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.
If you want minimal maintence avoid window managers and go for desktop environments. Installing KDe or Gnome you shouldn’t have any problems
This is the exact hole that had me quit Gentoo so many times over the years. When I stopped trying to be cool and just set my system up with KDE it finally stuck and I’ve been happily using it ever since.
Once you’re past setup and understand package management, what is a distro but a desktop environment, after all?
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…
It was really worth it for me. Having control of what stays and what doesn’t is a big relief for me. I wanted switch away a few times when something broke but nothing was as smooth and curated like my arch linux setup.
I will say a day or two later I am really enjoying it thus far. A bit turned off by the manual install but now I know exactly what is on my system, like you said “curated” and I am really liking yay.
That’s nice to know. I’m low on storage 256gb SSD so minimalism is quite important for me. But you have to be aware that there will be few hiccups especially when you don’t update for over a month, so make sure you don’t land into that. Also avoid arch linux discord/reddit unless you need help. They are the most toxic, entitled people you have ever seen.
As I was searching for a few questions I had I ended up on the reddit sub. So unfortunately got exposed already to it… toxic is right! Sheesh. Thank you for the tip about keeping up to date. That was sort of a question I had. I’ll probably just have it on a scheduled task.
You could search for solutions on reddit but I wouldn’t recommend making a post. You also have arch forum which comes up on Google searches and it most likely has the solution anyways. Lemmy arch instance is pretty chill. Have a nice time mate.
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.
A lot
I mean maybe? Arch is fun as a project, but imo it’s not very fun if you’re looking for a stable daily driver without fuss.
If you enjoy spending an evening tinkering with your config and installing various workarounds, arch is the perfect playground for you, but if that annoys you then I’d suggest looking at more stable established distros, at the very least until you start to get bored by stability. Personal pick is debian, but if you’re coming from IT you could install a distro you’re already familiar with like alma or Ubuntu.
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.
Solid advice. Good to mention too: use btrfs as filesystem for a better experience with Timeshift.
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.
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
/homeon its own partition (better yet, own disk) — changing distros can be nice and easy without worrying about your personal data.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.
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.
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.
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’d suggest you give this article a read. If this does sound appealing to you, go right ahead. If you think you’d be frustrated with having to make all these changes, Arch likely isn’t something for you.
This is just not true at all. This level of configuration is in no way required for having a good usable system. Things are as hard as they are plus how hard you make them.
Arch requires a lot of effort to maintain.
That’s just a lie
Did you craft a very unorthodox and complex system? If so, I can believe you.
However, I went with a very traditional system with ext4, no fancy partitions, X11 and Gnome. I didn’t want my system to have anything experimental, because I knew I had to learn a bunch of stuff anyway. Just made everything as simple as possible, so that I can understand what’s going on.
So far, there hasn’t been a lot of system maintenance. Obviously it’s still more than what a Debian system would require, but nothing too crazy.
Nothing too complex, no. KDE desktop, some stuff from the AUR. LVM on LUKS.
Perhaps it’s more fair to say that Arch takes more effort to maintain than any other well known distro except Gentoo (or LFS, if one considers that well known).
I found keeping up to date on a fairly bleeding edge rolling release distro exhausting. I would, too often, come across issues with updates that required manual intervention to solve. And the AUR can be a crapshoot as far maintainers keeping them up to date and applying fixes. Nothing unmanagable, but not an enjoyable experience for me.
No hate intended on Arch though. I think it’s one of the best distros out there, and the Linux community as a whole is better off for it’s existence. But it’s not something I want as my daily driver, and I suspect from what OP wrote, it might be the same case for them.
Edit: Reworded AUR bit for clarity.
Try a beginnerfriendly distro like mint first, instead of directly using a distro mainly used by advanced users.
Arch has great performance but sometimes you update your system and the [choose something] doesnt work anymore. I enjoyed when i had a ton of time to put into, now that i need something that just works and wont break for no reason its a no for me
