I Ditched Windows for Arch Linux and It's Great

I've been a Windows guy my whole career. Not because I loved it, just because it was there and it worked well enough. I think most people are in the same boat. But "well enough" has a way of accumulating. Slow startup, Docker being a second-class citizen, random background processes eating CPU during a build. It got old. So when I had an excuse to swap my boot drive for a new Samsung 990 EVO Plus, I took the detour. Fresh SSD, clean slate, Arch Linux.

I picked Arch because I figured it would at least be a fun project and I'd end up with more control over my machine. The install has a bit of a reputation, but I found it pretty smooth. My main hiccup was my motherboard only having a single M.2 slot. I couldn't have my Windows drive and the new SSD installed at the same time, which meant flashing the Samsung firmware straight from the USB boot kernel. This guide was a lifesaver.

For me it was worth it. Here's the part that actually surprised me though: Docker. On Windows with WSL2, my dev containers had this annoying 15–20 second lag on file change. Hot reload felt more like warm reload. I'd save a file, go check Slack, come back, and maybe it was done. On Arch, running Docker natively, that same reload is near instant. Same codebase, same dockerfile. It's not a small difference, it's genuinely changed how I work.

The rest of the setup took an evening of my dad and I poking at features and getting my peripherals configured. NVIDIA drivers are still a mild adventure on Wayland, KDE Plasma needed some tuning, and yes I had to look up more than one command. But the machine feels lighter, faster, and like mine in a way a Windows install never did. If you're a developer who's been sitting on the fence, a new SSD is a pretty good excuse.