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.
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!
You’re probably better off with Fedora, Mint, or Bazzite to be honest
Seconding Bazzite, it’s great for gaming.
sudo pacman - SyuAnd done., usually. Lol
Arch Linux’s whole claim to fame is Some Assembly Required. Go with something like Mint or Fedora (the latter of which is available with the KDE desktop, source: am typing this on a gaming computer running Fedora KDE) and they’re much more complete out of the box.
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.Welcome to Linux where you maintain your own os… You are literally the owner of this ship you want to destroy your system to ahead you want to do whatever cause windows pissed you off go ahead… evening can be fixed usually… try all the distros till you like some and use those.
How does it feel to be in control and not have to listen to the Man ?
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.
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 your only exposure is steamos bazzite might be easier for you
if you’re a first timer and already got arch with kde set up you’re pretty fucking tech savvy ngl
But that doesn’t mean it’s a good place to start.
Try Linux Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora. Any of these will be easier than Arch and offer point and click installation for steam, drivers, and just about anything else.
When you get some more experience, instead of arch you can try endeavourOS. it’s basically arch with good defaults and has a fantastic KDE implementation.
Arch has easier points and click install then any of those with things like cachy.
The whole arch is hard thing is a wildly out of date common wisdom. If your using a pre built distro.
I’d argue that beyond surface-level stuff, the Debian-based distros have a steeper learning curve. PPA’s, packages with versions in the name of the package,
.debs that don’t update with the rest of the system, the list goes on. No shade to anyone who is happy with Ubuntu or Mint, but I too started on Ubuntu and didn’t find it intuitive enough to stick around. OP is talking about avoiding the terminal, “just use Debian” is not even a solution to that.
Mint or fedora. Skip Ubuntu. Updates break things too much. If you got mint I’d recommend LMDE over Ubuntu mint. For the same reason so long as your not on brand new hardware. Mint is honestly the easiest way to go. Fedora being second. Bazzite if you want to have a steam OS like experience.
I have a 70 year old father running Ubuntu on a laptop without issue for a couple years now. Everyone’s mileage may vary.
Poor OP probably has no idea what to do now.
For gaming focused PC I’d look at Bazzite. OP wants it to be like the Steam Deck, it’s just perfect for that.
I almost always advise against atomic distros for noobs. They are extremely limiting, add multiple complications to otherwise simple tasks, and the padded cell of immutability means you can’t really fuck around and learn how traditional Linux systems work.
I’m usually distro agnostic and just happy to see people use whatever Linux they like, but immutables have issues.
This is what I ran into when I first decided to try a linux system desktop after ten years. I wasn’t familiar with the new distros around these days, so decided to try Bazzite first. Immediately ran into a driver issue that was apparently not fixable until the (already released) fix made its way into their official repo or something.
Shelved that and gave CachyOS a try (made more sense anyway since I used arch in college and had a steam deck since day 1), and it’s been my daily driver for 6 months now.
Agreed.
CachyOS has all of the gaming stuff (can be just point and click with their welcome popup/installer), is arch based so there’s a ton of well made documentation.
Download yay and off to the races
I’ve been wanting to try Cachy, but my experience with Endeavour has been so good for so long that I’m not even feeling distro-hoppy. I admire Cachy from afar.
I used bazzite and I ran into the exact issues you described above. It worked, and it worked well, but anything extra that I wanted to do required jumping through a shit load of hoops and bouncing around between bazzite forums, fedora forums, and universal blue forums to maybe not even arrive at a reliable work around.
It was extremely valuable because I had to learn a lot, but it just wasn’t nearly as seamless as cachy.
Bazzite will play steam games right off the rip and it will do it well, and is an easy install. Beyond that it can get harry if you’re not just using flatpacks.
A lot of people will say “just use distrobox” if your solution to make something work in this OS is to download and use another OS, why wouldn’t I just start there with the other OS?
