Hitchhiking on Arch Linux — The Sad ending :(

Disclaimer: I did NOT stop using Arch Linux because it crashed upon me.

I’ve been using Arch Linux for over a month now but unfortunately I cannot use it anymore. There seems to be an issue with the the headphone jack in my 2012 Macbook Pro 13" model. The inbuilt microphone doesn’t work anymore so I have to use an external mic. Prior to using Linux I used to plug in my wired headphones via the headphone jack and use the headphones’ mic. This functionality stopped working when I installed Linux (any distro in general). And as I do need to use the mic for Zoom and Google Meet calls I had to dual boot MacOS with Linux.

The problem arose when I couldn’t just get Arch Linux dual boot with MacOS. I tried various Arch Linux forks and distros such as EndeavourOS, RebornOS, ArcoLinux and also some TUI (text user interface) installers like Anarchy. I don’t quite like Manjaro so never used it. Out of these I could just get EndeavourOS working but the Linux kernel which I use is the LTS variant which is much more stable and reliable than the latest Linux kernel which EndeavourOS uses out of the box. Although I could switch the kernel to LTS but it was just too much hassle for me.

I tried a lot to get Arch Linux dual boot with MacOS over a span of 2 days and ended up downloading approx 60 gigs of ISO files and reinstalling MacOS via recovery. Sensing that I was devoting too much time to just get Arch Linux working I felt I ‘d to switch to another Linux distro.

So I went with Linux Mint with the Xfce desktop environment. Although I could have used Xubuntu (I like Xfce) but Xubuntu’s support for their latest ISO release is only for 3 years while for Linux Mint with Xfce is 5 years.

I will be missing Arch Linux a lot. Arch has taught me so many intricacies of Linux and I had a wonderful learning experience while doing so.

The next few articles would be my experience with Linux Mint with Xfce.