Arch Linux

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...

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?

If you have an interest in Arch, I'd recommend starting with a derivative distro like EndeavourOS. It'll give you an easy installation process and a desktop that's ready to use.

Then just use it as your daily driver. You'll eventually run into the occasional issue when package X or Y upgrades and breaks something, learn to fix that, and eventually learn the "ins and outs" of Arch. That's how I started, I went from Mint to Antergos, used that for a while, then when Antergos was discontinued (RIP) I converted my install to "pure" Arch and never looked back.

Are you versed in Linux though? If not I think going with Mint or another beginner friendly distro would be better.

That being said, if you are comfortable enough around Linux Arch is great, and the meme about being difficult probably stems from people who have no idea what they're doing trying to install it. The installation is the most difficult party if you can spin up a VM and successfully install and run it there you're good to go.

On the long run though I prefer Arch exactly because I'm lazy. Yes, installing it is a bit tedious, but if you know what you're doing it's 30 min of tedious stuff, then you get access to the lazy motherload, i.e. the Arch User Repository (the AUR essentially contains 99% of every software you might want to install but is not on the official repositories, so no looking for PPAs or downloading installers from random websites ever again), plus it's a rolling release distro, so no more reinstallations or version upgrades that need lots of attention.

Overall I use Arch because I'm lazy, but you need to be comfortable around Linux for you to be able to be Lazy using Arch.

No, it wouldn’t.

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.

If you're just gaming and using godot, Bazzite (im not quite sure if it's spelled like that) with KDE is probably a better choice, it's immutable so you can't really break the system outside of your home directory.

As a lazy Arch user, I can tell you that there will be frustrating moments, but not that many. Mostly you’ll be fine, but be prepared for minor annoyances.

Features

If you didn’t install it, it’s not on the system. That’s good for a minimalistic system, but frustrating for a lazy admin. Once you’ve ironed out all the issues you encounter during the first few months, the system should be pretty solid and worry free. However, once you encounter a new situation, you have to do your research, and install (and maybe even configure) that one missing thing. Later down the line, this becomes increasingly rare, but never disappears completely, so be prepared for minor annoyances like this.

Interventions

Before updating, check the official site for big news. Some rare updates require intervention, so you should know what you’re doing before updating your system. Usually it’s totally fine, and you can run the update command blind folded. It’s definitely not recommended, but it’s not going to destroy a simple installation any time soon. If you do complex stuff with your system, the updates become more frustrating. However, once you break your grub this way, you’ll learn to read those notes before updating. These things don’t happen often, but once a special update like that does roll out, you’re going to find it frustrating. Could take a few years, so you don’t really need to worry about it today. Just know what you’re getting into.

Updating takes a while

I update roughly once a week, but occasionally only once a month. Maybe there’s something wrong with my connection or settings, but I get timeouts all the time. As a result, I ended up just using the no timeout option instead of actually doing my research and looking into this problem. Need to take that deep dive one weekend eventually. One month worth updates is also a lot of data to download, and I’m getting 0 kb/s for several minutes at a time, so it takes even longer. A lazy admin suffers in annoyances like these. Be prepared for something similar to happen to your system sooner or later. Probably takes only 30 minutes of reading and two commands to fix, but I’ll get around to it another day. Before anyone asks, yes, I’m using a list of the fastest servers, and no, I haven’t updated that list in months.

I still have Arch on my main laptop, but recently I replaced the Fedora of my HTPC with Debian. I just can’t be bothered to spend a minute on system maintenance, so Debian is better suited for that purpose. I’m still going to stick with Arch for reasons I don’t even fully understand. Probably just sunk cost fallacy at this stage…

The most difficult is installing. Once you're on it, you're set.

As a capable but lazy Arch user, not much. It certainly bugs me a helluva lot less than Ubuntu and Manjaro did.

If it's your first distro, then it might be an overkill.

I'd first start out with a readymade distro, because maybe it already fits your needs and wants. If you get to a point where you spend a lot of time on rebuilding your setup or distro-hopping, then Arch can be considered.

(Not because you are lazy. I'm lazy, too, but maintenance isn't much work, unless you're running updates too infrequently. You should check the news before updating. Many users don't and even then when you "break" something, it's not too difficult to identity the problem and fix it with the great help of ArchWiki, the community and chroot.)

I moved from Arch to Bazzite as my day to day. I enjoy my time more than with Arch. More than a few times I went to do updates or install something and it took forever. Could be (probably is) my fault for not knowing how to skip some of it at the time? I find Bazzite to be intuitive and cutting edge enough for my liking. The gaming aspect of the OS makes certain things easier too.

Do endeavor OS. It is literally just arch with an installer and nothing else is different

If you want minimal maintence avoid window managers and go for desktop environments. Installing KDe or Gnome you shouldn't have any problems

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

Most of the time you would be fine, but sometimes stuff breaks in unexpected ways, so at the least you need to manage a good backup scheme or be ready to chroot whenever there is a system critical update.

As for Endeavor OS, It's basically Arch with a nicer and smarter installer (compared to Archinstall, not the Arch way). The downsides and maintenance are exactly the same.

There is also pacnew..

Did you find you had a lot of trouble getting new peripherals to work? Things like wireless mouses/headsets?

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.

If you're new to Linux, I would reccomend fedora if you don't want to have to fuck with anything, but if you work in IT, you will inevitably want to fuck with stuff more, and arch is great for learning

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.

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 swing in lava, but it's your choice to make like that.

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 /home on its own partition (better yet, own disk)

changing distros can be nice and easy without worrying about your personal data.

Arch requires a lot of effort to maintain.

I wouldn't recommend it in your case. Mind you, Arch is easy enough to install with the archinstall script or say using EndeavourOS, but the issues come afterwards. For starters, you'll need to occasionally deal with .pacsave/.pacnew files when you do an update, keep up with Arch news and be aware of breaking changes which may require some non-trivial manual intervention, like in this post for example: https://lemmy.nz/post/7648427

So if you're after something that "just works", then Arch isn't for you. Since you're into gaming and you're lazy, Bazzite would be an excellent choice as its an immutable OS with atomic updates (updates either work or don't, there's no middle/broken state). But if you're after a more traditional distro (ie, non-immutable), Nobara or Pop!_OS also work well for gaming.