issues with some stuff working not correctly, that i fixed time after time. one thing that was the not working at first was bluetooth for sure, but i believe with the arch wiki external link icon arch icon i have made it work. i invested a decent amount of time to fix such issues, so that i did not even try to get printing via cups external link icon arch icon to work. nowadays i know how to fix these issues, or to better say i know that i can fix these issues very quickly and i where to find useful resources to do so. but at this point in time i had basically no experience with linux at all. the only os i have used was windows and sometimes i used mac-os in my school (and my work-laptop came with pre-installed arch). so i was used that certain things just work out of the box. i would also say that it was a mistake to jump right into arch linux and not to have a better start with distros like linux mint external link icon mint icon or fedora external link icon fedora icon .
at the end i just wanted to get back to arch linux. nowadays i would have wished to at least have experienced fedora or a debian external link icon debian icon (based) distro other than ubuntu external link icon ubuntu icon or even debian itself, but i got back to arch. like i said it was mainly cause of the minimal and freedom philosophy external link icon arch icon , but to be honest i think it was also due to the fact that arch was hyped. i also liked the memes about arch (e.g. btw i use arch external link icon ) and thought that cool "linux-kids" naturally use arch. it was and is hyped in some parts of the linux-community and i naively thought that there are good reasons for it. of course, there are but this is not entirely true, i know nowadays. everybody should use the distro that fits them the most. for one it is arch, for others it`s fedora or linux mint or even gentoo external link icon gentoo icon . on the other hand because of the fact that my work-laptop was also on arch linux, i was used to it, so i thought it would be better to go back so that i don`t have to learn a new distro all over again next to my web-dev-apprenticeship and my volunteering stuff i did in my free time. i also didn`t want to do the arch install all over again, so i looked for a arch-based-distro and right at this time garuda linux external link icon garuda icon was getting popular. it`s an arch-based-distro, which is costumized for gaming with a lot of visual features out of the box. i didn`t think that this was in conflict to my minimal approach and also my hardware capabilities. my thinkpad t440s external link icon with my 12 gb ram was not that good enough for so many visual effects. also, because of the customization for gaming, it comes with a lot of pre-configuration. i think i tried kde plasma external link icon kde icon in garuda, and i didn`t like that either. so after a week or so, maybe it was even shorter. i looked for an alternative and i found endeavour-os external link icon endeavour-os icon . a minimal arch-based distro which comes close to vanilla arch. i think i also tried xfce external link icon xfce icon , but again i am not sure. at some point a tried it for sure, but maybe it was only in a virtual system external link icon wikipedia icon .
endeavour-os
at the end i ended up with endeavour-os and gnome external link icon gnome icon for a long time. i liked my current system and for sure i was a fan of gnome with the workflow and apps it ships. on the other hand i had much more trouble with this set-up than i had with my very first arch install. maybe it is just a nostalgic thing, but i do think that my very first setup was much more stable than my endeavour-os setup. on this setup i remember i had quite some issues to fix and my system broke completely from time to time. sometimes it was my fault, but on rare occasions it was endeavour-os itself who caused it to break. i remember once after an update i could not get back into my system and i was really scared, because i thought i lost everything. after some investigation on my work-laptop i found the issue on the forum external link icon endeavour-os icon of endeavour-os and it was not my fault, instead it was entirely the fault of endeavour-os (read about it here external link icon endeavour-os icon ). there was a known bug that caused grub external link icon wikipedia icon to fail, so grub had to be updated or reinstalled manually. in short grub is a bootloader which manages the boot process. after some nervous moments i managed to fix this issue. so in the end everything was ok, but i had a bad time with a lot of fear during the process. this bug only appeared in endeavour-os system`s so a normal arch install would have spared me this moment. although i think i got stronger after that because i came to the conclusion even when certain things break completely i can handle it, i can fix it. on the other hand i was more careful with updates, so that i only updated my system if i had time to fix possible issues afterwards. it is a good recommendation to do this, but this led for me to update my system even more unregularly in other words even lesser. and because of this more issues came along. most of them were easy to fix. the issue that i encountered the most was problems with the arch key ring external link icon arch icon or the mirrorlist external link icon arch icon , which i then had to update manually again. now i am foreshadowing: currently i am not using arch nearly a year at this moment and i forgot certain arch things. and even though i had to fix this issue quite regularly, i don`t remember exactly what i did. so at the moment i can`t explain more to this topic.
