So I'm currently sitting in my office with a cup of coffee and a laptop. Inside the laptop is a relatively unknown Linux distro called Artix that I installed over the weekend. Prior to this I was running Fedora KDE spin. Before that was Mint, only for a couple of days, but I kept a live boot as I've found how versatile it is.
I distro hop just like that, and that was just on this current laptop. On my main computer I'm running Gentoo. That one will stay, though I might run a complete system reinstall here and there.
Okay, enough about my distro hopping activity. This post is about the Artix Linux I'm currently using.
Artix itself is not a very well known distro, but it is derived off Arch Linux. It is quite new, offering more integrated options on desktop environments, and most importantly, Systemd alternative. I went with their KDE option, installing whatever I had in Fedora. Instead of Systemd, I have OpenRC.
Overall, I find this distro to be lean and quite minimalist, which I like. What I appreciate the most is their options on desktop environments that I briefly mentioned above. They even go as far as providing their own theme.
However, it got a few things that could be polished.
Being an offshoot of Arch, it inherits pacman with all its good and bad. It's mostly good, but the bad thing is that it can't seem to know how to handle overwriting rogue file. The solution is posted here (on Artix website as well).
After running the update twice (had to be twice, for some reason, otherwise not everything is updated), everything runs smoothly. What I like the most is that unlike what I saw in Fedora KDE spin, their support on KDE doesn't seem half-baked. Their version of Audacious is built with Qt, and their Falkon browser has working web inspector.
I got to try Linux LTS, but I decided that the most up to date version would serve me better.
As I was customizing the desktop, I tried installing a widget for weather, which wasn't included. While installing it was a success, running it was a different story. Turned out a certain Qt library wasn't installed. In was the XML library (listed under qt5-xmlpatterns), in case somebody ask. After I got that down, the widget came out.
There was also some issue with audio. Apparently that one doesn't come default either. So I had to install that. After installing PulseAudio and KMix, the audio works. However, it turned out that KMix is not what I usually use. Some confusion ensued when trying to switch audio source (in my case to HDMI). After replacing KMix with plasma-pa, everything went as I expected.
There were a couple more customization I did. One of them was setting DNS with openresolv. After a few failed retry, I managed to get it working by changing the setting on NetworkManager. I also didn't miss my chance to replace the original file with a symlink to a temporary location.
Last but not least was the screen brightness. I noticed that the display brightness got set to maximum everytime I power my computer on, even after I dialed it down. After some research, I found out that I've taken some Systemd functionalities for granted. With more research, I learned how to replace this functionality with a couple simple scripts.
This should conclude my write up this time. I hope this distro would thrive because otherwise I'm screwed and have to distro hop again.
