Tech Journey

"Arch linux? Seriously?"

(A backstory of How I ended up using Arch linux)

Long story, Not short. Take a seat and get yourself a coffee while reading this story of mine with linux.. I started using Fedora linux in November of 2024 and mainly used GNOME Desktop to replicate the MacOS look I wanted, but GNOME keeps crashing in my hand due to the amount of extension I had (Pretty sure I got like 10 extensions atleast) and then I switched to XFCE as I heard it's more 'lightweight', I realized Fedora using BTRFS partition by default that moment I started realizing it was really sucks for me. It keeps relying on my HDD way too much by doing metadata-intensive operations and single threaded BS that slowed down my program. Sure BTRFS is useful for backing up snapshots but I really do not care about most of the BTRFS feature it came with especially on this sluggish HDD.

Story hadn't ended yet, I switched debian and holy paw I managed to get the lowest memory usage as possible around 300mb~ that alone was already enough for me since I don't really plan on upgrading from 6gb to 8gb that time (Mostly cause I ran out of money, and had to focus to other stuff) I decided to use XFCE, again. Although my HDD was not helping my situation and I was getting atleast 40s~ of boot time but very laggy in firefox, I had to hibernate to fix that, this issue applies to every linux based kernel I use including Arch linux itself due to my horrendous HDD. Once again this time I customized XFCE to look like MacOS, it had become my most popular post in r/unixporn and, I then made my own rice in xfce but randomly I switched back to gnome for fun and made this, you could see where this is going and I started using SwayWM at this point.

Finish line? I switched to Arch linux as I realized debian no longer suited me today, compiling is painful for me. Due to the amount of outdated packages Debian had I can't take it anymore. So I decided to switch, since nowadays I really needed to compile program, most app I've found needed to be compiled like swayfx itself still can't be run in Debian due to incompatible wlroots version, maybe I'm doing it wrong but i've decided to let go of Debian. If the time comes and ill come back to Debian again but for now? I won't need it, and the reasoning is on top of the page.

When I entered Arch linux live USB (techically only CLI), I was a bit confused by the Arch wiki. So I told myself to get my head together and try to understand a bit, My first thought was trying ArchInstall So I did and it can't even format my partition, I decided "Hey what if I just make my own parittion and run ArchInstall?" I read the manual, used my secondary phone as Ethernet (broadcom driver doesn't work in Live USB), did cfdisk, and realized that the only part I needed to do is install linux and configure grub, IIRC I started at 12 PM Till 10 PM cause of course, I can't rush things while learning new stuff. Finished and Installed everything, configure stuff myself and done. Arch linux isn't hard as people made it seem, but maybe thats just me.

"Imagine hating systemd"

Switched to Artix Linux, and why?

I don't hate systemd but the main reason I switched from arch to artix because of how heavy it is in my 2010 laptop. I mean what could systemd possibly doing in the boot process that takes me 30 seconds even with SATA 3 SSD? I decided to make a switch and use Runit as my main init system and the reason is simple. Performance, even though the mitigation and PTI feature was on in my kernel, the differences is delicious, my laptop boots in 14 seconds and app? Hella fast. Turning off PTI and mitigations might help especially it is known to be quite 'impactful' to the performance in older hardware like mine, even though I mostly turned off javascript when I browse the internet, I still keep my mitigations and PTI.

And for the other reason? I like exploring new stuff! Artix is really fun and actually applies the 'linux customization philosophies', and I think more distro should let you choose which init system you prefer instead of shoving down systemd but hear me out, I'm not hating systemd but I just hate why most distro doesn't let you use a different init system, isn't that the whole point of linux itself? Why are you destroying the purpose of linux customization? Oh well atleast you still could choose distro for different init system. So far Artix has been really stable in my machine and hasn't coughing out a blood of issues, as longest I know how to take care of my machine and I should be fine.

My Daily Driver

I got from 2021, it was originally released in 2010. Pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium

It had a decent specs, intel core i5 m430 and 6gb of RAM (I installed 4gb RAM) with 512gb HDD as a secondary drive with 128gb SSD. I no longer use Windows as my primary OS but I still had it in my USB just in case I decided to test some Windows machine in the wild, Wine sometimes doesn't do it's job properly due to the lack of vulkan my machine had even for gaming, it could 100 fps in GMOD with 640p resolution while in Windows I get about 300 fps since it uses DirectX instead of OpenGL 2.1 and virtual machine on this thing? Runs like hell. Perhaps I misconfigured QEMU/libvirt but with these kind of specs, It was pretty much expected. "HDD in 2025 is painful." an old quote of mine when I use HDD

This laptop had already gone through so much stuff, my cat dropping it, my cat biting the side panel, and threw my laptop somehow. Motherboard sometimes doesn't work but it'll repair itself, perhaps CPU problem or thermal problem itself. Battery is already broken, can't be replaced cause the lock mechanism is broken. Display already suffered too, I accidentally overclocked it to 70hz before and I could only use half of the screen most of the time. Now it repaired itself, cause it felt like it. This laptop genuinely have it's own emotion lmao, I'm still surprised it survived all of these.

