Arch Linux

Finally, I formatted my entire Windows 11 Lenovo laptop and installed Linux Arch. Been on Arch for about slightly over a week now. Still fumbling in the dark, but there are these awesome frontiers who generate excellent demo tutorials for newbies like me.

Only use the laptop once a week, do the presentation on each Wednesday management meeting. So decided to maintain a minimalist configuration.

What's the difference?

hyprland

hyprland is a tiling window manager on Arch Linux.

• Windows: N/A
• macOS: AeroSpace
• Arch Linux: hyprland

Been on Windows for almost thirty years and I never heard of the concept of "tiling window manager". How dumb is that. My beloved wife bought me my first Mac last year, and it's a Mac mini m4 desktop machine. Stumbling at the very beginning and then I loved it, along with its apps ecosystem and the refactored workflows.

After been using hyprland on my Arch Linux for slightly over a week, I find that the only missing piece is the support of the letter named workspace, which I enjoy very much on AeroSpace. Instead of purely numerically numbered workspaces, AeroSpace expands the namespace into the letters.

For instance I use Safari on workspace "S", Brave on workspace "B", Google Chrome on workspace "G"; Ghostty and Kitty on workspace "T"; Mails (NeoMutt and Outlook) on workspace "M". Wechat and WhatsApp on workspace "W". You get the idea.

Mnemonics, right? Helpful for the memorization. The hyprland dev team should definitely consider adding this feature in their subsequent iterations. Suggested default keybinds:

• SUPER + Letter: execute a command to launch an app
• Alt + Letter: switch to a workspace
• Alt + Shift + Letter: move the current active window to the letter-named workspace

The essentials

These are the essential tools that I have installed on my Arch Linux:

• NeoVim
• NeoMutt
• onedrive
• wechat
• libreoffice

Attempted but failed:

• onlyoffice
• wubi

Further tweaks required:

• A password manager can be used on both macOS and Linux, likely gpg and pass, so that I can converge and maintain just one same set of configurations for NeoMutt
• Auto sync and notify on new mails?
• On each restart of Arch Linux, I have to manually press Num to enter the login password. Is there a way to have it auto enabled?
• onedrive auto run?