arch is about getting a system that works for you, if you like and use kde, then its not bloat, its just your system. there is nothing wrong with making your system work for you
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Arch isn't necessarily about minimalism. It's about the distro not doing things for you and mostly leaving the defaults the way the upstream developers intended. So you DIY most of your distro, but you do it exactly the way you want. I very much do the exact same thing you just did for every work-issued macbook I've gotten in the past 10 years. Excepting, of course, the current one because the M3 isn't really usable in linux! Package groups are great for bigger things like DEs because they're developed together, so you get the entire experience the way the devs intended it. I think the only really big thing that's broken for KDE is Discovery, because pacman support isn't great there. It works fine for flatpack and others, though. Use it the way you want to!
Cool! Installing Arch was surprisingly easy. Just a few minor issues. Plus I have a MacBook Pro with the touch bar (not my choice) and I am struggling to get that working with the recommended packages but beyond that it's not too bad.
When I had that model, I just forced it to be function keys permanently. I spend a lot of time with strange terminal programs, so Fkeys were important. Think "managing solaris devices" or "ancient ISP hardware used via serial terminal".
Is it a huge faux pas to install all the default packages?
Nope👍
Your computer is meant for you. Personally I'd recommend installing just the packages/programs that one needs but if you want to install all of them to save on time then I don't see anything wrong with that🤗
That's the beauty of Linux, you get to use it the way you want to. There's probably an elitist that will say you did it wrong, but just ignore them. Even if you did it the "wrong" way you can learn from it.
No