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.
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…
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
Nice opinion you got there.
FYI Plasma Wayland doesn’t start with SDDM, you have to edit ~/.bash_profile and remove the “startx” line (or comment it out)
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
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.
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 -Syyuonce 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.
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.
Totally agree.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The most difficult is installing. Once you’re on it, you’re set.
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.
Most likely AUR is the main issue here. I’ve specially avoided it to make my system as simple and easy as possible, so my experience has been a bit different. The thing about Arch is that every system is unique, and it’s hard to say something that would apply to all of them.
As a capable but lazy Arch user, not much. It certainly bugs me a helluva lot less than Ubuntu and Manjaro did.
Amen. Additionally, for the lazy among us, get yourself one of the pacman wrappers for easy aur access
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.
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…
No, it wouldn’t.
Try a beginnerfriendly distro like mint first, instead of directly using a distro mainly used by advanced users.
A lot