C’mon. Live a little.

Just imagine needing to give a company-wide demo of a newly completed platform initiative, so you wanted to make sure your camera and mic were working, but you care about privacy so you want to do it locally.

You dont have an app for that, as this is a purpose-built, minimal, Arch Linux workstation, so you use pacman to install a local webcam GUI. While you’re using pacman, you think, might as well update too.

Update, reboot, uh oh.

WHERE’S THE ARCHISO USB?!?!

You can’t find it anywhere! And you even check that weird place you found it last time! Think! … Your phone has a USB-C port and a terminal right? And right there is a USB-C Flash Drive… Surely you can just flash - Ah shit, not without rooting the phone!

Thinking quickly, you unscrew the back panel and replace the M.2 SSD with the one from your personal Librem 14 laptop [you care about privacy, remember?] that’s currently out for repairs for the (now infamous) power issues. It’s Arch too, but it hasn’t been updated yet – thank the good Dennis Ritchie, so you’re able to boot with it and check the ArchWiki homepage…

Those dreaded words… MANUAL INTERVENTION NEEDED… Ugh! Why does this only happen when I need it not to!

You frantically download and flash the archiso to your available usb stick, swap ssds, boot up, decrypt the drive, mount it manually (remembering fondly the carefully chosen partition layout), chroot in, perform the “intervention”, and reboot.

Perfection. Smooth as freshly polished glass. Smoother even – probably – with these sweet new updates! You log in, slide directly into the meeting, you were only 30 seconds late. You give the presentation expertly, they’re all impressed by your fancy words like “kubernetes” and “admission controller”. “What a genius” you know they’re thinking. They have no idea.

You sign off, and wipe the cold sweat from your brow. These are the moments when you remember why you run Arch at work. Not because it’s easy – because it’s hard. Because every time you’re faced with a situation like this, you get a little bit better.

Sure, you could be an Ubuntu Urchin, a Debian Dweeb, a Mint Mistake, but you’re not. You’re better than them. You’re an Arch Assassin, because you know the moment you lose your edge – is the moment you lose your job.

You sit back and start your favorite database UI tool, DBeaver. It full screens instantly thanks to your tiling window manager. You love how it’s always been reliable on Arch Linux. Why anyone would bother doing anything else is beyond you.