last night i bit the bullet and installed arch ^O^
i still have a ton of settings and stuff to migrate from my manjaro install on the other hard drive, but the "spring cleaning" feeling makes it all worthwhile. this was half driven by the simple compulsion to install linux on something (it's been a whole year!!) and half because... recent headlines have been making me anxious to "company behaves badly tomorrow"-proof my workflow. not that i'm super wary of manjaro or anything, but i want to be closer to where the community support is strongest. for the principle of it if nothing else.
anyway i had a look at hyprland but i couldn't find a status bar that i could configure comfortably without breaking it so i chickened out of learning to use a tiling window manager for now. but i am haveing fun taking this opportunity to re-customize plasma... if i want to learn the tiling wm workflow maybe i can make use of plasma features to do it.
