Arch Linux – Very First Impressions

It’s been three days since I installed Arch, and I have to admit – I’m in love. I’ll go over my first impressions separately of;

1. The installation of Arch
2. Using Arch itself
3. The desktop environment I chose to install – Gnome

I think that’s only fair, as they’re fairly distinct things and I don’t want to conflate Gnome with Arch Linux.

The Welfare Industry

“Welfare provision is a growth industry.”

Let’s take a moment to let those words sink in.

During the first day of a week-long “professional development course” in 2011, I listened to my (then) employer describe the needs of welfare organisations thusly;

• Services providing welfare must, if they wish to survive, target between 3% and 5% growth per annum
• These NGOs¹ will seek to aggressively enter new “markets” where possible, including other States/Territories.
• There must be continual investigation into merging with other organisations
• All sources of income are valid sources
• All organisations are doing the same thing, therefore competition for market share is fierce

That afternoon I needed a wash.

The Arch Way – In The Beginning, There Was The Word

And the word was “pacman”. Specifically, it was “pacman -Syu” because I needed to update the live USB I was installing from.

Let me back up and start again.

I first installed Linux in April 2010, very shortly after Ubuntu released their 10.04 “Lucid Linux”. I was talking with a French backpacker on the Isle of Skye in Scotland about computers (as you do)  and he was saying he’d wanted to try Ubuntu – so it was set – we downloaded the .iso using the craptacular hostel internet, made a bootable thumb drive (not that I knew what one of those was at the time) and off we went!