…not because I feel the obligation, but because the act of blogging about the thought made me realise that I spend far too much time installing other distros and then setting them up to work exactly like Ubuntu. I appreciate the freedom that Arch gives me, and I appreciate the flexibility that that system provides. It’s just that I don’t really need it. This came into sharp relief thanks to this sequence of events:
- Want to boot Ubuntu to a text prompt and then start X when I need it
- Can’t find an easy way to do it as they seem to have changed the boot process to avoid using inittab
- Throw all my toys out of the pram at The Injustice Of It All
- Wipe my machine and spend a whole weekend getting Arch to work, booting nicely to a text prompt
- Blog about my new found freedom
- Take an hour installing and setting up the software I need to get Arch to boot to a graphical log-in as I’m fed up of the text one
Granted, I know a lot more about Linux than I did before I started, but that’s another few hours lost that I could have spent improving my Python or PHP skills, or writing a chapter of my novel, or sorting out some of my photos, or any one of the other hundred things on my to-do list. And I could have done any of those on any of the distros I’ve tried in the last year.