A New Laptop and Now I Use Arch BTW

For 7 years since February 2018, I had been using my first gaming laptop, an Acer Helios 300, as my personal computer, including doing everything with this very website. Now in July 2025, I bought myself a new gaming laptop, an Asus TUF Gaming A15.

I ordered my new gaming laptop from Asus' official brand store in Malaysia through Shopee on July 6, then the new laptop was delivered to my home on July 10.

My previous laptop was bought in February 2018, and it had experienced many major changes throughout the years:

• In around 2020, I replaced the 1 TB internal hard disk drive (HDD) with a 2 TB one.
• In November 2023, the laptop's solid-state drive (SSD) started showing signs of age and then broke down, thus I asked for professional help with replacing the 256 GB SSD (which is paltry by today's standards, but back in 2018 SSDs were still considered a luxury) with a 1 TB one with Windows 11 installed.
• In June 2024, I broke the laptop's internal speaker when I raised the system volume too quickly during a heavy rain outside my house that was louder than the sound from the laptop, so I had to plug in and use external speakers to hear the sound from my laptop again.
• In late June 2025, shortly after switching to Fedora Linux, the laptop's internal 2 TB HDD broke down due to age as well.

The last point was the final push was made me consider seriously looking for a new laptop. After doing my research, I chose Asus TUF Gaming A15, with the main draw for me being two SSD slots, so in addition to the default 512 GB system drive, I chose to add a 1TB SSD when I ordered my new laptop.

By gaining a new laptop, hardware is not the only new changes to my personal computer, but operating system too.

Just a few weeks before purchasing my new gaming laptop, I became a full-time Linux user, by switching my PC's operating system from Windows to Fedora Linux in June 2025. Therefore, I took the opportunity of obtaining a new personal computer to switch from Fedora Linux to Arch Linux as the distribution of my Linux desktop, making it my first time using Arch. In other words, I can now officially say, I use Arch BTW.

Why I chose to switch to Arch Linux?

Like Fedora, Arch is a Linux distribution that I have been curious about for a long time, due to its reputation of being aimed at experienced Linux users, not to mention the "I use Arch BTW" meme. I had wondered if one day I will be proficient enough on Linux to switch to Arch Linux as my Linux distro of choice. It helps that Arch is one of the Linux distros recommended by Privacy Guides (Fedora is another one of them as well).

In recent months, I have made significant process in learning to use Linux, including by using command lines, thanks to having my virtual private servers (VPS) and attending my local campus of 42 the computer science school, since its campus computers have Linux installed (with Ubuntu as its distro), and shell commands are part of their bootcamp curriculum. After becoming a full-time Linux user and using Fedora for a bit, I came to have a better idea of how I want my personal computer's operating system to be like, and with Arch Linux's do-it-yourself (DIY) design philosophy that gives users much freedom in customising their system, I finally felt ready to give Arch Linux a try.

After trying out a few different Linux distributions (Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, Manjaro and Fedora), I realised that while I am fine with stable release distros model for servers, especially public-facing ones for which system reliability is crucial — in fact, I am using Debian in both my VPS — for my daily desktop use, I prefer rolling release distros as I like to keep the software I use up to date.

(To be fair, I also appreciate Linux Mint for being a beginner-friendly distro that has helped both my father and I to transition from Windows to Linux when we began to use Linux desktop for the first time, and I still think Fedora is a good distro for having good out-of-the-box defaults in a general purpose distro)

Arch Linux being a popular distro means it has a lot of resources, such as having a large official repository that include a lot of software, including some popular closed-source ones, an extensive wiki — Arch Wiki — with goldmine of information and guides, etc.

During my transition to being a full-time Linux user, I learnt of the existence archinstall, which provides guided installation of Arch Linux. This helped to encourage me to try out Arch even more, so I used archinstall to install Arch Linux on my brand-new Asus gaming laptop, and I was impressed. I am grateful for archinstall for helping to make installing Arch less intimidating for Arch newcomers like me.

When I switched from Windows 11 to Fedora Linux, I chose KDE Plasma as my desktop environment, because I love how customisable KDE Plasma is, and the fact that KDE has a large variety of free and open-source software certainly helps. This time I switched my daily Linux distribution from Fedora to Arch, but KDE Plasma is still my desktop environment of choice.

When I successfully logged into KDE Plasma and saw the welcome window after archinstall finished installing Arch Linux on my new laptop, I was relieved and pleased that I managed to install Arch Linux on my own computer.

Despite using a guided installer like archinstall, and installing a full-fledged desktop environment known like KDE Plasma, my fresh Arch Linux install was still minimalist out of the box: I still needed to use the terminal to set up and install things I wanted. Notably, Arch Linux does not even have any web browser pre-installed, and you need to manually enable Bluetooth with a command line to start using it.

That said, I found it interesting that Arch has Kate pre-installed on KDE Plasma, in addition to KWrite as text editors with graphical user interface (GUI), while Fedora KDE Plasma does not have Kate pre-installed.

I am not complaining, however. I knew I would need to learn to set up almost everything myself when I decided to switch to a DIY Linux distro, and I appreciate that it allows me to deep dive into how Linux system works, and the freedom to assemble an operating system the way I want.

After spending a few days in setting up Arch Linux, I officially started to use my new Asus gaming laptop daily.

Despite having switched to a new laptop and a different Linux distribution, I do not intend to throw away my previous Acer gaming laptop.

I am still undecided for how I want to repurpose my previous laptop, but while its internal speaker has been broken, a machine with a 1 TB SSD and 8 GB RAM is still serviceable when it is not used as my primary computer, like turning it into a home server or even a backup computer.

It has been almost a week since I obtained this new gaming laptop, and a few days since I switched to using Arch Linux as my daily use Linux distribution, but I am happy with my brand new personal computer, and enjoying the process of learning to assemble your own operating system by using Arch Linux.

July is also my birth month, with my birthday being in late July, so I am happy to have got myself an early birthday present in the form of a new gaming laptop.