I Installed Arch + Hyprland as a Linux Noob and My Eyes Literally Bled (A Retrospective)

It’s been three years since I nuked Windows and went full Linux. Looking back at my first week, I wasn't just "switching OSs"- I was basically throwing myself into a digital meat grinder.

Since I'm hosting this on my portfolio, I figured I’d document the actual chaos of that transition. It wasn't all clean terminal commands and "efficiency." It was a lot of swearing at a black screen.

The "Big Brain" Mistake: Arch + Hyprland

Most people start with Mint or Ubuntu. Not me. I decided to jump straight into Arch Linux and install Hyprland (a tiling Wayland compositor).

I thought I was a genius until I realized I couldn’t even lower my screen brightness. I was sitting there at 2 AM, eyes bleeding because the screen was at a literal 100% luminosity, and I had no idea which config file I had to sacrifice a goat to just to dim the lights. I spent hours stressed out, wondering why I’d done this to myself.

Lesson learned: If you go the "minimalist" route, you are the developer, the IT guy, and the victim all at once. If a feature isn't in your config, it doesn't exist.

Learning to Game (The Heroic Way)

One of the biggest myths is that you can’t game on Linux. For a while, I was living proof that you could. I got Heroic Games Launcher running and managed to get GTA V working surprisingly well. For a second there, I felt like I had beaten the system.

But then, Rockstar did what Rockstar does. They pushed the BattlEye anti-cheat update, and just like that, the party was over. One day you're cruising through Los Santos on a native Linux kernel, and the next, you're locked out because the anti-cheat thinks your OS is a threat.

What I’d Tell 2023 Me

If I could go back and talk to myself when I was staring at that blindingly bright Hyprland setup, here’s what I’d say:

• Don't Rice Before You Drive: It’s cool to have a "pretty" desktop, but make sure your basic hardware controls (volume, brightness, Wi-Fi) work first.
• The Anti-Cheat Wall is Real: No matter how good Proton or Wine gets, if a company decides to use kernel-level anti-cheat, you're at their mercy. Keep a small Windows partition or a secondary machine if you absolutely need those specific AAA titles.
• Arch is a Teacher, but a Brutal One: I learned more about how a computer actually boots and manages memory in three months of Arch than I did in years of Windows.

Three Years Later...

I’m still here. Despite the GTA V heartbreak and the initial "blinding brightness" incident, I’m never going back. Especially now that I'm pivoting into DevOps, having a system where I actually understand the underlying architecture is a massive advantage.

Windows feels like a black box now. Linux feels like home—even if the "lights" are sometimes a bit tricky to turn off.