Your system will almost certainly get irrevocably broken by something at some point and you’ll have to reinstall. This isn’t a failure on your part though, it’s a rite of passage that everyone goes through at least once, especially if you have Nvidia drivers lol. It’ll happen less and less over time the more you learn how to fix stuff though.

Also back up often!

My best advice is: Try to use it as a daily driver. It was it finally worked for me. Solving the everyday problems is the best linux teacher :)

Doesn’t matter what distro you choose. I’d suggest picking one with a large support base, and not a niche distro.

But ultimately, pick one, don’t become a distro hopper, or one of these folks that’s always asking “what’s the best distro”.

As a new user, if you try out a distro for a few months and it’s just not “clicking” for you, there’s nothing wrong with trying something else out.

More than anything else, once you do find the distro that feels like home, learn to tune out the haters, because they’re going to crawl out from under their rocks every bloody time you mention the distro you use, and try and tell you why what they like is better.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned which distro I use. And that’s for a reason. I happen to think it’s pretty damned fantastic, but there’s at least one other person that will read this, and feel its the worst thing ever, of all time.

As far as tips go? Learn to read error messages, learn how to use a websearch, learn how to ask intelligent questions when you need help.

I highly recommend giving this a read: https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Yes, it’s old, but it’s just as relevant as it was when Eric Raymond wrote it back in 2001.

If you’re installing Arch, one trick the installation wiki article doesn’t tell you:
If you type “archinstall”, it has a command line installer there that’ll do the install for you, and lets you pick from several desktop environments as well. I’ve had it crash before more than once, so it’s not perfect, but it’s less of a pain then doing it all by hand…

My absolute, #1 biggest recommendation is to male separate partitions for / and /home.

What does this mean? In short, you’re telling the system to treat different sections of the hard drive / ssd as entirely separate buckets. In this case, you’re putting all of the operating system and programs in one bucket ( / ) and keeping all of your files and settings in another (/home).

Why does this matter? As someone learning Linux, you should tinker with things, learn what they do and how they work. Sometimes, that means breaking things, occasionally in spectacular ways. Having your files and your OS separate means that you can completely wreck your OS while you learn without losing your data in the process- you can reinstall from scratch or even distro hop (try out a new version) without having to stress over losing anything. In short, you can learn and play and blunder and explore without risking anything more than a 20 minute reinstall if you can’t figure out how to fix it.