I’ve been using PopOS for a few months now, and I’m interested in Arch, but I’m worried about whether or not I have enough experience to do that successfully. Also, I have an Nvidia GPU until I start a new build in the next year or so. I don’t know if that’ll be a problem in Arch. It was a major issue with Fedora for me.

I’m willing to learn the terminal, but right now I’m still pretty dependent on tutorials to do more than basic things, like installing software. Most of those are catered to Ubuntu-based distros, so I’m concerned I won’t have the luxury of guides to more complex terminal stuff.

Am I overthinking this? Or should I wait longer (maybe even until I build a new PC)?

How difficult is the transition from Ubuntu-based to Arch?

  • DrRatsoEnglish
    8·
    9 months ago

    Arch is fairly easy, the difficulty is a bit of a meme:

    • Wiki is huge, read it before you do things.

    • As others said, pacman and AUR are dummy easy to work with, you generally don’t need to worry about dependencies etc, pacman and AUR helpers (like YaY) will install everything for you.

    • AUR is massive but understand that it is maintained by users.

    • The part that is hard is installing arch manually, archinstall mitigates this, you don’t learn too much by doing it manually, except how to partition disks through CLI and mount them (which, granted can be useful), also chroot is a good thing to know how to do if you brick something.

    • A clean arch install will give you a TTY environment, if you depend on wifi, make sure the install sets up networking before you reboot (archinstall has a separate option for this). Archinstall does give you options to install a WM / DE.

    • I recommend checking out Hyprdots by prasanthrangan for a very comfy Hyprland environment, but you could of course just set up something you are more comfortable with.

    • Nvidia drivers are not too hard to set up, the above dotfiles do it for you on a clean, minimal install. But if you want to do your own thing just follow the wiki on NVIDIA, you will need to be able to string together a few concepts independently by following the wiki links (to remove the KMS hook and add nvidia modesettings.