Most people treat their operating system as furniture. You install it once, maybe complain about it, and move on with your life. I did the opposite somewhere in first year. I installed Arch on my only laptop and refused to leave.
This is a retrospective of using Arch Linux as my daily driver for my entire undergrad, from assignments and exams to all nighters and the occasional 2 AM update that went sideways.
The short version is simple. It was the best decision I made as a student, but not for the reasons I expected.
The backstory
I started with Ubuntu, like every other CS student. And honestly? Ubuntu worked. It installed easily, WiFi worked, the touchpad worked. My problems started when I got curious.
The laptop originally came with an official Windows subscription, but I somehow ditched it within the first week.
I wanted newer packages. I wanted to understand how my system actually fit together instead of treating it as a black box that occasionally showed me a desktop. Every Stack Overflow answer seemed to assume I knew things Ubuntu was carefully hiding from me.
At some point, the classic thing happened. I broke Ubuntu doing something I didn't fully understand, couldn't figure out how to fix it, and reinstalled. On the next reinstall cycle, I figured that if I was going to reinstall anyway, I might as well install the thing everyone warned me about.
So I put Arch on it.
The machine
The hardware matters to this story, so here's a quick note.
- The laptop is an HP EliteBook 840 G6.
- It has 8GB of RAM.
- It has a 256GB SSD.
- This is my only machine.
No desktop, no secondary laptop, no "I'll just do it on the lab machine." If Arch broke, my coursework was inaccessible until I fixed it. That raised the stakes in a way I think actually made the experience better. I couldn't afford to treat the OS as a toy.
An EliteBook from 2019 with 8GB of RAM sounds like a machine that would struggle. It doesn't. Linux + a tiling window manager is genuinely light. Idle RAM usage sits around 1GB with a browser open. Battery life is respectable. The 256GB SSD has never been the bottleneck people assume it would be.
The real constraint isn't the specs. It's that when your only machine breaks, you fix it or you don't submit the assignment. That's the whole game.
Hyprland + HyDE
I run Hyprland as my window manager, and specifically HyDE, the Hyprland desktop environment project, on top of it. I've been on this setup for over three years now.
I know what you're thinking, because I thought it too. How does a Wayland compositor that people describe as "eye candy" run on a 2019 business laptop with integrated graphics? It runs perfectly. Hyprland is smooth, animations and all, on hardware that's older than my degree.
Why a tiling window manager at all? Because on an 840 G6's 14 inch screen, screen real estate is the scarce resource. Floating window managers spend most of their pixels on chrome and empty space. Hyprland tiles my terminal, editor, and browser with zero waste, and everything is a keyboard shortcut away. After three years, reaching for the mouse to move a window feels like reaching for a calculator to do 2+2.
Why HyDE specifically, rather than a hand rolled config? The honest answer is that I tried writing my own setup first. I burned days fiddling with waybar, launchers, and colorschemes, and I still use my laptop for actual work. HyDE gave me a genuinely beautiful setup with everything included from the start. More importantly, it's all just config files. I've been slowly customizing it ever since, one dotfile at a time, instead of building everything from zero. That's the sweet spot. It's opinionated enough to be usable on day one, yet transparent enough to own later.
The dotfile culture around this ecosystem is half the appeal. My entire desktop (keybinds, bar, theme, application launcher) is text files I can read, version control, and replicate. I have ~/.config in git. If my laptop died today, I could be back to an identical setup in under an hour.
What daily driving Arch actually looks like
Here's the unglamorous reality, three years in.
Updating is a ritual, not an event. pacman -Syu runs on my machine more days than not. Arch is a rolling release, which means there's no "upgrade to the new version". There's just today's system, always. The famous advice is real, though. Read the news before big updates, don't update during exam week, and never --force your way out of a keyring problem at 2 AM. (I have learned this one more than once.)
The AUR is the killer feature. The Arch User Repository is why I stopped distro hopping. If software exists and someone uses it on Linux, it's in the AUR. Every niche tool I've needed across undergrad (compilers, LaTeX tooling, editor plugins, random CLI utilities) installed with one command. On Ubuntu I was adding PPAs and downloading .deb files and hoping. On Arch, yay -S <thing> and done.
Things break, but rarely in unrecoverable ways. In three years, a laptop without NVIDIA has spared me the worst of it, honestly. The memorable breakages were almost all self-inflicted. They included partial upgrades, a misconfigured bootloader after a kernel change, and the one time I pacman -Rdd'd something I shouldn't have. Every single time, the fix existed on the wiki, and every single time, I came out understanding my system better than before it broke.
The Arch Wiki is the real product. People on other distros read the Arch Wiki because it's simply the best Linux documentation that exists. I read it constantly, not because Arch is difficult, but because it explains things at the level I wanted to understand them. Half of my Linux knowledge is really "the wiki with extra steps."
The part nobody warns you about
The cost of daily driving Arch isn't breakage. It's attention.
You will notice things. Why is this service running? What's eating RAM? Why is my shell slow? Arch doesn't hide its machinery, and once you can see the machinery, you can't unsee it. I've sunk entire evenings into problems Ubuntu users don't know exist, and I'd argue that's the point, not the flaw.
There's a popular joke that Arch users insert "I use Arch btw" into every conversation. The version nobody says out loud is this. Arch is a feedback loop. The system keeps asking you to understand it, and somewhere in undergrad, without planning to, you become the person other people ask when their Linux breaks.
That competence compounds. Networking, systemd, filesystems, shell scripting, build systems. I learned all of it as a side effect of maintaining one laptop. No course taught me this. The distro did, by refusing to be invisible.
Would I recommend it?
Here's my honest breakdown after a full undergrad on it.
Do it if
- You're curious about how Linux works below the desktop
- You have time to fix things occasionally and actually want to learn from it
- Your hardware is your daily driver and you want it lean and fast
- You like the idea of a system that is yours, dotfile by dotfile
Skip it if
- Your thesis is due and your machine is a load bearing part of your life
- You want your OS to disappear, which is a completely valid want
- "It just works" is a requirement, not a preference
Arch didn't make my undergrad easier. It made it more interesting, and it quietly turned my laptop from an appliance into something I understand down to the boot chain. With Hyprland and HyDE running smoothly on an EliteBook 840 G6 with 8GB of RAM, I still don't feel the itch to switch.
If you're a student with one machine and a little bit of stubbornness, install it on a weekend when you have nowhere to be, read the wiki, and let it break you a couple of times.
It's worth it.
Setup includes Arch Linux, Hyprland, HyDE (hyde-project/hyde), and an HP EliteBook 840 G6.