felsiq

Just a note on windows “having” this: a significant amount of hardware (wifi adapters, nvme drives, a lot of the shit in a Surface laptop, etc) don’t have native windows support and require command line usage and/or hunting for third party drivers to even get windows installed. A user installing an OS on a machine with that sort of hardware would have a much easier time on Linux - it’s only manufacturers preinstalling windows and the needed drivers that give the impression it’s easier on windows. When the user has to wipe / reinstall their OS it’s a much more apples to apples comparison.

I’m not saying this to imply Linux doesn’t need to get better, because of course that’d be great, but I see this comparison a lot and it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s a bit of an unfair one even if it’s a reasonable standard to hold an OS to.

I think you can definitely survive it as a beginner if you’re both patient and happy to learn about your OS, but most people recommend trying another distro first so you don’t have to learn everything up front all at once and that’s good advice imo. Even if you’re happy to learn everything thru the wiki and want to jump into the deep end, I’d probably recommend checking out other distros on distrosea first just so you have an idea of what’s out there and what you like/dislike.

You’ll have to read about and then make a choice for every component of your system, from the filesystem to the kernel to all your user space programs and DE, so you’ll make better choices if you’ve seen some of the options in action imo.

I should also mention I’ve heard the archinstall script trivializes installing arch so if you want an easy way in you could use that - id probably keep this in mind or better, put your arch iso on ventoy along with a second choice of distro in case you get overwhelmed and just want your computer functional again.

Good luck tho, if you choose to do it I hope you have as much fun as I did! Don’t be afraid to ask questions on whichever of the Linux communities are relevant, but definitely expect a lot of “just use mint” answers if you say you’re installing arch as a new Linux user lol.

Not the same person, but my updates take like 30s (if I don’t go looking at what changed) and happen whenever I want. We’re not talking windows updates here, just sudo pacman -Syu, seeing the list of what’s changing (etc firefox went up a version? Cool), and then saying “sure” if it looks good to me. Don’t even need to restart all the time, although I tend to do updates before turning my pc off anyway so I nearly always do.

Packages tend to use the latest stable version of their software, unless you choose a beta branch instead, so if anything I think I’ve run into less broken software than on Debian-based distros because you don’t get bugs that were fixed a week ago but haven’t made it into the official apt repository version yet. If there is a bug, you can just not upgrade that package if you know about it in advance or just downgrade it until they release a fix (I’ve never had to do this but iirc you can pin a version in pacman).

Not suggesting to jump ship if you’re happy with your current distro, but arch is a great learning experience to set up and once you have a good system running it’s absolutely rock solid. Just don’t expect to install it in fifteen minutes like other distros, if you want a good install you have to do all the reading yourself (arch wiki is priceless) to make informed choices because you’re entirely responsible for piecing together your own OS.

Wow you’re more patient than I am, if you type on your phone here a lot lmao. Thanks for the answers!

You make a good point about systemd being monolithic, and I hate to add to your replies fully ignoring it to only talk about the thorn… but I gotta admit I’m really curious how you type it.

I’m guessing you’re not using text replacement and that you’re typing it instead, but do you have it bound to a key combo, replacing a little-used character, etc? Do you use the same method on mobile, if you also use the thorn there? If you type like this everywhere, are you concerned about your distinct typing patterns making you easy to dox?

Sorry to hit you with a bunch of questions unrelated to your actual comment, I don’t have strong opinions on systemd so don’t have much to contribute there lol