Breakup!

Last week I broke up with my operating system. I'm pretty sure this is a "for real" breakup and not a mere spat, so I feel confident describing the situation here publicly.

Firstly, let me say that I consider my time with Ubuntu to have been well spent. We were together since about 2005. (It's difficult to say exactly when we first became "on" because, like many relationships, ours began tentatively.) During that time we grew together, and I even introduced Ubuntu to my parents. Ubuntu and I underwent many system upgrades, a transition to a wonderful new laptop, and even a fresh install. Through it all Ubuntu treated me well--perhaps a little too well. I grew lazy and stupid, enabled by the comfort of being with an operating system that made system administration simple.

But then the unthinkable happened. My rock steady Ubuntu began gaining weight. For sure, Ubuntu was never the slimmest OS of the bunch, and I was okay with that. There are things more important than a trim physique, and I was smart enough to realize a good thing when I had it. But it was the most recent upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic during which my precious operating system became morbidly obese, bursting the seams of my laptop despite the machine's dual-core processor and 2GB of memory. Ubuntu had become fat indeed. I even began viewing its other positive attributes in a different, less accepting way. By last week I made the decision to split, and on Thursday I installed Arch Linux.

I heard of Arch Linux through a coworker several months ago. It's not as polished and refined as Ubuntu and makes less of an attempt to make administration easy-to-use. The benefit of this is that Arch Linux is lightweight and flexible. These two defining characteristics, so opposite of Ubuntu, may mean Arch Linux is a rebound operating system. I don't know. Perhaps it's telling that today is day five into our relationship and I'm still happily running twm--without a graphical display manager, no less--and it's from the command line that I'm doing things like bringing up wireless, starting Firefox, and suspending the computer. My terminal is xterm. My volume control is alsamixer.

So I don't know. Whatever the future holds for me and Arch Linux, I know this much: for me a computer is not and cannot be a mere appliance, and the right operating system for me is one that enables me to cultivate my garden, not to outsource the landscaping duties.