Building MY tech environment

I’m a long time Arch Linux user for a reason: out of the box, it doesn’t feel particularly interested in telling me how I should use my computer. It starts with a minimal base and expects you to assemble the environment you actually want. Its own philosophy emphasizes simplicity, minimalism, and configuring the system yourself rather than relying on a preassembled desktop experience. I like tools that gives me a small, almost bare-bones starting point and then gets out of my way. Software where the first few hours might involve reading documentation, changing keybindings, writing configuration files, and occasionally wondering “why on earth did I choose to do this to myself?” And then, eventually, it becomes mine.