It's s been roughly 20 years since I've used #archlinux, and when it came time to finally distro hop away from void in my laptop (not my main machine anymore) I decided to give Arch in 2025 a try. I'll admit, I was influenced heavily by #quickshell #caelestiashell.
https://github.com/caelestia-dots/shell
Holy shit is arch easy to install these days with the #archinstall script! Installing Caelestia-shell was also just another instill script. I was up and running within about 10-15 minutes.
It's pretty neat. Beautiful even. A small learning curve because I'd never used #hyperland before, but not that difficult. However, the arch philosophy or the "arch way" still remains the same. The system still requires the user to babysit config files and to read every change log etc. The likelihood that my system will break one-day with a `sudo pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq)` is looming.
My main system these days is trusty Fedora Workstation on my desktop PC. I actually like gnome. If I'm going to use a fully integrated desktop environment it's going to be gnome. I'm tempted to jump ship now before I get to deep into arch. I don't need bleeding edge stuff anymore. And these days, I actually prefer flatpaks anyway. I must be getting old and boring.