Sometimes I have to screenshare for work with other developers, and pretty often they want to know something about my environment.

“What browser is that?” (it’s qutebrowser)

“What terminal is that?” (it’s st)

“What window manager is that?” (it’s dwm)

“What code editor is that?” (it’s neovim)

“What version of Linux are you using?”

The answer to that one is, at least for the last year or so, Arch Linux.

I tried a lot of different distros – Ubuntu, Centos, ElementaryOS, Linux Mint, popOS, even gentoo. I ultimately settled on Arch because I like the minimalism combined with the rolling release model – plus of course sometimes you just wanna go flex (kidding.. kind of)

As I mentioned, I use dwm for my window manager – so the distro really doesn’t matter that much. A lot of distros are debian / ubuntu based and what differentiates them from each other are the preconfigured desktop environments and the package managers. The arch package manager works fine for me so I’m good to go there. Plus part of my philosophy is to strip away the layers of shiny UI and hand-holding so I can get a better understanding of what’s really going on under the hood. Arch gives me that. Arch also has great documentation for when things are unclear. I highly recommend it.

If the install process is too daunting for you, I would recommend Artix Linux which is basically Arch with a user friendly installer and no systemd, if that’s something you’re in to.