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.
Just have a look at EndeavourOS which is Arch with sane pre-installed stuff. Have been using it for a year without problem. Am also lazy :D
I’m like OP, can find my way around things but am lazy. I second this recommendation, but I just had a negative experience on it die to laziness. Got lazy around updates, let them pile up to 600 pending updates, ran them all at once and my laptop just became unresponsive. Naturally, I forced its shutdown like a caveman and had to spend the following 6 hours recovering my partition. The nice thing is that endeavour at least has some nice commands to deal with just this kind of situation. The not so nice thing is that I was lazy about looking shit up, hence the 6 hours. The command that saved me was “reinstall-kernels”, fixed my systemd-boot in an instant and fixed whatever other mess I had caused.
So yeah, it can be frustrating sometimes. Especially if you’re lazy.
Arch has an installer, EndeavourOS is pointless. also mkinitcpio > dracut, you don’t need a firewall, paru > yay. just use 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
As a capable but lazy Arch user, not much. It certainly bugs me a helluva lot less than Ubuntu and Manjaro did.
Welcome! Coming from Windows myself, I made the jump to Manjaro (It has certain issues and I do not recommend it), then to Arch less than a year after. I have been on Arch full time for around 2 years now. After the initial setup, I have found Arch to be pretty low-maintenance and no harder to maintain than any other distro, hardly requiring more than the occasional yay -Syu --noconfirm in the command line to update things. As someone with less computer knowledge than an IT professional, I think Arch’s reputation for being difficult is overblown IMO, and I suspect mostly due to intimidation from the more involved setup process prior to the availability of the install script.
I don’t know if you have any familiarity with Linux already from your work, but regardless of what distro you go with, I would go into it with a mindset that you are learning a new skill. Some things are simply done differently in Linux than Windows and will require getting used to, such as how drives work using mounting points rather than drive letters.
Realistically, setting things up for the first time often requires additional steps and may not “just work,” but when using my laptop and gaming desktop from day to day, it works just like any other OS. Gaming has been great for me generally, and the work Valve has done to improve game compatibility on Linux has been spectacular. Most Steam games do, in fact, “just work” for me.
In the 2-3 years I have been using Linux, I have rarely had things spontaneously break as many folks seem to worry about, or if I do it is because of companies not supporting their Linux communities, like Discord not pushing out updates on time, or major-event changes like the move to the Wayland graphical stack on KDE 6 which undid some of my desktop customization settings.
