I know my way around a command line. I work in IT, but when it comes to my personal fun time more often than not I’m quite lazy. I use windows a lot because just plugging in anything or installing any game and it just working is great.
But support for windows 10 is ending and I should probably switch sonner rather than later, so I’m wondering if Arch would be a good pick for me? For reference, I mostly game and do Godot stuff in my free time.
Once I have learned Arch, installing and maintaining it is super easy and fast. Troubleshooting a problem if it occurs is also easier because you know more how the system works internally.
But there is another problem I see when using it daily for many different things. I install Arch and week later when sending emoji find out there is no emoji font and I need to install one. Then month later needing to quickly use Bluetooth I realize I forgot to install bluez and some of it’s frontend. Then about to print something and now I need to learn how to install CUPS print server. All those things takes few minutes and have the best documentation in the Linux world, but after fresh install I get annoyed for first month or two for stuff that come preinstalled on other distros.
But… That’s also why I use Arch. I could run some post-install script from someone or use Endevour, but setting stuff how I want is the beauty of Arch.
Eh Arch being “hard” is overblown. I’ve honestly spent just as much time troubleshooting windows crap or other distro crap. You just have to learn all the little tricks and whatnot that are specific to arch. It happens over time naturally.
Nice thing about arch is the community. Great documentation and if you find something that doesn’t work - somebody motivated will make it work and share. Example: protonvpn decided “nah we’re not supporting arch”. No big deal, someone in the community has packaged it up and maintains it for us.
Arch users rule
Once you install Arch with the archinstall script and set everything, you’ll be fine.
Arch is as hard as you make it be. I run Arch with Gnome using mostly flatpaks and I the only maintenance I have to do with my pc is run sudo pacman -Syyu once a day to keep everything up-to-date.
Of course you can make it be as hard as trying to swimming in lava, but it’s your choice to make like that.
If you’re not super patient, I wouldn’t personally. If you do end up going with Arch, the first thing you should do is install Timeshift!!!
You will save yourself sooooo much pain and frustration, especially with Arch. Installing a system/feature-breaking update becomes trivial to undo with Timeshift. I’ve borked my systems multiple times and with Timeshift it took less than 5 minutes to go from a trashed system back to my fully working setup.
Set it to take an automatic snapshot once a day. That way worse case scenario, your system gets reverted to the beginning of the day.
Arch is great if you’re patient and willing to learn the right way to do things in Linux.
If you want a “just works” experience though, you should look elsewhere.
Solid advice. Good to mention too: use btrfs as filesystem for a better experience with Timeshift.
