After spending many years using Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, I’ve decided to look at going a bit deeper and start tinkering with ArchLinux

Initially I tried to use Manjaro, but I couldn’t get its sound working with my Pixelbook, even using u/LyncolnMD’s setup (reddit link here). That being said, a commenter on that thread did say they had sound working, so I’m not sure how he made that happen.

Bizarrely, under vanilla ArchLinux, on which Manjaro is based, it works. So I’ve decided to go into ArchLinux instead.

I spend several hours making backups of my current Fedora setup and making CloneZilla images.

It took several hours to copy back the files too (212GB of content in my home folder).

I have also decided to reutilise my pixelbook-fedora-setup repo to configure for archlinux too. That will take a while to reconfigure everything since ArchLinux uses pacman as its package manager (with some AUR helpers like yay or pamac). Ansible has a pacman module, but no yay module, so each time I have to use yay to install packages under ArchLinux, I have to use the shell module instead. A minor issue, and I can see a few people have already worked on some yay modules, but none are officially distributed yet.

So until I finish reconfiguring my pixelbook setup repo, I’m staying on Fedora. I’m using a VirtualBox machine to do the testing of the setup.