Distrohopping for the first time in forever

I've gotten too comfy with my laptop setup lately. Aurora Linux has held up nicely and everything just works. I need to play around with more things, and push myself out of my comfort zone. To this end, I've finally decided to distrohop once again. I'm also going to replace the tools I usually use with similar ones. Here's what has happened so far.

Aurora is actually really good

So, Aurora Linux. It's part of the Universal Blue family of immutable Fedora spins, which means you trust the devs behind the OS to manage the core, while you add whatever you want on top. It's like Windows or ChromeOS in a good way. Let the maintainers do the maintenance over the immutable core of the system, and install your normal applications through Flatpak, Homebrew (which is built in) and Distrobox. On top of that, Aurora (and the rest of the Universal Blue spins) leverages the Just command runner to provide users with the command ujust, a single place where you can deeply configure the system and install more tricky applications.

Aurora is the KDE equivalent to the Gnome-powered Project Bluefin. Both are tailor made for developers. They come with Homebrew and they make tools like Podman Desktop incredibly easy to install. Their immutable cores make them rock solid for average users. I love ujust though the distro does need more documentation and user-friendly tools to really be beginner-friendly. Every time I hear people talk about Omarchy I want to recommend Bluefin and Aurora, because they embody the ideas of highly opinionated desktops that are tailored to developers a lot better than the Arch + dotfiles distro. If you haven't tried Aurora or Bluefin before I highly recommend giving them a try.

Picking a new distro

I spent 30 minutes looking through Distrowatch to jog my memory on the options available to me. After some careful consideration I narrowed down my list to 5 choices:

• RakuOS
• OpenSuse
• Gentoo
• MX Linux
• CachyOS

All of these distros are interesting and worth looking at, and I would have been happy with any of them, but my decision went like this:

• RakuOS is immutable in a similar way to the Universal Blue project, but it's too early to say how it will go. I want to wait and see before picking it
• OpenSuse is great but occasionally has a weird config issue or two
• Gentoo is great but I haven't kept up with Linux partitioning and bootloaders and I don't want to learn right now
• MX is great but Xfce looks weird with my 1080p laptop screen

And that left CachyOS. I've used Endeavour OS (another Arch-based distro focused on user-friendliness) before so I think I know what I'm in for.

First impressions

I really like CachyOS Hello. It's a little app that pops up when you start your system for the first time (and until you turn it off) and it points you towards general things you'd want to do with a new system. It's tailored towards people who already know Linux and are looking for what makes CachyOS different, rather than people who are just starting to use Linux. A good welcome system is hard, so I can't blame them too much.

CachyOS comes with a package manager named Shelly. I really like it. It's easy to use, and it optionally works with the AUR, Flatpak and Appimages. I like how it has a list of curated software, though I don't like that I have to install them one at a time and after every install I end up back at the start of the list.

The default shell isn't Bash. It isn't Zsh either. It's Fish. I actually really like this decision. We've been stuck with the same old terminal shells for too long, and it's time distros started experimenting with newer ones. Even Windows has moved on from it's awful old shell towards the surprisingly nice Powershell. This Fish has a custom Starship prompt and every time you open a terminal it runs fastfetch. As cool as that is, the terminal that comes with Gnome doesn't open large enough and the nice ascii art gets garbled.

I'm specifically not using the AUR. There have been too many security warnings around it. Luckily between the Arch and CachyOS repos, and Flatpak, I have access to all of my software. Shelly asks at the start whether you want to enable the AUR, and it disables it by default.

Moving out of my comfort zone

I've been with KDE for the past year or so, so it felt right to go with Gnome this time. Gnome has always been an interesting and unique desktop, even if it's not always been good. I've used it off and on from the 2.x days, through the teething issues with Gnome 3, all the way up to the very polished desktop that it has become now. I need to use it more, but so far I'm enjoying myself.

While it is a small change, I've also switched to using Maple Mono as my terminal font. I fell in love with the cursive l from the italic version, and while it doesn't appear in the "normal" font I still really like how this looks. I'll keep using Iosevka on systems with small screens, but for everything else I'm switching to Maple Mono.

I usually code in Neovim, with the LazyVim distribution. It's nice, it has sensible defaults, and it gets out of the way. You can't really ask for anything else. I decided to shake things up a bit and go with NvChad instead. First impressions are that it looks amazing, but I need to use it for some proper programming projects before I can give a fair comparison.

I'm a Youtube addict. It's a serious problem and it gets in the way of my productivity. That's why this time I'm installing Invidious on my home server and using Youtube through that. Invidious is a Youtube proxy and frontend, which lets you watch Youtube through it. It's design is much more simple and it doesn't have the algorithm. It also lets you "subscribe" to channels to see their latest videos without having to sign into Youtube. It is slower but that's probably a good thing for me.

I don't keep proper digital notes because of an incident involving Apple Notes and years of important work notes disappearing. I've decided to dip my toe into the water again with Obsidian. It stores notes as standard Markdown files, so if something does go wrong I should be able to recover all of my work. I like the builtin support for Vim keys and the little captcha thing they make you do to prove you know what you're doing.

For the last year I've used Zen Browser as my browser. It's styled after the Arc browser back when that was good, but it's based off Firefox. Overall pretty good. I've switched to Vivaldi, which I did use a few years ago. I still miss Opera 12 and am genuinely upset that such an amazing browser has been replaced with Modern Opera, the Chrome skin that steals your data. Anyway Vivaldi is a continuation of the values of Opera 12 and I highly recommend trying it out.

For what purpose

I've always been interested in computing and I don't want to get complacent. The Linux community and it's surrounding projects have provided so many amazing options to choose from, and I'm not just going to sit in my little Fedora Silverblue derivative corner and ignore everything else. I'm sticking to CachyOS for at least a year, and I'll see how I feel after that.