I put Arch on my mini PC (and kept Windows anyway)

A Ryzen 5 2400G box too weak for Windows 11 became my excuse to finally try Linux. A day of commands, one very pretty shell, and the one thing that sends me back.

I have a small custom-built PC under my desk: a Ryzen 5 2400G with 32 GB of RAM. It's not a gaming machine and never pretended to be. It's for light work, coding and watching things. The 2400G's integrated graphics are fine for that, but Windows 11 on it felt heavy, like the operating system was using the machine more than I was.

I'd wanted to try Linux properly for years, and a machine I didn't depend on was the perfect test driver. If I was going to jump, I might as well jump into the deep end. So I installed Arch.

A day of commands

Arch doesn't have an installer in the usual sense. You boot into a terminal and build the system yourself, following the ArchWiki. It took me most of a day to get through it, mostly reading, re-reading, and learning what each step actually does rather than pasting it. The heart of it looks like this:

# partition + format the disk, then mount it at /mnt
pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware amd-ucode   # the base system (+ Ryzen microcode)
genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab                      # tell it where its disks are
arch-chroot /mnt                                        # step inside the new system
# …timezone, locale, hostname, users, a bootloader, networking…
pacman -S mesa vulkan-radeon                            # graphics for the 2400G's Vega iGPU

bash

When it finally rebooted into a system I'd assembled myself, it felt like more of an achievement than any install I'd done before. And for the first time I actually understood what was on my machine, because I'd put every piece there.

Making it look good

Out of the box, Arch is a black screen with a prompt. You choose everything, including what the desktop looks like. I went with Caelestia, a desktop shell with a clean, modern look: animated panels, a launcher and widgets that make the machine feel designed rather than configured. It turned a tool into something I actually enjoy sitting in front of.

Learning the alternatives

The real learning curve wasn't the install. It was everyday life. Every app I reached for on Windows needed a Linux answer: some have native versions, some have open-source equivalents that are just as good, and a few have no real replacement. Finding those became part of the fun, and a good reminder of how much of my "computer habit" was really just "Windows habit".

Lean is an understatement

This is where the old hardware came alive. A minimal Arch system takes a fraction of the disk space Windows wants, and idles on a fraction of the memory, because there's nothing running that I didn't install.  With 32 GB of RAM the machine now feels like it has room to spare for the first time, and the same 2400G that felt tired on Windows feels quick.

The catch: Skyrim

And then there's Skyrim.

I'm big on modding Skyrim, and that's where Linux still hurts. The modding scene is built around Windows tools. Mod managers, script extenders and load-order tools expect Windows, and getting them working through compatibility layers means a lot of fiddling, workarounds and things that break in ways you have to research one by one. Playing a game on Linux has become genuinely easy. Modding one heavily is another matter.

So, where did I land?

Arch is staying on the mini PC. For coding, light work and media, it's faster, leaner and far more mine than Windows ever was on that box.

But I've accepted that I need at least one Windows machine, for Skyrim and the handful of things that only really work there. Linux didn't replace Windows for me. It gave my weakest computer a second life, and that turns out to be enough.