I’ve been using PopOS for a few months now, and I’m interested in Arch, but I’m worried about whether or not I have enough experience to do that successfully. Also, I have an Nvidia GPU until I start a new build in the next year or so. I don’t know if that’ll be a problem in Arch. It was a major issue with Fedora for me.
I’m willing to learn the terminal, but right now I’m still pretty dependent on tutorials to do more than basic things, like installing software. Most of those are catered to Ubuntu-based distros, so I’m concerned I won’t have the luxury of guides to more complex terminal stuff.
Am I overthinking this? Or should I wait longer (maybe even until I build a new PC)?
How difficult is the transition from Ubuntu-based to Arch?
- How to do the most basic things
How to search for a package:
sudo pacman -Ss packagenameHow to install a package:
sudo pacman -S packagenameHow to update:
sudo pacman -SyuHow to remove a package:
sudo pacman -Rcns packagenameHow to clean old packages:
sudo pacman -Sc --noconfirmArch linux installer (official):
archinstall…and that is (pretty much) all you need to learn to use Arch linux in an acceptable fashion. Now go ahead and give it a spin – you’ll love it.
Or just use
yaywith EndeavourOS.yay is also preinstalled on Endeavour; its main sells are fuzzy search, bundling AUR and treating just “yay” as update and upgrade everything and “yay <stuff>” as fuzzy search for that package and you can select items to install. You still have to learn the rest of the commands though.
Yes, let me reiterate for OP that
archinstallis how you want to start your arch setup. The tutorial will guide you down the manual path to setup which is a lot more laborious and doesn’t always work the way you hope. The built-in script will do all of the manual setup tasks for you.
Nvidia is fine on Arch, the drivers are in the base repositories.
For tutorials, the Arch Wiki is one of the best resources for Linux. If you are unsure how to do something, there is likely an article that states how to do it.
If you are unsure, I would install Arch in a VM before swapping.
Yes, the Arch wiki is spectacular, many users of other distros come there, via search engines, for help.
I can only recommend EndeavourOS, it’s a fantastic way of getting into Arch
Vouching for Endeavour–I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and it’s been great. I have an AMD gpu though.
I have an Nvidia card, and it handles the driver really well, so yeah. Great system
Pacman is the most braindead straight to the point package manager of them all, it won’t take you very long to memorize the 3 letters you need to use it.
I’m a chronic distro hopper and here is my advice. If you want to try out new OSs make sure to backup your data as the probability of screwing everything up is relatively high. I use syncthing to ensure all documents I have exist outside my laptop so there is no cost to me breaking everything, but you can also just use an external hard drive and not be fancy. Whatever works for you.
Arch really isn’t hugely different especially through the Endeavoros route which gives you sane defaults and packages without grinding through documentation. Just be prepared to be the car enthusiast of computing. Car people love understanding internals, messing with stuff, fixing issues that bother them, looking under the hood, asking for help, etc. That is the best analogy for the more, let’s just say, enthusiast Linux environments.
Don’t let that scare you though. Be prepared to learn a thing or two, backup your data, and make sure you have a backup stick with another OS on it to undo whatever you break and you’ll be fine. I think I have literally gone through 100 reinstalls on the low end and everything is fine. Unlike a car your computer is fairly cheap to fix if it is just software.
I’d say use EndeavourOS and if you choose NVidia in the menu when you boot the installer it will install the distro with NVidia drivers from the start and there’s nothing to fiddle with. The updater (called yay) will henceforth update NVidia drivers as needed. It’s one of the most handsfree NVidia experiences there is as kernel and driver updates are automatic via Arch.
I also suggest installing apps via Flatpak, this way there wont be problems with library versioning and system and apps are separated nicely. You can install KDE Discover for example to have a GUI app “store” that supports Flatpak. Just make sure to have the right Desktop portal installed. I run KDE but for some reason needed both the kde and gtk portals to get nice fonts everywhere.
You install stuff with Yay or Flatpak, e.g. “yay -S xdg-desktop-portal-kde” or “flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam”. If you use Flatpak install Flatseal, it can handle permissions, for example you can give Steam access to another folder you want to use for games, for example I use /home/protonbadger/Games/ and gave Steam access to the folder this way.
