How I Ended Up on Arch + Niri (The Long Way Lol)

Why This Exists

Most portfolios show projects. Few show the infrastructure you had to learn just to build them. This is that infrastructure: the Linux side that doesn’t live in a GitHub repo but shapes how you work every day.

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The False Starts

VM → Dual-Boot → Hardware Hell

Started with Ubuntu in a VM. It lagged so bad it was unusable. Everyone said “start with Ubuntu” so I figured that was just how Linux was.

Switched to dual-boot thinking bare metal would fix it.

It didn’t. WiFi, Bluetooth, microphone: none worked. Spent days on Reddit and the Arch Wiki tweaking kernel parameters. Someone said “just get the latest kernel.” Back then that sounded like rocket science. I didn’t even know how to switch kernels. Gave up and hid in WSL2 for a while.

WSL worked, but it hid everything: no boot process, no real hardware, no init. Convenient, but I wasn’t learning Linux.

The hardware: MediaTek WiFi/Bluetooth + NVIDIA dGPU. Classic “new for Linux, old for Windows” combo. Still unsolved on that install.

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Learning the System Properly

Two resources changed everything:

• Linux Journey: filled the mental model gaps: permissions, processes, package managers, boot flow, filesystems.
• OverTheWire Bandit: forced me to use the CLI for real: SSH, file ops, grep, tar, cron, setuid binaries.

Stopped copy-pasting from ChatGPT and started understanding why commands worked. The shift from “how do I do X” to “what does this flag do” was the real turning point.

Then I went bare metal with Debian + KDE. Still no WiFi, Bluetooth, or mic. In hindsight it was obvious: the hardware was too new for the kernel I was running.

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Arch + Hyprland Era

Why Arch

Needed a newer kernel for the MediaTek hardware. Arch’s rolling releases meant kernel 6.x without manual compilation. The install (archinstall → manual partitioning later) taught me more about bootloaders, fstab, and kernel parameters than months of Ubuntu.

Hyde → Custom Hyprland

Started with Hyde, a pre-riced Hyprland dotfile suite. Tiling felt amazing on day one. Then one day it just stopped working, and I had no idea why. New to Linux, so I reinstalled. Again and again. Loop.

After a few months I got into ricing, ditched Hyde, and built my own config from scratch:

• Waybar: custom modules (pacman updates, network, audio)
• matugen + swww: dynamic wallpaper → color scheme sync (Material You style)
• hyprpaper → swww for smoother transitions
• Keybindings: workspace per project, scratchpads for terminals

This phase taught me Wayland protocols, XDG Desktop Portal, and why wl-clipboard matters.

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The Shell Hopping

Phase	Setup	Why I Moved On
1	oh-my-zsh + plugins	Slow startup, opaque internals
2	Manual .zshrc with sourced files	Maintenance burden
3	antigen	Stable, declarative, stopped the hopping

Antigen worked. Clean plugin list: zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntax-highlighting, fzf-tab, zoxide, eza aliases.

Then I tried fish + fisher and it just worked out of the box. No compdef ordering wars, no plugin manager bootstrap, no framework tax. Completions, autosuggestions, keybindings: sane by default. Only config I maintain: a few aliases and fish_add_path calls.

Now: Fish (primary), Zsh + antigen (secondary/POSIX fallback).

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The Terminal Hopping

Kitty, Ghostty, Alacritty, WezTerm: tried them all. Each had something (GPU rendering, ligatures, multiplexing) but also latency or config complexity.

Foot won:

# foot.ini: that's the whole config
[main]
include=~/.config/foot/themes/noctalia
font=MartianMono Nerd Font Mono:size=12
pad=4x4

[colors-dark]
alpha=0.85

[cursor]
style=block

[bell]
urgent=no

[scrollback]
indicator-position=relative
indicator-format=percentage

[search-bindings]
find-next=Control+n
find-prev=Control+p

foot --server + footclient starts instantly. No daemon management, no Lua config, just an .ini file. Fast as hell. Only terminal I’ve kept 6+ months without the itch.

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The WM Switch: Hyprland → Niri

While shell/terminal hopping, I also moved WMs.

Hyprland was great until the random crashes, plugin API churn, and config breakage on updates. I wanted something stable, scrollable, and keyboard-driven.

Niri (scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor) clicked immediately:

• Vertical workspace stack = mental model matches how I think
• noctalia handles night light, idle, DPMS, screenshots, wallpapers: one daemon, declarative config
• ly (TUI display manager) replaces SDDM: faster, lighter

No more rewriting my config every time Hyprland updates.

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The Editor Saga

VSCode

Worked. Then Electron bloat hit: high RAM, slow startup, random freezes on large workspaces. Extension ecosystem unmatched, but the foundation felt wrong.

LazyVim

Best “batteries included” Neovim distro. LSP, treesitter, formatting, pickers, all configured sanely. Used it 3 months. Learned Neovim’s architecture by reading its source.

Custom Neovim (Shell Editor & Quick Edits)

Stripped to a mini.nvim-centric config (~200 lines). No distro overhead.

-- plugins.lua
vim.pack.add({
  "https://github.com/RRethy/base16-nvim",
  "https://github.com/nvim-mini/mini.nvim",
  "https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim",
  "https://github.com/nvim-lua/plenary.nvim",
  "https://github.com/rafamadriz/friendly-snippets",
  { src = "https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter", branch = "main" },
  "https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig",
  "https://github.com/stevearc/conform.nvim",
  "https://github.com/lukas-reineke/indent-blankline.nvim",
  "https://github.com/mason-org/mason.nvim",
  "https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive",
  "https://github.com/stevearc/aerial.nvim",
  "https://github.com/brenton-leighton/multiple-cursors.nvim",
  { src = "https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter-textobjects", branch = "main" },
})

Setup:

• LSP via nvim-lspconfig + mason.nvim (installs servers/formatters)
• Formatting via conform.nvim (format-on-save, no linters)
• Picker via telescope.nvim + mini.pick fallbacks
• UI: mini.statusline, mini.indentscope, mini.surround, mini.pairs, mini.ai. The mini.nvim modules replace most single-purpose plugins
• Treesitter on main branch with textobjects for yaf/daf/vaf