Up until last summer, I have been a windows user. My previous laptop ran windows XP even after it was discontinued, as I had nothing else to install (I was afraid of Linux, thinking that there would be too steep of a learning curve). After my laptop broke down, I managed to find a disassembled one that a teacher did not need. I got this laptop from him, fixed it up, and got it running; however, my hard drive was wiped, so I had no bootable operating system. Inspired by some of my friends in advanced computer programming, as well as my CS teacher, I decided to try out Ubuntu on my laptop. I immediately fell in love with Ubuntu, it was only a little bit harder to use than windows, and it came with lots of tools as well as online support that made it perfect for my needs as a programmer. Later, my parents made me install Windows vista because our printer does not have drivers for Ubuntu, and they wanted me to use Microsoft Word over Libreoffice. With a lot of work and help from my dad, who used to run Linux, we managed to add a Vista partition without killing my Ubuntu. I stood using these two operating systems through out the first semester of my Junior year; however, right before Christmas break, a friend of mine who works on Antergos asked me to check it out. I tried booting from his flash drive, and as a test of speed, I ran my natural selection simulator, which lags on my Ubuntu. On Antergos the simulation ran at full speed without any lag. I have heard from others that Ubuntu includes lots of things going on in the background, and that unity is inefficient, but this showed me how this inefficiency was bringing me down. On average on Ubuntu, when not doing anything, both of my two CPUs would be running at 20%. On Antergos, they are currently running at 5%. It was at this point that I decided that I should check out Antergos.
The Antergos instillation gave me a lot of trouble. I downloaded the most recent build from the build server, installed it to a partition, but then it would not show up in my grub2 boot loader. I eventually learned how to manually create a boot entry, as update-grub would detect but not add Antergos to my bootloader. After adding the partition, it complained that some files were missing from the /boot directory. Investigating this, I probed the installation from Ubuntu, and as a friend helped me realize, the /boot directory contained nothing but grub. By this point in time (I gave up after a while, and then decided to come back to it), a stable version of Antergos had been released, so I added it to a flash drive, and this time used the visual installer, resulting in a successful installation.
I may have succeeded in installing Antergos, but there is still much for me to learn. I have started messing around with Arch’s installer, Pacman, and I decided that it was about time for me to pick a side in the editor war. Based off of my father’s opinion, as well as my previous experiences with the nuances involved with editing modes in vim, I decided to try out Emacs. So far, I have only done a basic tutorial, but I can defiantly see how this is a powerful text editor. Overall, I am happy with Antergos, and am looking forward to finishing setting it up.