recently i just finished building a new pc. mostly for gaming since my only exposure to linux is steam os and i heard its uses arch with kde plasma so i try to emulate it as close as i can. however soon i realized how different it is and it requires more setup than i initially thought. i spent a whole day or two setting it up and i read now im responsible on maintaining it, what does it mean? is it just finding and testing drivers? or system update? what is the easiest way to do it? and what i getting myself into?
when i was about to install steam i found a tutorial on it with 3 - 4 pages full of text and was a bit overwhelmed, i decided just set it up using discover with flatpak, the problem is when i was about to find out how to do that i read mostly people really hate when you ask how to enable it in arch, is it really bad? should i just use konsole instead?
im not very tech savvy and at first I was really reluctant to use konsole but since i decided to use arch its inevitable that i have to use konsole and so far its not that bad, yet.
I’m just wondering for the long term, should i just change distro? or i should just powertrough arch and see where it goes.
thank you for your time.
edit:
thank you for all the kind words, support and information everyone. i decided that i’ll stick with arch until it breaks and ill see either i retry arch or try different linux flavors. i never feels so excited about os since i was messing around in win 2000
recently i just finished building a new pc. mostly for gaming since my only exposure to linux is steam os and i heard its uses arch with kde plasma so i try to emulate it as close as i can. however soon i realized how different it is and it requires more setup than i initially thought.
It sounds like you’re thinking of Arch + KDE as similar to building a PC, where if you get the same parts you can hook them up for the same experience.
I think their team chose Arch to build their distro off of because it’s very customizable and made it easy for them to add their configurations, interface layers, hardware optimizations etc. That doesn’t make it the best choice for a beginner unless you want to be thrown into the deep end and spend some time to learn a bunch.
IMO you should look into something like Bazzite or some other atomic Fedora, or OpenSuse, so that you can have a running operating system you can game on. Then you can spend some time learning about Linux with the functioning PC. There are ways to run other Linux distros inside your main one if you want to play with them and learn about them.
Unless you have another machine to use day to day, I find it annoying to be learning with the same machine I need for other things.
It sounds like you’re thinking of Arch + KDE as similar to building a PC, where if you get the same parts you can hook them up for the same experience.
yeah you nailed it.
i think ill keep learning arch and see how far i got, when it inevitably break ill choose later if i want to retry it or just go with bazzite, its a mostly pc for gaming so there isnt much important stuff in it
Sounds good! There’s also !linux4noobs@programming.dev and similar communities to ask questions for all the specific issues you are working on
I think you’re better off with CachyOS than Bazzite to be honest.
It’s Arch-based, comes with an installer with KDE Plasma as default and on top of that is optimized for performance and geared towards gaming.The only reason people are recommending Bazzite
is because CachyOS is only a year old, while Bazzite is two years old,
unless someone can prove me otherwise.
In any case Bazzite is RHEL-based, so it won’t have the AUR or pacman,
which are the two things that set Arch-based Operating Systems apart from the rest of the pack.
AUR and pacman are superior to all other repositories and package managers.
Arch has a bit of a steeper learning curve. Ubuntu is probably the most “mainstream”, but I prefer Mint (based on Ubuntu) for some user-friendly changes. PopOS (already based on Ubuntu) is also supposed to be a bit more gaming centric if you’ve got an Nvidia card.
I’ve got an AMD kit in my main machine and Nvidia/Intel in my laptop and both work fine with most Steam games using Proton.
If you’re willing to learn Arch it really isn’t that difficult. I wouldn’t reccommend it to a noob but seeing as you’re already using it why not give it a try? I wouldn’t reccommend the Steam flatpak as Valve reccommends against it and it doesn’t work as well. Feel free to DM for advice from someone who uses it daily.
I second this. The initial setup is the hard part. Give it a couple days. The arch wiki is the best resource in the whole Linux ecosystem in my opinion. If that’s the long manual you were looking at for installing steam, know that 90% of it is info on strange edge cases and all a typical user will need to do is
sudo pacman -Syuthensudo pacman -S steam(I forgot you have to enable the multilib repository if you haven’t already. You seem smart, you’ll find the info in the wiki)A couple times a year or so something will break after an update. When that happens
- Google if anyone else has posted your exact problem
- See if chatgpt knows anything
- Humbly post in the arch user forum
One of those will solve it. Good luck!
WHOA. Please be VERY HESITANT to use anything ChatGPT outputs. Sanity check any commands it gives you from other places first.
i see. thank you for the info. i dont exactly remember if i have enabled multilib, it does sound familiar. maybe i alr enabled it when i tried a bunch of random things…
thank you for the kind offer. ill try to use arch as long as possible. i hope i am a fast learner because I’m a bit lazy to setup a new distro and reconfig everything again
I’m the laziest fuck there is man. You’re in good company lol.