from time to time a looked at other distros, but i did not install them. i was just informing about them and trying to keep up to date with the linux community. yeah, it was also a bit of looking for alternative systems, but i did not remember to really thought about hopping to another distro. i was happy with endeavour. at some point i tried a window tiling manager external link icon wikipedia icon , openbox external link icon i think, in a virtual machine, but again foreshadowing, i was not ready to leave a full desktop environment yet.
in august of 2023 i bought a new laptop. surprisingly it was nearly exact 4 years later than i bought my thinkpad t440s. around that time i started to study social work external link icon wikipedia icon and i wanted a better laptop for the start of my studies. but i had not quite the money to buy the newest tech and i wanted to stay on a thinkpad, because i had no mentionable issue with the t440s, besides the battery (it is not that good as it used to be, so i couldn´t use my laptop that long without recharging). i still have it and use it from time to time to test stuff. but it was getting older, after all it was made in 2014. so it at this time it was nearly 10 years old, 9 years to be exactly. now it is 12 years old and i can still use it quite good. but i wanted an upgrade. in the end i bought which in some thinkpad-linux communities external link icon reddit icon is praised as the "goat" (greatest of all time) of thinkpads or at least the last great thinkpad external link icon youtube icon , the thinkpad t480 external link icon with 16 gb of ram. and i think it was a good decision. now, after 2 years (and some months) i still love my thinkpad. it is not the best device, but other than some compromises about gaming the newest games, it`s more than enough for my use case and everything can be exchanged or upgraded. in general thinkpads are made very robust and last a long time. again i installed endeavour on it and i was using it at least for a year on this machine.
sadly i don`t recall other dates before this buying date. i would love to know the exact dates of the time i installed arch for the first time, as well as the other moments i mentioned in this post, like my ubuntu time, garuda linux and the start of my endeavour-os-phase. but i don`t think i have much clues to determine this dates. maybe i will dive deeper into it and try to make a kind of timetable.
with my new thinkpad i did not change much. i looked around for other distros and desktops but i never seriously considered to move.
up until my second semester in summer 2024. at this time i worked at my university in the website-team of my department and i had a cool boss. to be correct formally it was my boss, but we were more like a team and we saw each other more like teammates, even though there were obviously a hierarchy and a dependency between us. especially when i participated in his seminars. in this semester (summer 2024) he made a seminar about free and open source software (foss external link icon wikipedia icon ), copyright external link icon wikipedia icon and linux. the final submission of these course was an installation of linux, the presentation of it and a documentation of the whole process. i really liked the course, because it was the first time i really get to know the free software movement external link icon wikipedia icon and my professor showed us linux very beginner-friendly. of course, most of it i already knew, because at this point in time i used linux already 3-4 years. so i wasn`t a beginner anymore and in some topics i had more knowledge than my professor, but it was a good refreshment, and some aspects were new for me for example the dual boot, i never did one. it was also a good way to learn linux all over again, this time more systematically from the ground and also with a progressive political point of view in mind. in my apprenticeship we also had an introduction to linux at the vocational school, but it was intended to learn linux for servers and it was only the technical side of view. not the history nor something political. we had to install a server on our raspberry pi`s external link icon wikipedia icon and develop a small python external link icon wikipedia icon sensor program, which measured the temperature and the humidity. i don´t remember that free software external link icon wikipedia icon or the gnu-project external link icon wikipedia icon was even mentioned once. it was more influenced by the liberal economic side of view, with the open-source ideology external link icon wikipedia icon .
ok, back to my linux-seminar at the university. there i really considered which linux distro i want to install and present at my old thinkpad. first of course i thought about arch linux. in the seminar our professor gave us time to research and to install distros during the seminar and i wanted to use this time. so it was clear that i should not do an arch install. on the other hand i could have invested the time to do a normal arch install and really get to know my system. but i started to wonder if i could use this seminar to experience and test a completely new distro, maybe also a challenging one. and so i did...
i think at this point i would like to stop and make a little cliff hanger out of it, i feel a bit sorry for that, but just a little bit, not enough to not do it. i think it is a good point to stop here because the next part is a key point in my linux journey which changed a lot. so i would like to give it its own part. and i think i will write it very soon, because it will help me to decide if i wanna stay at this distro or if i want to go back to arch linux. i think this question was the whole reason why i started to write about my linuxjourney. i wanted to reflect on why i did what in which time to help me to understand what i should do next. so there will be hopefully not a big break, although i am currently thinking about adding a big feature to my bash-html-builder-script, which can take some time, but this is a topic of it`s self. and i am currently stuck on my last assignment this semester which i should really be focusing on more.
but for the time being that is all i have to say