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?
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 The only complaint was that the packages I used were pretty out of date.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