Just talking about my personal notebook, at work I’m usually using some kind of macbook.

This November, I decided to retire my trusted Lenovo Thinkpad x230 from about 2013.

Because I’m a heavy terminal user, it was not too much of a deal. For programming, these days I’m on AstroNvim with full blown LSP setup. Which mostly was fast enough for me. However, the trusted gear served me very well over the years, but the difference to a macbook air M1 is just… noticeable.

This month I somehow decided: This is the time! I went online, did a fair bit of research… not too much for sure… and ended up on a ASUS Zenbook UM3406.

Completely new installation #

I made some decisions about my OS. First, I want to keep a small partition for the included Windows 11. And to be perfectly honest. I’m impressed by it, and thought for a second: Maybe just sticking with it and use WSL2? I just can’t stand it 😄

Because, I really have a whole lot of respect for the people behind Universal Blue, I gave the Gnome spin a try. It really works well, but I’m old and a diehard archlinux user… So just installed my beloved distri.

But why do I keep Win 11… I use it for Zwift and it is just too much of a fuff to run it on Linux. Even form me, sometimes things should just work.

Took me three iterations to get both installations correct. Mostly because of being stupid and removing partitions by accident, and letting the Windows installer to pick a too small efi partition.

My last installation of archlinux dates back to 2011, when I installed my pre-pre notebook. This installation, I synced over to the Thinkpad in 2013. So I don’t remember anything about the old installation process. Today, I really liked how simple it is to configure WLAN using iwctl. I opted into doing a full disc encryption, and do not separate /home from /, but creating a single partition with a btrfs. Guess, I’m a btrfs user since 2013.

You might already realized how weird I am. Very old school on one hand, but a sucker for new stuff on the other. This time, I opted into using systemd-homed to manage my home directory. Because using btrfs, being the sole user of this computer, and having full disc encryption, I use subvolume as the storage driver. There are strings attached, and some parts are not yet integrated into other parts. Like there is still account-service, but it is unable to really manage systemd-homed users. I expect things to come closer together in the future. I will get those pretty early, because of the rolling release nature of archlinux.

A brand new terminal emulator #

For convenience purposes, I installed the package group gnome, which includes gnome-console. It works reasonably well, and has a more modern look and feel than my trusted gnome-terminal. The lovely Universal Blue folks brought my attention to ptyxis. I installed it via the gnome-software-center, which is configured to use flathub, because there is no archlinux package yet.

Tested the container features, using distrobox. Feels really nice and snappy. Some features I (unfortunately) cut out, because of using tmux. Here again, old man, old habits. For instance. Ptyxis colourizes the borders red when detecting sudo.

All in all, a great user experience. Did not spend too much time into it… well, because things should just work, and Ghostty is coming. I’m kind of sucker for those kind of new stuff 😄

Using minimal config from the old one #

This time, I decided to only copy over a minimal set of configurations from my old notebook. It proved to be a good decision. For Instance, my Evolution Mail client looks cleaner now, even though they are in the same version.

What’s next? #

This might or might not be my final installation. I still like the approach the lovely folks at Fedora and Universal Blue are taking. But for me, this notebook is not my “I earn money with it”-machine, and I love to have a relatively low level Linux.