I’ve been daily driving arch Linux as my main distro for quite a while now, as a replacement for windows 11 (I refuse to use windows 11 for longer than it takes to download a Linux iso and format it into a usb). Installing it on my laptop wasnt my first time ever using it, but it was my first time really getting into any Linux distro beyond the Arch install that I did on a VM on my old desktop forever ago.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that arch is like super hard, but honestly after actually learning it I disagree. I think its difficulty is overstated. Of course it took getting used to, and I definitely had problems, but once I changed my outlook on how to handle problems (for one reading the wiki instead of going on forums) I found solutions much faster, and within a week of using it, I was already using the terminal for most tasks, to the point of it probably being excessive (for example when I tried hyprland I would launch programs that I didn’t have hot keys for with “example & disown ; exit”, instead of just using dmenu which I did have installed.
While browsing forums for solutions before my whole shift in how I approach problems, I noticed people being quite rude to beginners, telling them to run commands that would brick their installs (thank god I didn’t fall for that) and outright telling people to give up on Arch just because people would ask beginner questions on forums. I understand how it can be annoying to have to listen to the same beginner questions all the time, but I think we should just be POLITELY telling people to use the wiki and maybe some some wiki page related to their problem, instead of just being douchebags. It’s a bad mindset to treat beginners like that because we all started somewhere.
Ultimately while Arch does have a great community there are a couple of bad eggs in there. I also think the overhyping of how difficult arch is and how some people actually do think they are unironicaly better than the ubuntnoobs is a very bad thing, and I have seen it dissuade people I know who I think would love arch from even trying it.
I tried several windows managers, such as XFCE, KDE Plasma, Gnome, i3, and Hyprland. I think KDE looks nice and all but it uses too many system resources compared to XFCE to justify it for me (I don’t actually have resource problems but it bothers the optimiser in me), Gnome feels like a shitty tablet to me, i3 was great and I really enjoyed how lightweight and efficient it was to use (until I broke my config file), hyprland was heavenly to use (until I broke that Config file too) despite my slight annoyance over how it uses more resources than i3 (which makes sense all things considered). Right now I’m using XFCE as my main which I really enjoy. I got it looking very nice looking and it runs very well on my computer. I actually do prefer the tiling windows managers so I think I will experiment more with Hyprland and i3 before I fully settle on that.
As for other Distros, I did try out others after the fact on other computers. I installed mint on a laptop I had bought for my little sister, and honestly going from arch to having to use that to troubleshoot it for her, I found it to be inferior from the perspective of my personal tastes. When I experimented more with it on my old desktop, I found it to be bloated and it had a lot of programs I just didn’t need. I had the same issue with Ubuntu. I also tried putting Debian on my old desktop which so far I quite like much more than Ubuntu and Mint. I still prefer arch though as I think it has many advantages to Debian such as Pacman, the AUR, the amazing wiki, it’s fast updates, and the real sense I get that I’m building my system from the ground up. So I think I will continue to stick with arch as my main distro.
Would I reccomend arch to other Linux noobs as their first distro? Absolutely yes, but only if you are a specific type of person. If you just hate how bad Microsoft is , how bad windows 11 is, and you’re just looking for a simple out of the box alternative that works well, I would say use like Ubuntu or mint or something. But if you are a person who really likes technology, who wants to get good with computers, who really wants to understand linux, who enjoys tinkering, who enjoys solving problems (which the amount of problems arch has is overstated anyway), then I would say absolutely use arch as your first distro, but please read the wiki before you go to stack exchange or something lol. As a side note, I would discourage using an install script because I think that the install process for arch is a tutorial that will teach you a lot of skills and habits that will prepare you to handle problems you might have while using arch.
With that, thanks for reading my long rant, what do you all think?
Edit: reworded some things, improved grammar and sentence structure