Installing EndeavourOS
Partway through my fall semester (2025), I decided to semi-impulsively install EndeavourOS (an Arch-based distro) on my Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 (Intel) on a Saturday. It was semi-impulsive because it had been in my task list for quite some time and the real desire to do it coincided when I needed to study for an exam (I was procrastinating, probably). I really missed pacman, the default package manager for Arch Linux. I did not want to install vanilla Arch as I already had done so—and broke it. Many months later, I recovered my files from my desktop and reformatted my disk. I am still in between installing EndeavourOS, Debian, or NixOS on it.
Installing EndeavourOS was pretty straightfoward, making it a less painful process than installing vanilla Arch. I chose to go with i3 for my window manager. I would like to briefly focus on two humps I encountered along the way.
After installing Ghostty, I encountered an issue with terminal responsiveness. It was really, really slow. I thought it was completely unresponsive. The default (XFCE) terminal worked fine. The issue turned out to be with the renderer: Ghostty was software rendering instead of using accelerated graphics. I uninstalled xf86-video-intel and forced Iris (the driver) to run with MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=iris in /etc/envirionment. Also, I think I was missing some Intel graphics packages, so those were installed throughout my troubleshooting. Unfortunately, I am writing this so long after the fact that I can’t recall what packages I installed.
Given that my main system is Ubuntu 22.04, I was coming from Emacs 27.1 (which was released in 2020). Since Arch is on the “bleeding edge,” I was upgraded to 30.2. For some reason, ledger-mode did not work when I went to revise my ledger document for ledger-cli, which I highly recommend for finance management! According to this mail thread, ob-ledger was pulled out of the org-babel package and added to org-contrib in the Org 9.5 release. It reminded me of how important it is to read the release notes as I am well behind on them.
I wanted to make my laptop Yotsuba-themed (from the greatest manga series Yotsuba&!). Here is the link to the wallpaper. I love how simplistic it is and all of my apps are out of sight, so it’s nice to just focus on what I actually need to do.
^ Enjoy everything! 🍀