One of my SSD disks crashed this weekend. No worries at all, no data was lost during the process, because everything important was in the cloudz.

Here are a few notes from my Linux OS reinstallation process, which are going to be nice reminders for a future self who’d have to do it again.

🔗finding the right ArchLinux distro

While I was willing to reinstall Archlinux, The Hard (but well documented!) Way™, at first, using the fearful CLI, and all. But quickly, I was disenchanted. When it was time to connect network, nothing worked; in fact the network WiFi card wasn’t even detected. It was working just fine on my previous system, but I didn’t recall what I had to do to make it work; or even, if I had to do anything in particular.

I’m too old for spending hours trying to find out what’s the right driver, and finding a way to put it on the live environment. So I figured I could look around at other distributions that are based on ArchLinux and that try to make it simpler to install, with friendly, easy, y’know, graphical installers. I had heard about Endeavour before, but never tried it. When I ran the LiveUSB environment on my machine, it did Just Work™! The network card was immediately detected, WiFi worked immediately. The installation took overall 5 to 10 minutes, at most, so this was super fast. The resulting installation was minimal, which I quite enjoy. I could select which desktop environment I wanted (GNOME ftw!). Wayland ran out of the box, without me having to do anything to configure it. So that has been super nice so far.

🔗paru or yay, there is no question

In the past, I’ve been using paru as an Archlinux User Repository (AUR) helper, but the preinstalled yay is actually much better. Two things I’ve liked about it, in particular:

• I can run the plain command yay, and it will perform the most common command: update the source lists, and propose to upgrade all the installed software. Since that’s the most common action, it makes sense that it runs by default. As far as I can tell, doing the same with pacman or paru requires the -Syu argument, which I had to recall by heart at some point. Nice defaults ftw!
• I can also run yay $SOFTWARE_NAME, and it will search and propose me all the softwares that match the name, with a small selection interface, that allows me to then install one or several entries from the list. Super sweet! I’ve even discovered new software that way.

🔗flashing the usb drive for the live environment

I did use unetbootin in the past, but it’s been buggy and gave lots and lots of error messages, when I’ve tried to use it this time. I’ve discovered Balena Etcher, in the meanwhile, which has a super simple interface, binary executables for all major operating systems, and even gave me a nice progress bar with a time estimate until completion. Just Worked™, and that’s nice 😌

🔗choosing a wallpaper

After the install was finished, I’ve gotten back to set up a few of my favorite software, extensions, and generally habits. Of course, I’ve chosen a wallpaper from the super talented artist David Revoy, of Pepper and Carott fame. His list of free (and open-source!) wallpapers is super nice, but the list of artworks includes plenty of amazing stuff too, include two other pieces I’ve used as wallpapers in the past: Just found you, and My neighbor Mastodon.

🔗fixing the wezterm crash due to weird scaling

I’ve installed the wezterm terminal emulator (written in Rust 🦀 so blazingly 😎 fast 🚀), but it was crashing at start with a cryptic error like Wayland protocol error: wl\_surface@44: error 2: Buffer size (907x300) must be an integer multiple of the buffer\_scale (2). Thanks to this forum post, though, I figured that was because I set the display scale to 125%. After resetting it to 100%, it would work correctly again. Using the GNOME Tweaks app, I’ve set the font scale to 1.5, which also scales everything, so it’s a decent workaround for me.

🔗ohnoes my ssh is full of AI agents now???? owait

After copying my public and private SSH keys to the new machine, I’ve ran into weird errors like this one, when trying to SSH into one of my servers:

sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed: agent refused operation

I didn’t understand what it meant, what the hell, did we lose SSH to the artificial intelligence fad too? But thanks to this StackOverflow post, I’ve ran ssh-add, which gave me a better idea of what the actual error was, with an actual user-oriented error message. Something something permissions about the private SSH key; a little chmod 600 fixed it, and then I could SSH into my servers back again.

🔗i am once again asking you to install the printer

Fortunately, for this one, I did already write a short note about it recently. Unfortunately for me, the printer wasn’t even found in the local network, this time, even after installing cups and cups-browsed. It turns out that I missed the DNSSD resolver, so I’ve installed systemd-dnssd. After enabling and starting it, I was delighted to see that not only was my printer recognized, but this time I didn’t even have to fiddle with the URL configuration myself, and it worked out of the box by being globally detected in “print” windows 🥳 Sometimes Linux is nice, even when it comes to printing 😆

🔗sweet GNOME extensions

What I dearly missed from my dead SSD is the list of GNOME extensions, carefully found over time. I’ll probably make some kind of pages with all my favorite GNOME extensions, at some point, so this doesn’t happen again. In the meanwhile, here are the ones I’ve installed immediately:

• With the GNOME Pomodoro app, a simple yet configurable GTK-powered Pomodoro timer, comes a system addon to start and stop pomodori with simple shortcuts, and see the status of the current Pomodoro.
• Dash to dock allows to create a dock of currently running and favorite applications, à la MacOS. Turns out, there’s a fork / modified version Dash-to-dock-lite that even has animations on hover, like MacOS, so I like it even better!
• No overview at startup. Nothing more. I like the sobriety of the description on the extensions website.
• AppIndicator, to get all my different little icons on the status bar, at the top right 😍
• The simple System Monitor indicator, with live status about usage of CPU/RAM/network and disk.

🔗that’s all, folks!

In the next few days, I should receive a new 2TB SSD NVME disk. So I will hopefully be able to reinstall Steam on my machine, making it possible to get rid of Windows, as this was one of the last two usages I had of it (the second being using it for a DAW, in case you wondered). Will 2026 eventually be my year of Linux on the desktop? Let’s see 😌