Hello!
I’ve bought new parts and I am awaiting their arrival so I can build my brand new computer. I’ve decided to go for Arch Linux with KDE plasma or perhaps Gnome as my desktop environment but that’s as far as I’ve come.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Xw4sRv
I figured I would ask the community if they have any tips or suggestions, thanks!
hey! don’t listen to all the people who are telling you to choose an “easier” distro. my first linux was gentoo. i had never really bothered to learn computers before. that was 20 years ago and i was a teenager. i’ve been using various linuxes over the years since then.
if you want something that mostly just works, don’t want to mess around with your computer, and are fine with having to reinstall every 2-3 years because updates always break, then yeah, ubuntu derivatives are fine. fedora and friends are a little bit more stable and offer a similar experience.
if you want to learn, though? then it’s 100% correct to go with something that lets you do more of the work but has an excellent manual. in that vein, arch or gentoo are the leading experience.
the advantage of these is also that they won’t break as easily as anything debian/ubuntu based will.
you will have to do a lot of reading, a lot of learning, a lot of asking people embarrassing beginner’s questions (DO join the respective IRC channels for support! they’ll love to have you), and you should keep a rescue system on a stick or CD because you have a pretty good chance to break yours.
(strongly recommend putting your /home on a separate partition if not its own drive, so you can simply unmount it and then do with your system whatever you want, without having to worry about your important files.)
as for everyone else recommending you to use a different distro: you will get this advice incessantly. whenever you ask a question or are trying to find solutions to a problem, people will swarm you to tell you to use a different distro. this is an unfortunate habit of the linux community. so my most important piece of advice is to wholeheartedly ignore the distro recommendations at all times except when you have explicitly asked for them.
you know best what your needs and wants are. the whole point of free software is to empower people to do with it whatever the fuck they want.
Great comment, I’ve decided to go for Arch and I know that it might come with a lot of tinkering and work. Thanks for the tips and encouragement!
Remember to trust first and foremost the Arch Wiki.
Never follow the random tutorial on youtube/blog/whatever.
Take your time to read. Mess up. Fix the mess. Enjoy.
If at any point it feels too much, no shame in taking a different direction: it’s your life and your own time.
Best wishes!
I’m on arch and just got back into using linux after playing around with it years ago. I’ve managed to get a lot of things working on it just fine, like Diablo 4 and various software not packaged specifically for arch, which forced me to learn the system I am using.
It’s exactly what I want!
I disagree. Over the past few decades many of us have seen friends try out Linux and then leave it be, and one of the common reasons is the complexity of doing various tasks. Of course figuring out things is part of the fun, and I hope that a lot of people will do so, but if things don’t work out of the box, that can be really frustrating. And people are busy. They might want to mess around with their Linux box, but this might not be the time to do it.
That all being said, I think many of the popular distros today are designed reasonably well for new users, compared to the much more adventurous landscape we had 20 years ago.