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.

  • 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. ;)

  • 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 :)