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?
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