Since I found a workaround, I figured the cause of the random shutdown was because of the sudden power surge from my turbo boost CPU feature causing the capacitor to freak out, I should've known this sooner to be fair since it lags really hard when I cold boot my linux kernel. My linux kernel is yelling at me that the capacitor is the reason why everything slows down, since it throttles down my CPUs it won't make the capacitor freak out either but it made everything very laggy and borderline unusable. But I found a really stupid method to bypass the linux kernel throttle to make everything works without laggyness that you had to deal with in cold boot.

Hibernation is the key, somehow, somewhat, the linux kernel bypasses the capacitor throttle when I hibernate my laptop. Sounds really stupid but it really works, I created a script to launch hibernation in sway, so as soonest I enter sway in my tty, it'll hibernate and after that I boot up my laptop and that capacitor throttling is gone. How does this work you may ask? I use an auto launch script in sway config and put the script somewhere in /usr/bin, after it launches that script it hibernates and it'll make a file in /tmp and stops the script from infinite hibernation loop when launching sway, basically it'll look for that /tmp/hibernation and stop, so that if I need to launch sway in tty2 it won't automatically hibernate, pretty neat solution but it isn't as complicated since it's just a basic bash script.

To prevent any of the shutdown from happening again, I configured my TLP to disable the turbo boost instead of disabling them in my BIOS, there's a way to disable turbo boost in my BIOS but that would also disable the hyperthreading for some reason? I couldn't understand why it does that but there's that, turning off the turbo boost helps the capacitor from calming down when the CPUs does too much works, and I figured that runit makes the system do less work instead of doing too much stuff like systemd does in my fedora install. Though I tried disabling turbo boost in my Windows install but Windows 10 won't even cooperate with my hardware, it still heats up my CPUs even when I turned off turbo boost in registry editor. Another reason why I should just dump broken Window(s) in the dumpster.

This seems crazy to some people but, my previous android (Realme C15) had dying EMMC. I can't continue using that thing before it kernel panics completely, I had a lot of issue with reflashing, even installing a normal apps it took forever. I used it just for a backup phone since I got no other use than making it as an Ethernet, the screen was broken cause I accidentally lefted it in my backpack (I really am forgot) and sometimes it had ghost touch so much. It's basically unusable now.

The Real Cause is probably I switched over Custom ROMs/GSI's a lot and that caused the EMMC to freak out everytime I flashed new ROM's every week. Kernel was not stable too even after I optimized it, quite buggy coming from this phone. There's a dedicated community to reviving this phone although they're still stuck with the Android 10 Kernel.

The main reason I use iPhone 8 is that my sister gave it to me and I was thinking of jailbreaking, mind you this is my first time jailbreaking. Everything went well (except for that one time when it stucks in recovery as I tried to rejailbreak for the first time) jailbreaking in these old iPhones really gave it some life. Installing IPA's freely feels I'm using my Android again, I sometimes customized springboard to how I want it to look like (iOS 18/iOS 26, etc) and if you're asking "How's the battery life?" the battery is pretty much ehh.. Questionable enough. Just idle the phone the rest of your day and it'll last longer than it needs to be.

I decided to leave the 'jailbreak' scene and use stock iOS, yes it's very much unfortunate but I now prioritize privacy rather than fake liquid glass iOS 26 customization. I use lockdown mode in my phone just in case, I could've turned it off but I prefer it that way especially even in my artix installation I use librewolf nowadays rather than helium browser and I've hardened so much privacy toggles on my current machine and my phone. Yes I'm aware that I'm still leaving footprint of myself in the internet as a dog but I prefer having privacy and hardened security rather than leaving my door unlocked for everyone to sneak in, I don't like getting spied by the big brother just because I disagree with their political opinion especially when I use iPhone 8 I'm basically still isn't receiving major updates (good thing Apple still gives old iPhone security update)

Ah got a little off track there, but here's the summarized way I basically don't want to keep my device vulnerable especially someone could just restart my phone and my phone would grant them into entering my phone, that's the problem with Palera1n. Once you restarted your phone or it dies, it'll boot into non jailbroken state with no passcode on it. Quite spooky huh? I've always leave my phone unattended in my class sometimes and if someone knows how to force reboot, I'm basically fucked.

Anyway, I don't need jailbreak nowadays because now you could do the same with the recent iOS (except iOS 16 of course) and for sideloading? Just use sidestore alongside with livecontainer. That is the best way I've could ever sideload in iOS without worrying of losing my sketchy certificate that I got online, just refresh the app time period and you're basically done.. Yeah I know that's a stupid of me for using random sketchy certificate but I was a bit in a desperate time there tbf. For customization? I don't think I'll ever need it since when I was using palera1n, do you know what I use? Only trollstore, exiwall, and some workaround I made to prevent power off GUI from showing up when holding the power button. I really had nothing to do in jailbreak cause my interest in jailbreaking went down and I only worry if my phone gets stolen or lost, anyone could unlock it especially this is my main devices.