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.
I had a similar issue. I actually wrote myself a text document listing out all of the programs I generally use post-install and any additional setup I did, so that way whenever I am setting up a new system I can quickly refer back to it and save myself a lot of time over doing one-off installs as I run into them.
but after fresh install
See, there’s your problem. If you never re-install this is longer a factor. Sure I had to do those things, but I had to do them exactly once like 8 years ago…
My 2¢ is that running Linux, you play the role of user and of sysadmin. On some distros you only put on the sysadmin hat once in a blue moon, but on others you’re constantly wearing it.
My Arch experience is a few years out of date; I felt I played sysadmin more than, say, Debian Stable, but it wasn’t too onerous. I also had an older Nvidia card, so there were some…fun issues now and then.
I use Debian on my machines now, and am happy. Try some different distributions! Even better, have
/homeon its own partition (better yet, own disk) — changing distros can be nice and easy without worrying about your personal data.I don’t mind being the sysadmin of my own machine (I prefer it, in fact). It’s just that I don’t want to spend free time troubleshooting some obscure problem specific to my build because I chose an ASUS motherboard and I don’t have drivers for my wireless headset or something. At least not when I’d rather unwind playing a game.
I was an Ubuntu WSL user and installed Arch Linux on my laptop without the install script and it took me a whole day plus a few more hours in the following days (reading the wiki and such). I learned a lot and it was a lot of fun.
I installed EndeavorOS on my desktop and it was… Weird. It was so weird that I broke things and had to reinstall it twice. Endeavour is great but I had already gotten used on setting things up by myself.
I have both computers running perfectly since then but you need to keep in mind that you’ll be responsible for doing maintenance on your system. Updating, checking logs, reading and rereading the arch wiki.
I wish I had tried getting into Arch sooner but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that isn’t willing to dedicate to it. Maybe try Endeavour and see if you like it?
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
As a capable but lazy Arch user, not much. It certainly bugs me a helluva lot less than Ubuntu and Manjaro did.
Amen. Additionally, for the lazy among us, get yourself one of the pacman wrappers for easy aur access
Do endeavor OS. It is literally just arch with an installer and nothing else is different
I just switched over today just to see what its all about. I’ve been using linux as my only OS for about a year now. Been on ubuntu, pop, fedora, etc… Sysadmin by trade. I am a linux novice I’d say. Not a noob, but not an expert. Still have a lot of issues just figuring out startup/service stuff, etc…
Followed this guide: https://gist.github.com/mjnaderi/28264ce68f87f52f2cabb823a503e673 (I wanted my drive encrytped).
I am up and running and basically back to where I was on fedora 40. I was doing this mainly to always be on the latest. Having to learn pacman and yay. I am finding I can get everything running but it’s definitely more involved.
No regrets just it did take a few hours. Not sure if it was worth it tbh at this point. lol
If I need to reinstall arch, I’m going to use endeavorOS. The entire time I was setting it up, I was like “why am I doing this?”. I automate everything I can at my job, why am I doing this the old fashion way…
It was really worth it for me. Having control of what stays and what doesn’t is a big relief for me. I wanted switch away a few times when something broke but nothing was as smooth and curated like my arch linux setup.
I will say a day or two later I am really enjoying it thus far. A bit turned off by the manual install but now I know exactly what is on my system, like you said “curated” and I am really liking yay.
That’s nice to know. I’m low on storage 256gb SSD so minimalism is quite important for me. But you have to be aware that there will be few hiccups especially when you don’t update for over a month, so make sure you don’t land into that. Also avoid arch linux discord/reddit unless you need help. They are the most toxic, entitled people you have ever seen.
As I was searching for a few questions I had I ended up on the reddit sub. So unfortunately got exposed already to it… toxic is right! Sheesh. Thank you for the tip about keeping up to date. That was sort of a question I had. I’ll probably just have it on a scheduled task.
You could search for solutions on reddit but I wouldn’t recommend making a post. You also have arch forum which comes up on Google searches and it most likely has the solution anyways. Lemmy arch instance is pretty chill. Have a nice time mate.
