Madhias wrote: I have wiped on my home PC the SSD, and installed Linux, namely Arch - not on a second HDD, and not in a VM but like real men do on the first drive. So far I have the i3 window manager up and running, a nice font in the URXvt terminal, after years of using Chrome typing this post in the Firefox browser, and a slightly customized information bar on the top of the screen.
Congratulations! Welcome to the real world.
i3 is a really good WM. Take a look at
py3status if you want to have fun with your bar easily.
rxvt-unicode is also a very good choice for your terminal. I never took the time to learn and configure it, but it's on my to do list. I'm still using terminator which is also excellent, but kind of bloated.
Madhias wrote: Abandonment is another thing of which I am afraid of: reading the Arch Wiki (=world heritage) is great, but later I always check if the thing I am interested in is OK to use, or its developers are not interested in it anymore and all people are using alternatives meanwhile. Or is this just silly thinking?
Yes, a lot of abandonment, even more since you choose to use a non-traditional desktop environment. But in the end you'll see that the benefit from the few softwares left is much bigger than all the junk you have anywhere else. I couldn't live anymore without a real tiling WM, emacs or bash. The kernel itself is freaking awesome, you should definitely try to recompile it to your needs several times to understand how it works.
Madhias wrote:
- file manager
You shouldn't use this. A good shell like bash, zsh, or fish, is the way to go. It will hurt at the beginning, but once you master it and know the good tools to do the good job, anything else will seem tasteless.
Madhias wrote:
- image viewer
I use geeqie because it's really light, doesn't depend on anything and even if it's ugly as fuck, have a lot of nice features (renders RAW files, link to common image editors, etc). Thought, if you find something better that doesn't require a full desktop environment like Gnome/KDE to run, I'd be very interested!
Madhias wrote:
- what is Udisks and how to auto mount in an elegant way
I really struggled on that one for some time. In the end, my preferred way to automatically mount an USB storage is to use udev. That's really simple, doesn't need any dependency, and works like a charm with in a few script lines. See:
https://gist.github.com/ramnes/67899785dbe985c48dca
(Edit: just read your last post, looks like you already found this. Great!)
Madhias wrote:
- maybe change the font rendering of Firefox somehow (currently I quite like that strange 1996 feeling)
I can't help on Firefox particularly, but be sure to check your OS font rendering first.
Madhias wrote:
- install Steam
Are you really sure that you want to do that? Once it's done, it's hard to go back. Steam is proprietary, closed source, hard/impossible to debug,
really badly coded, and needs a lot of dependencies that got me mad multiple times on Gentoo. Maybe it's more straight forward on Arch, but personally I'm not going to do it again anywhere soon. Anyway, playing games is a waste of time (self-persuasion, self-persuasion, self-persuasion).
Madhias wrote:
One important part I am going to do will be to ... install VMWare Player or Workstation Pro to startup a recently made Windows vmdk and later Lightroom. I can't live without, and running it in Wine is not as
good fast as starting up a virtual machine? Dont't need GPU acceleration, just CPU power, RAM and a fast drive. Again: I
need that program!
I would recommend VirtualBox rather than VMWare.
About Lightroom, I know you don't want to hear that there are alternatives, because I didn't want neither at first, but you really should check RawTherapee. It's really a good piece of software, it's open source, works anywhere, and the developers are really active.
For example, I shot that picture in RAW with a D70, and I used RawTherapee to process it:
And I'm pretty happy with the result.
. I also am a fan of most of the suckelss apps 
