Seriously thinking about leaving after 3 years

LeonN · 2025-07-01 07:30:14

I've been using Arch since about 3 years. It was my first distro and I tried different setups with window managers like qtile, bspwm, openbox and also some desktop environments like Plasma, Xfce and Gnome. Since my work as a developer required me to invest more time on it, I had less time to spend thinking about the distro and tweaking my dotfiles, so I wanted stability and a whole ecosystem to just work. Following this philosophy, I found my home in Gnome. It had everything I wanted, stability, customization, a robust ecosystem of applications. It was great. I felt this setup like the most productive one I could get, and it was. I was using Gnome on Xorg since Wayland always been a quite laggy on my hybrid graphics laptop. Another issue I had with this "perfect setup" was that installing the nvidia drivers will make my dual monitor setup to be completely unusable: I have a 27" monitor which I use as my main display, and the laptop display as the secondary, but for some reason, when installing the Nvidia drivers, the whole system would crash if I used my external monitor as primary, I couldn't even open a single window on that screen without crashing the whole system. So, the easiest approach was not to install Nvidia stuff and just use mesa and the Intel graphics. As long as I didn't touch that stuff, my system was perfect, until a few weeks ago. After two weeks of not performing a system update, I made the mistake of doing it at work, since I needed to install a package. Well, it turned out that the mesa package was broken and made some systems not show the GUI at all, just a blank screen, so after some research, I downgraded the mesa package to the version before the update. It was simple, but annoying, since this happened at work...

Yesterday, I performed another system upgrade, after confirming that the mesa package already works as expected, but when I rebooted my system, it was all messed up. I couldn't open any window on my external monitor (primary display), and it was showing nothing more than the mouse cursor. As I had to work, I ended up using just the laptop scree, since my 27" monitor was complete unusable, after some research, found that the linux firmware package might have had something to do with my problem, but after some tweaks, the issue persisted. Finally, today, as I needed to work, I switched to use the Wayland session, and the system is laggy as hell, stuttering animations, my Albert launcher not opening, some delay on inputs. Well, let's just say that my perfect setup is broken.

I've always liked the way Arch does things, the way it encourages you to research and try to solve your problems; however, I no longer have time to spend on fixing my system because of a broken package, and now that I'm not able to be as efficient as I was in my own laptop, I'm seriously thinking about leaving the Arch world and getting into something more "stable". I don't even know if there's another Linux distro out there for me, as I really fell in love with Arch. Maybe I'll move to the cringy MacOs world, idk. This is really frustrating, I know it is part of Arch, but being an Arch nerd is no longer my priority, just need to do my stuff on my own laptop.

seth · 2025-07-01 08:39:02

I couldn't open any window on my external monitor (primary display), and it was showing nothing more than the mouse cursor.

Please post your Xorg log, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg#General

topcat01 · 2025-07-01 19:50:25

I find macos extremely frustrating, almost as bad as windows. The AS hardware is great though. I personally came from Gentoo, and Arch is more friendly in comparison.

You have provided zero info about your hardware and configuration. Let's focus on the technical aspects.

Last edited by topcat01 (2025-07-01 19:51:09)

afader · 2025-07-01 20:07:28

I would say install all the nvidia packages, enable modesetting, and consider bumblebee or prime or switcheroo if it applies to you

seth · 2025-07-01 20:17:36

prime is default behavior and the only reasonable option unless you've a VERY old optimus system.
Let's first see what's actually going on and wrong - the xorg log will most likely cover it all.

Arch Linux

#1 2025-07-01 07:30:14

Seriously thinking about leaving after 3 years

#2 2025-07-01 08:39:02

Re: Seriously thinking about leaving after 3 years

#3 2025-07-01 19:50:25

Re: Seriously thinking about leaving after 3 years

#4 2025-07-01 20:07:28

Re: Seriously thinking about leaving after 3 years

#5 2025-07-01 20:17:36

Re: Seriously thinking about leaving after 3 years

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