SUSE Tumbleweed is a good alternative and more polished for desktop users, but you’ll have to install NVidia drivers manually afterwards, there are wiki guides and youtube videos showing how. Occasionally when a new kernel update comes out the NVidia drivers trail a day or two so be aware of that on SuSE. NVidia have their own official repository with SUSE drivers.
I suggest trying both first in virtual machines for a few weeks.
In my experience the only library versioning conflict I encountered was with GNOME and Budgie which has been fixed. Flatpak separates every single app which also means complicated directories so I avoid it and don’t really see the necessity of it.
I didn’t like it because of discussions of it online. But then my Steam malfunctioned because of a Mesa update and I decided to try it anyway and form my own opinion. Turns out it works really well (for me), it’s performant and I like that it installs without root password and is mildly sandboxed so installers can’t put files just anywhere in my system.
It’s not so much about necessity of it as it’s pros vs. cons of different package managers, Flatpak vs. pacman vs rpm vs snap vs appimage and repositories (the AUR is nice for example, but also a bit like the Wild West), etc. Pick what fits your personal philosophy and enjoy.
Arch has gotten much easier to install over the last couple of years, especially with the new “archinstall” tool. The hard part now is setting everything up after installation (e.g., desktop environment, drivers, applications, etc.) but if you invest a little time into learning how to read the wiki, you should be able to get up and running within 2–3 hours.
The Arch and Gentoo wikis are fantastic resources, even if you use neither flavor of Linux.
Arch is fairly easy, the difficulty is a bit of a meme:
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Wiki is huge, read it before you do things.
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As others said, pacman and AUR are dummy easy to work with, you generally don’t need to worry about dependencies etc, pacman and AUR helpers (like YaY) will install everything for you.
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AUR is massive but understand that it is maintained by users.
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The part that is hard is installing arch manually, archinstall mitigates this, you don’t learn too much by doing it manually, except how to partition disks through CLI and mount them (which, granted can be useful), also chroot is a good thing to know how to do if you brick something.
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A clean arch install will give you a TTY environment, if you depend on wifi, make sure the install sets up networking before you reboot (archinstall has a separate option for this). Archinstall does give you options to install a WM / DE.
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I recommend checking out Hyprdots by prasanthrangan for a very comfy Hyprland environment, but you could of course just set up something you are more comfortable with.
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Nvidia drivers are not too hard to set up, the above dotfiles do it for you on a clean, minimal install. But if you want to do your own thing just follow the wiki on NVIDIA, you will need to be able to string together a few concepts independently by following the wiki links (to remove the KMS hook and add nvidia modesettings.
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Go for it, I say. YMMV, but Pop!_OS for me was a headache, just didn’t play nice with my rig. I’d go with Endeavor over vanilla Arch, just to make the install process simpiler.
For the terminal, you can learn how to use it at a basic level, I believe someone here already posted some commands. Write those down and what they do, or use Endeavor’s Welcome Screen, and you’ll be alright…or you can just install Pamac (yay pamac on the terminal. Go with pamac-all or the one that says no snaps) or Octopi, or re-enable the Discover Store if you wanna go with KDE or Gnome software and have a GUI menu for all that. If you feel lost, Google, the Arch wiki, and the Endeavor forums are your friends. The Arch wiki especially is super detailed, and can be applied to Linux in general.
Transitioning, i feel, YMMV. Again, i had a pretty bad time with Pop!Os and I wasn’t a big fan of adding PPAs in general. It’s nice not having to deal with any of that, personally. And up-to-date packages means my stuff isn’t behaving oddly for the most part (there’s breakages, small and big, but that’s with all distros. Something is bound to screw up sooner or latter) Only thing I mind is constantly having to babysit the system…but that’s the nature of rolling releases (by babysit, i mean updating is a daily thing. i know i can leave it for a week or two without upgrading and it’ll be fine, but outta habit, I do a system wide update (yay in the terminal, or through pamac if ya got it) before shutting down for the day.) but I haven’t found a stable release I vibe with, so I put up with it
Yeah, I was thinking about changing over, because while I like PopOS, it has some issues on my rig. It wasn’t as troublesome as Fedora, but laggy animations, Pop Shop crashing, and its very outdated version of GNOME were starting to frustrate me.
