I started with Manjaro, and found myself in quite a predicament once I figured out what it means to have Arch under the hood. It was…a rude awakening.
Then I moved on to Debian and Fedora, and from there I gained enough knowledge to manage Arch systems. Now, I have Endeavour on my main computer and OpenSUSE Slowroll on my laptop.
For a casual experienced user - maybe, if bloat is a super big concern and ricing is an absolute priority.
For a casual newbie - please, no. Arch will immediately force the user to go through a lot of hoops, learn a million terminal commands to make basic changes, and overall it will be a very frustrating and non-intuitive experience. Also, rolling updates will inevitably lead to bugs here and there, and without the experience managing Linux systems, there’s only so much one can do to fix it.
Newbie Linux users shouldn’t go with Arch to begin with, even Endeavour or Garuda, unless they’re seeing it as a learning experience and have an IT background behind their back.
It’s not worth it for the average user, and honestly - even for most veteran users for that matter.
The great power of Arch comes with great responsibility to manage your system properly.
Super valid!
My point is: there’s little to brag about. But hey, I got that badge anyway.
Actually, yes. In many, many aspects Arch wiki requires a lot of prerequisite knowledge. Otherwise, you’ll be better off following online guides.
Why not? It takes a few hours at most, and I get a new interesting experience.
It is amazing if you’ve settled on your distribution of choice, though.
Very easy nowadays, even manually with all the guides, so you can cross that one off quite easily.
Arch Wiki is great, but it’s mostly oriented on people who already know something. And installation page should be very clearly written for absolute noobs.
Go ahead, install Arch on a VM (it’s not hard at all, actually!) and get your medal.
Then keep with Endeavour and enjoy your ride :D
Installing Arch manually is not hard, and there are plenty of step-by-step guides.
Figuring out what you need next and then managing this mess is more complicated.
Source: I installed Arch manually btw
I’ve used Debian for like half a year and this happened to me once, and to my buddy once as well.
Had to su
But why would someone use sudo to invoke su is out of my understanding.
Put Windows and Linux on two separate physical drives and this will never happen
It can only do so if both OS are on the same drive.
It is recommended to use two physical drives: one for Windows, one for Linux.
Never failed me in years.
While great overall, these are just launchers/wrappers for Wine/Proton with built-in library
They will not help launch something that can’t be run with Proton, and for hard mode, they won’t add native support.
So, nice, but not what OP is looking for
Dual boot would like to enter the chat
Raspberry Pi?
This is always a tradeoff.
KDE tries to be universal and useful for everyone. No matter what you plan to do with your system, KDE has convenient tools for that. But, no matter how they try to make the system less busy, full set of easily available functions always stands in the way of minimalism.
Gonna talk from KDE positions here. GNOME, too, has its place, but I recognize it’s not for everybody.
More pleasant to look at
Certainly not for the average person. For a normie user, KDE looks way way nicer, and it’s certainly way more modern than either XFCE or Cinnamon. Sure, the latter can be made into something modernishly enough, but the customization options are way more limited here. Either way, out of the box, KDE is much more preferable to most.
User-friendly
Can hardly find anything that is more user-friendly than KDE. Everything you can possibly think of is available graphically, the interface is extremely sleek and ergonomic, and you can change anything at all to your liking. Which leads us to…
Customizable
Why would anyone say XFCE or Cinnamon are more cutomizable is beyond my comprehension. XFCE can be somewhat reasonably customized, but the anount of technical knowledge required to do anything more than resizing bars is beyond the scope of normal users. Cinnamon is outright rigid, and its customization options are extremely poor by any means. KDE is easily customizable and can be turned into anything through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get graphical editor that requires 0 technical knowledge. Still, if you really want to go the old school way because you’re used to it, want something not offered, or can’t imagine yourself descending into the GUI designed for plebs, you can do it too. KDE is king when it comes to this aspect.
Stable
As far as XFCE goes, this does hold quite some weight. It has a mature codebase, allowing it to have plenty of things figured out. For mission-critical systems, it might be preferable. Same can’t be said for Cinnamon, but either way, every popular DE is stable enough for home use without much worry - including KDE.
In any case, having used all four, I stopped exactly at KDE and GNOME - the former being perfect for casual multitasking and entertainment, the latter being nice for focused work.
Honestly, on my Fedora I have to fix things more rarely than in Windows 11. Granted, Linux troubleshooting is sometimes more time-consuming, but I haven’t met a single issue that would take hours to resolve in a long while. Ironically, my partner wasted about 6 hours recently getting Windows 11 to work with audio devices on a remote desktop client.
Still, we have to admit fixing some stuff in Linux is complicated enough to be outside the scope of regular everyday user.
Oh, I should make it very, very clear: Ubuntu is a mess that newbies shouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. Comparing to Ubuntu, even Arch can look appealing for lack of confusion. Nothing that I say goes to support this abomination, and I did not mention it positively.
Generally though, most distros featuring KDE/GNOME will already have everything in one place - but, ironically, not Arch, which actually features three places to look for apps: the official repos for precompiled packages, Flatpaks, or AUR. And without something like pamac - a tool made by Manjaro team available through AUR - you can’t have all three in one interface or through same commands.
If I would choose distro by how easy it is to have everything in one place, this would likely be Fedora/OpenSUSE/Debian with Discover app store from KDE suite. Everything, be it native packages or Flatpaks, is in there, and you can easily select the source for any given app.
As per compatibility, I’m a strong proponent of Flatpaks. They are not significantly harder to manage than any other apps (in most cases, they don’t require any extra configuration), but they will help you avoid dependency issues and they also won’t get full access to your entire system, which is to me a disaster waiting to happen.