Switching away from Ubuntu, again, to try Archcraft. Here’s what I think!

Archcraft is for Linux users who want a pre-configured window manager with a unique look out of the box. You get a pretty theme setup, but you can choose from a couple of pre-installed options (10 free themes) as well.

You can pick other window managers like Sway, Wayland desktop session, and unlock access to extra themes on Ko-fi by supporting the developer. So, some can call it a freemium model, and I do not mind that, considering you are paying the dev to give you a refined pre-configured experience, saving all the time to set it up yourself.

But, of course, nothing is ever perfect. Everything has flaws. It is you who pick what flaws you can live with, and what you can’t.

  • Ellen
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    3 months ago

    Quick tip for the author and those reading, instead of doing as in the article noted e.g. sudo nano or the like, you can use sudoedit (or sudo -e). The advantage of this is that it will use whatever you have configured as an editor (through $SUDO_EDITOR, $VISUAL or $EDITOR), and will use your configuration files while editing instead of root’s, meaning if you have a sick custom neovim or emacs setup you don’t have to keep those settings files in sync with the root account. ;)

    • vvv@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      3 months ago

      More than that, your editor doesn’t run with root permissions, which reduces the risk of accidentally overwriting something you didn’t mean to.

    • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      3 months ago

      Almost 6 years using Linux exclusively, and I had no idea this existed. You just messed me up bad. I’m going to have so much fun with this.

      Thank you so much.

    • Psyhackological@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      3 months ago

      I use it at work with many servers like EDITOR=vim sudo -e /etc/samba/smb.conf

      However useful when you need some color highlighting or just numers then add it to .vimrc and EDITOR=vim in Bash config.

  • Kory@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    3 months ago

    I like that article, I’m in a similar position at the moment. I’ve been using Mint on my Nvidia machine for a long time now, but with the new Mint 22 update that’s also based on Ubuntu 24.04, I’m facing similar issues and so I’ve done some distrohopping over the past couple of weeks. I’ve tried Aurora/Bazzite and Nobara as Fedora based distros, Garuda and CachyOS as Arch based ones, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and probably something else I can’t remember right now. All of them were great distros but had certain flaws that were offputting somehow. And I’m in no rush, since Mint 21.3 is still supported for a while.

    I’m still open to suggestions what to try next! I’m getting faster and faster with fresh installs :)

    • Hanrahan@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      3 months ago

      Doesn’t #LMDE avoid Ubuntu if that’s what you are looking at doing ? And cones from Debian itself.

      • Kory@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 months ago

        Yes of course, that’s always an option. I was just trying to look over my Mint horizon and check out other distros and how they work. Exciting!

    • Telorand@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      Nitrux was a unique one I saw the other day. You could also go for NixOS.

      ETA: There’s also instructions and a template from Universal Blue on how to create your own custom downstream distro, if there was something you wanted to change about their base images.

      • Kory@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        Interesting, thanks! Never heard of Nitrux before.

        Yes that’s true. I just realised that I apparently tinker too much to use an immutable distro as of now. But I’m definitely keeping an eye on them.

        • Telorand@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          3 months ago

          The one I’m personally keeping an eye on is a future Universal Blue distro that’s being built with Cosmic. It’s not officially released to the public, but it’s quietly doing automatic builds in their GitHub repository.

    • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 months ago

      What issues were you having with mint 22? I haven’t had any specific ones yet, except for the qt5 themes app no longer being installed by default and not quite working right.

  • AndrewZabar@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 months ago

    For those times when I want something elegant, polished and mostly set to stay the same with very little customization, I go with Elementary OS. It’s really sweet.

    • Leaflet@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      3 months ago

      OS 8 should hopefully be out in September. I’m looking forward to trying it out with the Wayland session.