I’m actually testing EndeavorOS in a live environment right now to get a feel for it! I’ve always been hesitant to try Arch in any form because my main Linux buddy warned me it was a quick way to ruin your system.
I use this PC a lot, so I have no problem updating it several times a week or more. So fingers crossed I don’t screw it up lol.
Listen, if an idiot like me hasn’t blown up his PC in the two years I’ve been on Linucx (1 yr and change with Arch), you’ll be alright lol
I’m gonna assume the reason Arch is “scary” for some folks is because it’s a rolling release, which yeah, it can cause problems, but IDK, I’ve had much less problems with Arch vs any stable release I’ve tried not named Linux Mint (and even there, the volume and mic on my laptop failed to get picked up. An easy fix, but again, never had that happen on Arch). Sure, fixing a problem might seem daunting, but like…the internet and forums are right there. You can look up and ask for help. Then again, YMMV. I had to basically learn to ask for help and hunt down answers because of my time with Windows (geez, that was a headache. I’m convinced there was something wrong with my install, because I fought with Windows so much until i just couldn’t anymore), so when I switched to Linux, the whole “it doesn’t always work” argument fell off my back.
My only experience in the last decade is Mint and lately Nobara (Fedora 37 plus tweaks for gaming). Mint was pretty rock solid. I rarely rebooted except for updates. Occasionally Cinnamon would lock up… because reasons? It was too rare to worry about. The only complaint was that the packages I used were pretty out of date. I switched only because the 5.15 kernel didn’t support my AMD RX6600 (or I should say there was an issue with power save where the display wouldn’t show back up even after reboot).
As long as it doesn’t cause massive instability I would probably prefer a rolling update. Upgrading Mint every few years was a bit intrusive.
Yeah, Mint’s pretty solid overall, but as I too game a lot when not working, I didn’t wanna have old packages on me. I’d imagine getting them up to date or fixing issues that arise from them is headache inducing, so i’d rather just have everything fresh. Besides, I’m used to Arch syntax so I know I’ma go “sudo pacman -Syu” if i move to something else lol
Imo it’s better that you wait, you could try installing vanilla Arch in a vm and distrohop once you’re ready, if PopOS is suiting all your needs imo there’s no reason to get Arch on bare metal (A vm for fun and learning would be satisfying ig), on a side note, getting the proprietary NVIDIA driver to run is very simple in vanilla Arch (like a 4 steps or so)
With EndeavourOS, I would just use yay. It is pre-installed, uses the same syntax, and includes packages from the AUR.
If you ever have trouble, try eos-update as it builds in a few tricks that Arch users will eventually run into ( like having deal with outdated keyrings or pacman lock files ).
Pacseek can be a nice addition as well when you are searching repositories for something or trying to understand what a package is. Not essential but nice.
EndeavourOS is cake to install and maintain. NVIDIA drivers will install out of the box.
No need to wait.
To use the AUR, use yay instead of pacman ( same syntax ). Or use eos-update —yay to update as it takes care of a couple common Arch upgrade pitfalls ( infrequent ).
The Arch wiki is great so documentation should not be an issue.
EndeavourOS is very nice and I’ve loved it for a few years now having come from Kubuntu.
It comes preinstalled with
yaywhich makes everything nice and easy.Linux newbie who also started with PopOS here. I’d definitely recommend Endeavour, It’s been my daily for 2 months now and what finally let me ignore my Windows drive completely.
Only thing I’d add is grab timeshift, it’s saved my bacon more than once already.
It’s doable, just follow the installation guide meticulously and read the page about nvidia drivers first. The wiki is excellent.
If you’re worried that you might end up with a broken system, try installing it in a VM first until you’re familiar witht the whole process, or try an intermediate distro like manjaro or endeavouros that have an automatic installer and will sort out driver issues for you.
