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Archlinux Dotfiles for Ethical Hackers

Written by OrganGrinderrr | August 19, 2024

A word on Linux distros

Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Gentoo, NixOS, Qubes OS, Tails
Personally I would kill Qubes and Tails already, rather than choosing a distro designed for a single purpose, I would rather chose a general purpose. As everything in Qubes can be implemented in other general purpose systems. Qubes and Tails are not alien technologies.

Using Qubes and Tails in my humble opinion not doing you any good as it shouts out that you are special, or more than special. In some way, special equals to uniq. If you are a activist or whatever political sensitive person and you are not a hacker, then you can consider using Tails such kind of distro.

NixOS and Gentoo are taking things to the extremes.

NixOS philosophy is to be reproducible. Make everything easier. Imagine you broke your system and you have to start from scratch build the whole system again, maybe boot into a rescue mode and save your data. Install every package. Change endless configurations.

NixOS saves your time and effort with one configuration file (even tho no one is doing so in a single file). And you can run package in a virtual temperury env without worrying about apps shit in your system. But in order to use this thing, you have to spend some time dive into it and learn the basics.

Gentoo is really not for small brains like you and me. If you don't value your time. Go ahead. Have fun with it. It's a lot of fun.

Ubuntu is not kicked out of the chat. Although it's been laughed about around the internet,
if you want to show that you are just like everybody, disguise yourself as a simple-minded ubuntu user.

Arch Linux also have a large user base, less popular than ubuntu but it has a good to read wiki. Whatever issue you encounter you can look it up in the Arch Linux wiki. And it helps build your knowledge base about Linux, even if you are a fresh starter.

So Arch Linux I would say is somewhere in the middle. Our dotfiles will be worked on Arch Linux.

DIY Arch Linux for example

Must haves

Categories Name
wm sway
bar waybar
terminal kitty
shell zsh
compositor wayland
text editor nvim
file browser ranger
launcher dmenu-wl
web browser librewolf
screen locker hyprlock

This should be enough, perhaps a little bit bloated already, why bother to use a seperate pdf viewer and a music player, as everything is available inside a browser.

Everything else is available in terminal, nmcli for wifi. bluez for bluetooth. etc.

Nice to have

Categories Name
greeter tui-greet
screenshot grim & slurp
screen recorder wf-recorder
media player mpv
system monitoring btop
clipboard control wl-clipboard
virtuallization libvirt

Download the dotfiles

https://github.com/OrganGrinderrr/SimpleDotfiles