I recently installed EndeavourOS and it worked wonderful for roughly 5 months. Then it got me into a situation where there was no way forward nor backward. So EndeavourOS is a Arch Linux derivative. I have dealt with Arch Linux in the past previously. Back then I just ran plain old vanilla Arch Linux. For those who don't know, there exist the distros that will give sporadic updates like Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Then there are also so called rolling release distros like Arch, Void and Solus. They will get updates almost continuously these days from kernel to drivers to programs. Whenever some application updates their main branch on Git it will be in Arch almost right after.

There also exists the rolling release variant of Debian: Sid

The particular experience I had with that was that it was running on a simple laptop I had hooked up to the TV (a real old Samsung plasma screen one) and it was running Kodi for us to watch something from the comfort of our bed. It was a simple device that did not really need a specific distro so I could just play around with something new. All went well. Until about couple of months in, I did not run updates as often. After all I was used to Debian at that point. If you run it weekly or even monthly you were good in those times. What happened next was I had an usable system that did not boot and I could not do anything about it. I went back to another distro for this laptop and noted in my mind that I should not use Arch anymore.

Fast forward roughly a decade.

New work who dis?

So I quit my job and started a new one. Got a new laptop, time for a new setup. At my old job I used PopOS!. It was quite new when I started there and I quite liked it. It was a Ubuntu derivative but felt much smoother and nicer to work with. So this time I asked around what everyone else was using. They all said Arch Linux. My mind tingled back to that experience I had had. Well maybe not go with vanilla Arch this time I thought but let us go with something new that gets recommended. I went with EndeavourOS. Booted the live ISO, everything got detected including my Nvidia GPU. I was happy. I went full ham and used Wayland instead of X11. Okay, everything went smooth. Well not entirely smooth. I learned about Pipewire, Portals and all things GNOME. Point was I had a working system and I was up and running.

Five months later....

Updated again, this time more regularly as in every day, and got stuck again. Nvidia and the new 5.18 kernel but also the specific LTS patch they released did not get along very well. I could boot into a terminal, fixed one thing in order to boot the LTS kernel at least. I forget now what I did, because it was a very stressful few days these past days to get everything working and making sure I was able to work again.

I got all my projects and moved them off to my HC4 I have running. Get the SSH keys, GPG keys and so on. Thinking I got everything, but just like when you leave a vacation home that nagging feeling (rightly or wrongly) that you forgot something was present here as well, I went ahead and just installed PopOS! again.

It went smooth like crazy. I booted the live environment from SD, then zipped around a bit trying different settings and making sure I could get hardware acceleration going and seeing if the GPU worked and it all checked out. No more than 5 minutes later during the install process I booted into my installed copy.

I went ahead and installed all my favourite tools like fish, AstroNvim and Slack to be able to communicate again.

New aesthetic

Previously I just went with what EndeavourOS had because it looked quite nice actually. Now I had PopOS! again and it looks okay, but felt a bit bland for my taste. I discovered Catppuccin. When working in my previous job I used Nord. I really like Nord. I still think it would do great for websites if utilized rightly. This time however it felt a bit down to me. I rather have something more upbeat this time. I do have to stare and work with my computer all day long.

So Catppuccin has a bunch of themes and a palette. Now my Firefox, YouTube, GNOME + GNOME-shell, Neovim and GitHub are all official Catppuccin mocha. I also added the cursors to my setup and it really ties everything together. I made a custom Slack theme based on the palette that fits my GNOME theme. There was a single thing I had to do there which was install a package from my repository and from the website in terms of a Firefox add-on and then I could switch on User themes. That meant I could switch on Catppuccin-Dark-BL as my Shell theme.

I briefly tried out Sweet as well, I liked it but the Firefox theme did not work for me so I switched to Catppuccin

I also switched over to Candy icons. They are just really nice and vibrant and colorful.

I did forget some things though. Like pushing a branch in a project with new infra changes. Those were able to be recovered luckily from YAML in k8s via k9s. I did however forgot to save my personal project with AssemblyScript. Hopefully I pushed that to my internal in house git server though.

Conclusion

I cannot risk running an Arch type distro. The reason for this is I need my system to be stable and dependent. I need to be able to rely on the fact that updates don't bork the system. At least where work is concerned. I do not want to have the stress of thinking at any point my system will be inaccessible to me.

Arch and their ilk are perfect for hobby and personal projects that don't need a lot of work to restore or where if it fails to work it is okay.