StealthyCoder

I recently uncovered/remembered I had a old Dell laptop lying in the attic. I wanted to revive that sucker so I had a place to do private communication. Rather than being on my work laptop for everything.

I knew I had to bypass the BIOS admin password and luckily there is a simple tool for that online. So that was maybe 15 minutes. After I booted I saw it wanted to boot from network and otherwise it needed the BitLocker password. I do not possess that anymore so I got thinking on what shall I run on this system.

I wanted to give Arch Linux a shot. One I created again from scratch, this time with Wayland instead of X11. So I did a proof of concept in virtual machines on my work laptop. There I could start over as much as I needed. Document all the things that went wrong or needed tweaking. I did this quite a bunch, which is my recommendation for anyone starting with Arch install.

I am currently running Arch Linux, limine for booting instead of Grub. I use ly for the login/display manager. Then I run Hyprland as my desktop environment.

For email client I just use neomutt, the browser is Mercury and my terminal is still Kitty. As extra tooling I needed XDG Portal and HyprPaper to handle opening links from terminal and set the wallpaper respectively.

For the statusbar I run waybar and that is about it. It is minimalistic and brutalist. It works, it works well. It is running on a 2011 Dell laptop. It does not feel like it is so slow. Compared to my work laptop, a sick 2021 Dell XPS 15, at certain moments it feels a bit sluggish. Although not by a whole lot. I can watch my videos, read and process email and that is all I need to do. Occasionally I will write some code, but that is about it.

For a moment I was afraid that my system would be too slow since it ran so ridiculously sluggish inside my VM on my work laptop. Luckily for me that was no indication for physical hardware. It does not have a lot of hardware now but I have something lying around, maybe a faster CPU and definitely some extra memory.

Since it is running Hyprland that can be dynamic floating and tiling, ai currently try to use the tiling window. It takes some getting used to, but it does fit with how I normally work. Most of the time my windows are all full screen and never half-half overlapping or something. I definitely hardly ever see the desktop wallpaper. The only thing I currently miss, a slight bit, is I cannot alt-tab to different windows. However I generally only run Kitty on workspace 1 and Mercury on workspace 2. So a quick Super+1,2 takes care of that.

It is definitely fun to learn these programs a bit more and configure them. Is it for everyone, definitely not. If you enjoy delving into documentation and experimenting a bit, then I would suggest to give Hyprland a try. Does not have to be Arch Linux perse.