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.

  • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
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    23 days ago

    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.

    • Veraxis@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      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.

      • JGrffn
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        23 days ago

        Ngl that kinda sounds like Nix with extra steps.

    • ayaya@lemdro.id
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      17 days ago

      but after fresh install

      See, there’s your problem. If you never re-install this is longer a factor. Sure I had to do those things, but I had to do them exactly once like 8 years ago…

    • JGrffn
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      23 days ago

      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.

    • ElectroLisa@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      22 days ago

      FYI Plasma Wayland doesn’t start with SDDM, you have to edit ~/.bash_profile and remove the “startx” line (or comment it out)

    • 737@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      22 days ago

      Arch has an installer, EndeavourOS is pointless. also mkinitcpio > dracut, you don’t need a firewall, paru > yay. just use Arch

  • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    23 days ago

    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

  • Veraxis@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    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.

    • nicolauz@feddit.de
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      22 days ago

      Amen. Additionally, for the lazy among us, get yourself one of the pacman wrappers for easy aur access

  • Responsabilidade@lemmy.eco.br
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    23 days ago

    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 swimming in lava, but it’s your choice to make like that.

  • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
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    23 days ago

    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.

    • Kogasa@programming.dev
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      23 days ago

      I tend to agree, but I also don’t see it as a fault of Linux/Arch. If you’re not the sysadmin for your own system, who is? I’d rather do it, assisted by the collective knowledge of the community, than have Microsoft do it for me. For the last few years it’s only required a handful of interventions, with the vast majority of time being spent on initial setup and (re) configuration rather than fixing bugs or addressing breaking changes. So IMO it’s more of a test of your personal willingness to invest time into learning and building things than your ability to diagnose and solve technical issues.

    • lortyOP
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      23 days ago

      I don’t mind being the sysadmin of my own machine (I prefer it, in fact). It’s just that I don’t want to spend free time troubleshooting some obscure problem specific to my build because I chose an ASUS motherboard and I don’t have drivers for my wireless headset or something. At least not when I’d rather unwind playing a game.

    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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      22 days ago

      If you’re already an admin at work, you might not want to do any system administration at home. Well, until you find out that Microsoft is making some obnoxious decisions on your behalf, that’s when you suddenly find the motivation to do some research and tweak a bunch of settings. Situations like that will also lead to frustrating moments when you find out that your hands are tied, and you end up looking for workarounds. Spoiler: It doesn’t get any nicer after that.

      On the other hand, if you’re running a system that requires you to take responsibility, a lazy admin will end up in frustrating situations too. It’s not that simple to balance these things. You need to know what your priorities are and what kind of sacrifices you’re willing to make.

  • herrcaptain@lemmy.ca
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    23 days ago

    Everyone here seems to be saying you’ll have a tough time. Maybe that’s right, but I haven’t run “proper” Arch in a long time. My experience in an Arch-based distros these days (Garuda) has been very smooth sailing other than a few minor quirks I had to iron out. Gaming, in particular, has been mostly flawless outside of a few specific games.

    That said, you’ll probably have an easier time on a more stable distro, but they’ve all got their issues and frustrations. I’d probably recommend against something super stable like Debian if you primarily do a lot of gaming, as it’ll be running older packages that might not work well with newer games (so I’ve heard). You may also wanna stay away from mainline Ubuntu because of the snap bullshit (personal preference, but it’s a sentiment that seems to be shared by much of the community).

    I guess what I’m saying is, if Arch interests you, give it (or a derivative) a shot. If not, just fire up something like Mint and be happy. It’s your computer.

  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
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    23 days ago

    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.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce
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    22 days ago

    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.

  • Malix@sopuli.xyz
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    23 days ago

    if you use the archinstall to setup everything (partitioning, locales, de’s, etc), not that much, but def. more than some “everything and the kitchensink straight out of the box” distros. The installer worked nicely on 2 machines I’ve tested it on, a laptop and a desktop. While the base system and graphical desktop installed nice, there was quite a bit of manual tinkering left.

    But, steam works more or less the same on linux as it works on windows - but there is some proton version selecting, and even then absolutely everything doesn’t work.

    Personally, nvidia+wayland (and xwayland in general) is pretty horrid with some games, but supposedly that’s supposedly getting fixed next month… It’s always something and the fix is so tantalizingly close.

    and, it’s not like the EOL for win10 is that close, seems to be October 14, 2025, so there’s still plenty of time.

  • T (they/she)@beehaw.org
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    19 days ago

    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?

  • antsu@lemmy.wtf
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    21 days ago

    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.