Uninstall Arch and install Linux Mint. Give yourself that gift. It’d still be easier than installing Arch Linux, and you’ll be way more comfortable most of the time in the long term. It’s not that you can’t use Arch, but their approach is not beginner-friendly.
You haven’t provided a lot of detail on what your current setup looks like. If you use a gaming-focused distro like Cachy or Bazzite they should essentially work “out of the box.” Bazzite is also very difficult to break since the immutability makes for very effective guard rails for new users.
If you went with Arch right off the bat, you did take on quite a lot for a new user, but - and I do genuinely mean this - there is no better way to learn the ins and outs of Linux than jumping into the Arch deep end. Even if you choose to switch to a lower-maintenance distro, your effort with Arch is never wasted.
Want a very low maintenance gaming distro with almost no setup? Bazzite.
Want a more hands-on gaming centric distro like SteamOS? CachyOS.
Want a more stable all-around distro that also works great for gaming? Fedora.Avoid Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu. You will see Mint recommended often, but I personally only recommend it for older hardware that you are trying to revitalize. There are better options.
A new version of Debian just released, and there is no more rock solid distro than Debian. Add KDE Plasma and you will have a very low maintenance, pleasantly familiar, extremely reliable system.
If your only exposure is steamos bazzite might be easier for you
You are 90% of the way there.
Just keep your system up to date (update packages weekly maybe) and you will be fine. The system mostly manages itself.
I recommend installing both the current kernel and an LTS kernel. If you ever have a problem with a driver or a filesystem or something after an update, just boot into LTS and you are back up and running.
and i read now im responsible on maintaining it, what does it mean? is it just finding and testing drivers? or system update? what is the easiest way to do it? and what i getting myself into?
Where did you see this? What was the context? I ask because you could say the same thing about any PC you own. It’s not like Microsoft is gonna answer your distress call if Windows breaks unless you’re paying for support.
truthfully? memes. i always saw people memeing on how small thing can break linux and how barebones it is and after using the actual arch it just dawned on me.
Is Arch Linux a stable distribution? Will I get frequent breakage?
It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community, help is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is truly a ‘do-it-yourself’ distribution; complaints of breakage are misguided and unproductive, since upstream changes are not the responsibility of Arch devs.
It does not explicitly say “maintain” but it has a similar vibe to it.
Arch is very high-maintenance. Try Debian 13, it just came out this week. Ubuntu is okay but it has a lot of crapware compared to Debian. If your Wi-Fi and GPU work on Debian you do not need Ubuntu.
I’m an experienced Linux desktop user of about 15 years and I switched from Arch to Debian and I don’t miss Arch. If you need bleeding-edge software you can use a combo of Nix, language package managers, and building from source. Arch doesn’t add much plus I frequently ran the wrong pacman command and soft-locked myself out of the OS. Debian doesn’t do that to me.
i read now im responsible on maintaining it, what does it mean?
sudo pacman -Syu- do this about once every couple of days to make sure your packages are up-to-date
i can’t think of anything else i have to do as part of maintaining my system outside of backupsYes, you’re screwed.
You’re mega extra screwed.
They know where you live.
They’re coming for you.
Hide.
🙈
Once your computer’s working to your satisfaction, pretty much all you’ll need to do is alias
sudo packman -Syuand try to remember to run that every so often. The arch Linux wiki is second to none, and if you stick with the distro you should find it all feels very familiar in no time.🤞🏿 I just found out about ricing. so satisfactory is probably an illusive state…
oh my, thank you
It’s the best. I put it on my Windows machines too. It even updates WSL as it does it’s thing.
I don’t know exactly what u are talking about steam cause it just sudo pacman -Syu steam and that it .everything else if u have modern nvidia then do sudo pacman -Syu nvidia-dkms if amd setup then u will no need anything else .In the end as for beginner try CachyOS if u the most close experience to vanilla arch .this guys just do some performance tweaks while staying maximum vanilla as possible about arch linux
i mixed wiki as a tutorial step by step on how to install steam on linuk it seems
In my experience of maintaining Arch, it’s as simple as:
-Keep your packages up to date -Keep your mirrorlist up to date -install a package called “pacdiff” and run it after every update (certain config files need to be manually replaced/updated after system updates, pacdiff handles this for you. This actually includes your mirrorlist).
Anything else really just boils down to individual issues with packages which could happen on any distro, or really and OS in general. As another user said, if you got Arch installed as a newer Linux user, you’re already doing well.
