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.
Arch requires a lot of effort to maintain.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
