Desktop

A description of my desktop setup and applications.





6/6/2025 – Semtex

BTW

The joke being done, I do run Arch Linux on my desktop and laptop’s and pretty much everywhere else I can. The fact is that I enjoy starting from a blank OS then pulling my tools and software as I need them.

I’m also fine using anything else, I do own a MacBook Pro (2019) that I sometimes boot on MacOS and a Windows 11 laptop for work. But it’s always a pain to miss on everything I’ve set up on my Arch Linux machines.

󰣇pplications

  • Kernel: linux-zen
  • Driver: nvidia-dkms
  • Display Server: Wayland
  • Compositor: Hyprland
  • Launcher: caelestia-shell
  • Panel: caelestia-shell (quickshell)
  • Browser: Zen-Browser ; uBlock Orig in, I still don’t care about cookies, Stylebot, Tabliss and NoScript
  • Browser2: Vivaldi ; integrated adblocker, I still don’t care about cookies, Tabliss
  • Email: Proton Mail
  • Chat: Signal and Discord
  • Code Editor: Neovim, Zed
  • Terminal: Kitty, Zsh, Zellij
  • File Manager: Nautilus
  • Music: Strawberry
  • Video: mpv
  • Image Editor: GIMP
  • 3D Modeling: Blender
  • Virtualization: QEMU/KVM with gnome-boxes
  • Containerization: Docker
    • Ollama
      • Llama 3:2
    • WebUI
    • N8N
    • Whisper
    • Piper
  • Theme: Catppuccin Frappe
  • Icons: Candy Icon
  • Fonts: JetBrains Mono
  • Cursor: Bibata-modern-classic
  • Screenshot: grim + satty
  • Notes: Obsidian

Here’s a quick overview of how it looks :

Why 󰣇rch ?

Well I’m a Linux user since 2004, when Ubuntu was sending liveCDs by mail and you could buy distros in bookstores. At the time (I was around 13), I’ve mounted my own desktop and bricked it more time than I’m proud of. I’ve even managed to build and run a Gentoo distribution without access to the internet and only the sources and manpages present on the liveCD.

I’ve used more or less all main desktop/laptop OSes and many distributions. Stayed a while on Windows while I was gaming and coding in .NET, I really liked what they did with WSL and when I started to notice that most of my work was done in this Linux subsystem, I decided to switch back to Linux full time. Also Proton helped a lot with gaming, so nothing was holding me back.

Arch today is quite great on how it works. It’s dumb package management. You do your stuff and it sometimes breaks but never on its own. You can always fix it, revert, install stuff you need, clean it up,… I’ve always liked this idea, I liked to rebuild the system from scratch, implement tools I like the way I liked, code the ones I was missing,… Couple that with Hyprland and the keybinding approach, my ZSA Voyager keyboard and you can do everything in a few keystrokes.

Update 17/10/2025

I’ve reinstalled a 500GB Windows partition on my desktop to be able to run some games natively (mostly ones which requires Secure Boot). I’ve kinda forgot what my setup was capable of ! Despite Linux gaming getting better and better, you can’t deny that on high end hardware, there is still a MAJOR performance gap between native and Proton gaming. It may be the other way aroud on lower end hardware but on my 13900K + 4090 rig, it’s quite obvious. I’d say it’s around 20-30% performance loss on average, sometimes more depending on the game.

I didn’t manage to make my motherboard to accept Secure boot with linux (ASUS Bios is meh), so when I boot on Windows, I have to enable Windows Firmware UEFI Secure boot option. I guess I could make it work by using a signed GRUB version (Ubuntu or Fedora ones).