Moving back to elementary
In about a space of a month, my laptop has gone through the torture of multiple installations, endless configurations, and backup-restore rituals to settle on elementary OS 5.1.7. Artix ran well enough in every way and I quickly got used to the tiling windows too. The excellent AUR has everything and it was really convenient to try out new applications before it was packaged for any other distribution. There was always a nice TUI/CLI alternative to a CPU and RAM guzzling electron app. There were issues but for the most part I learned to live with it. When Blender broke with the latest ffmpeg update, Regolith found its place on my machine for a short while. Its a beautiful OS right out of the box but after getting used to a certain way of doing things in Arch, it didn’t feel like home and I hopped onto Endeavour OS. Sane defaults, a minimal XFCE backend, Sway WM, an ugly wallpaper for Sway, and AUR, of course. Endeavour was almost perfect but I was back to square one living with all the issues from back when I ran Artix and also ended up decorating Endeavour OS quickly with the things accumulated over the past 7-8 months to make it look more or less like the old Artix installation. It was like I never left. And frankly, it was getting a little tiring with the customization game to make the desktop look pleasing. And so elementary happened. Although humongous flatpak apps and the issues with boot time with systemd in the past are a turn off, I have been keeping tabs on the development efforts of their next release and I am really excited about how its shaping up. Some of the best minds I know package their apps with flatpak, work on machines running on systemd with no issues and are a million times more productive than me while I am being nitpicky about shaving few seconds off of boot time and saving some MBs over terrabytes of space on a glorified browsing machine 😅️.
PS: One nice perk of using tiling windows for a while is that I am now comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts and can use the very same shortcuts on Pantheon to move between workspaces and applications - with nice transition animation as a bonus. I used workspaces very little before Artix. Even with a tiling window manager, I leaned towards keeping not more than one or two applications in each workspace. Using floating windows in the same manner keeps the clutter away.