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.
You can try CachyOs. Arch base with modern packages compiled and built for more recent cpus.
Also,rather easy to maintain and very fast.
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.
if you use the archinstall to setup everything (partitioning, locales, de’s, etc), not that much, but def. more than some “everything and the kitchensink straight out of the box” distros. The installer worked nicely on 2 machines I’ve tested it on, a laptop and a desktop. While the base system and graphical desktop installed nice, there was quite a bit of manual tinkering left.
But, steam works more or less the same on linux as it works on windows - but there is some proton version selecting, and even then absolutely everything doesn’t work.
Personally, nvidia+wayland (and xwayland in general) is pretty horrid with some games, but supposedly that’s supposedly getting fixed next month… It’s always something and the fix is so tantalizingly close.
and, it’s not like the EOL for win10 is that close, seems to be October 14, 2025, so there’s still plenty of time.
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.
This is just not true at all. This level of configuration is in no way required for having a good usable system. Things are as hard as they are plus how hard you make them.
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.
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.
Try a beginnerfriendly distro like mint first, instead of directly using a distro mainly used by advanced users.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
I had a similar issue. I actually wrote myself a text document listing out all of the programs I generally use post-install and any additional setup I did, so that way whenever I am setting up a new system I can quickly refer back to it and save myself a lot of time over doing one-off installs as I run into them.
Ngl that kinda sounds like Nix with extra steps.
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…
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.
Welcome! Coming from Windows myself, I made the jump to Manjaro (It has certain issues and I do not recommend it), then to Arch less than a year after. I have been on Arch full time for around 2 years now. After the initial setup, I have found Arch to be pretty low-maintenance and no harder to maintain than any other distro, hardly requiring more than the occasional
yay -Syu --noconfirmin the command line to update things. As someone with less computer knowledge than an IT professional, I think Arch’s reputation for being difficult is overblown IMO, and I suspect mostly due to intimidation from the more involved setup process prior to the availability of the install script.I don’t know if you have any familiarity with Linux already from your work, but regardless of what distro you go with, I would go into it with a mindset that you are learning a new skill. Some things are simply done differently in Linux than Windows and will require getting used to, such as how drives work using mounting points rather than drive letters.
Realistically, setting things up for the first time often requires additional steps and may not “just work,” but when using my laptop and gaming desktop from day to day, it works just like any other OS. Gaming has been great for me generally, and the work Valve has done to improve game compatibility on Linux has been spectacular. Most Steam games do, in fact, “just work” for me.
In the 2-3 years I have been using Linux, I have rarely had things spontaneously break as many folks seem to worry about, or if I do it is because of companies not supporting their Linux communities, like Discord not pushing out updates on time, or major-event changes like the move to the Wayland graphical stack on KDE 6 which undid some of my desktop customization settings.
Did you find you had a lot of trouble getting new peripherals to work? Things like wireless mouses/headsets?
For most things it has not been an issue. Mice and keyboards have all been plug and play for me. Bluetooth headphones also work just fine for me. Setting up a printer was probably easier to do than in windows. My USB DAC, external hard drives, USB SD card readers, etc. have all been plug and play.
A persistent issue in Linux, however, are gaming peripherals. Anything which requires proprietary vendor software to configure RGB settings may be an issue. OpenRGB detects and allows me to configure the RGB on my Logitech G Pro Wireless Mouse, and I picked up a secondhand Drop CTRL mechanical keyboard which I was also able to reprogram in Linux, but broadly speaking any peripheral which requires dedicated software to program may or may not allow reconfiguration on a case-by-case basis. The last time I had to boot into Windows was to re-bind the key-map on an off-brand USB footswitch, which was a one-time fix and then it has worked fine since then. Similarly, the RGB on the keyboard in my Gigabyte laptop can only be configured from Windows.
On the laptop side, the main things to watch out for will be compatibility issues with fingerprint readers and certain oddball WiFi chipsets, but generally speaking my peripheral experience has been good.
I’m on a distro another commenter suggested, EndeavourOS, and the only time I encountered an issue was a laptop with a less than common fingerprint reader. But it just took 15 minutes of searching to figure out how to see what the exact hardware was, and once I did, I saw someone had a driver for it in the AUR, which is a blessing in general. Everything else has just worked, including my 15 year old printer haha
I personally had a ton of issues getting a cheap Bluetooth adaptor to play nice with my switch pro controller at first, but I recently did a clean install of EndeavourOS and it has since worked quite well.
Other than that, the only hardware issues I have had was Fable Anniversary trying to light my GPU on fire for some reason.
I use a Logitech M510 and it worked perfectly right off the bat. Bluetooth on Linux kinda sucks and wireless headphones took me a good 30 minutes to fix and they worked 90% of the time afterwards and game controllers keep breaking on me. Are you having any issues or are you just worried?
I use an MMO mouse that seems to require the installation of a (admittedly pretty crappy) proprietary software to work on 2.4GHz mode, so that’s the big one. I also have use a DS4 for some games. That’s 90% of it.
Arch is like buying a Lego and putting it together versus an action figure. If you don’t enjoy putting together the Legos then what’s the point?
You should probably go with a ready to use distro
If you’re new to Linux, I would reccomend fedora if you don’t want to have to fuck with anything, but if you work in IT, you will inevitably want to fuck with stuff more, and arch is great for learning
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…
