Arch isn’t a bad choice for a new Linux user who was a power user on Windows. You get to actually know what’s installed on your system which can really help during the inevitable troubleshooting, though it’s definitely a trial by fire when it comes to manual install and setting up the environment.
Recommending Gentoo to a new user though is a war crime.
99% of distro hoppers quit before finding the perfect distro
It’s not the biggest issue I managed to fix, but it was definitely the hardest to figure out a fix for:
Whenever I would boot up any game on my Linux machine I would have microstutters ever so often, and it was frequent and lengthy enough to be very annoying, and thus started my 2 month long quest to figure out what was going wrong.
To cut a long story short, the compositor I was using had suddenly decided to do a breaking update and change the names of the backends they were using.
Yeah I used it as well, but I was missing a couple of dependencies and realized that I have to move the loadorder files around in order for mods to be loaded. Was pretty annoying but it worked in the end.
me, trying to setup Skyrim mods to play Skyrim CO-OP with friends and constantly failing to setup a mod manager:
I know this is quite unprompted, but did you install correct video drivers? You gotta install proprietary nvidia drivers and its 32-bit libraries instead of nouveau
but NASA isn’t commie, they are glorious capitalists 💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪
there’s no way they use commie software
My very first distro was Manjaro actually - I tried it twice but there would always be some graphics related issue I would encounter that I couldn’t troubleshoot as a beginner (even though I’d spend a week looking for a solution on forums), and I’d move back to Windows. Finally getting the courage to try out Arch which was considered the “big scary meme distro” was what made me stay with Linux.
The biggest thing for me was that I actually knew what was installed on my system and what the function most of the major programs served (things like xorg, multilib graphics drivers, pipewire/pulseaudio, desktop environments/window managers), so whenever I encountered an issue or wanted to customize something, I would sort of know where to start looking.
Of course, all this depends on the person - not all power users are the same. For me, arch worked best but someone else might gravitate towards fedora, debian or whatever else and their way of doing things.