Yeah, this is exactly the point I was trying to make. I want a system that is simple and straightforward, running primarily native packages and a small handful of flatpaks. I don’t want or need to emulate other distros because my own distro has its wings clipped.
You can do gaining in literally any distro. My pop install runs steam just fine.
So OP should start over? Just offering your unnecessary opinion? (Remember they read this) Go with the compliment and move on
Yes start over.
Ubuntu, Mint, Pop_OS, Fedora.
Save your important files on a separate drive, install your new beginner friendly OS of choice, and don’t be afraid to break it. A reinstall from a USB stick takes like 15 minutes, and with your important files stored separately you don’t have to think twice about wiping the system and starting over.
OP should follow their chosen path and we should commend them for their efforts and support their choices rather than tell them they did it wrong and start over according to our opinions.
Op was asking for advice. You have different advice? Give it. I don’t care what you think of my advice.
I’m comfortable with tech but clueless with Linux. What does all this mean?!
But seriously, why would you want endeavorOS instead of sometbing youre saying is more simple, like Mint?
Increased flexibility and control, some things I like to do work better in an arch based system than a Fedora based system. One of my biggest reasons, is that the tiling window manager I use is better supported on Arch and makes use of many AUR packages. Using the AUR and building from source can be risky if you don’t know what you’re doing.
That fact that you don’t know what any of this means is why you should start with a more beginner friendly distro. You’ll learn, and as your knowledge grows you’ll have a much clearer understanding of your needs in a distro.
Imagine it’s like racing. If you start in a GT3 car pushing 900 horsepower as a beginner you’ll probably die. Which is why most start with karting or racing Miatas. Keep it simple and build your skill set and knowledge as you go.
I appreciate the reply.
Im definitely going to start beginner friendly. I’m just trying to get a handle on what the differences tangiby mean ahead of it. Every explanation i find seems to be. “You do more, you can customize more, it’s more powerful, or only losers dont use the hardest thing possible”. Ok, the last one was a joke, kind of.
The biggest difference? Arch forces you to the terminal more. The easier distros come pre packaged with GUI tools for things like graphics driver selection, adding and removing repositories, installing and removing software, etc.
Vanilla arch doesn’t come with any of that. EndeavourOS, the more fleshed out Arch based distro I use doesn’t either. You could use Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, or Fedora, without ever needing to see the command line. You CAN use it, and should from time to time to start learning, but Arch throws you right into the deep end of the pool of using the command line for almost everything you do.
Some of these people will likely try to say “well actually there are GUI frontends for pacman” or whatever, it’s not the same as using Mint where graphical tools that are easy to use are baked into the system.
lmao, im not sure about that. i just followed a couple of tutorials on youtube on how to do it
Tech savvy enough. I do my damnedest to find a YT tutorial or forum post before I throw the towel in and make a help request somewhere. Like I literally will go hours before I finally concede and realize I can’t do something myself, and I act like my honor is forever lost whenever I go to Fedora forums in defeat. There are many out there who won’t even do that at the bare minimum, so you’re doing great. We’re doing great.
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.
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.
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.
i knew a fair amount about linux cli since ive used ubuntu and debian for servers for like 15 years so i was someone knowledgeable but when i decided to wipe away windows on my desktops i picked linuz mint because it was ubuntu based but also it was recommended for beginners. for the most part it works great, i can use steam and heroic. i cant get warcraft classic working but i just need to dig in more.
the one problem i had was when i first started and it wouldnt boot up but i just command line restored using timeshift and it fixed it and i havent had a problem since.
i havent once had issues with drivers or anything. i even installed it on an old computer for my dads church who mostly use it for powerpoint (now libreoffice) and projecting. they know nothing about computers and theyve been fine. i do want to enable auto updates for them though so they dont have to do that.
As a completely new user who’s self-described as “not very tech savvy”, Arch is probably a terrible idea, and you should switch distros.
I really like Debian, but something like Linux Mint or Fedora might be wiser for you; all three hold your hand more, which would be very important in your case. Fedora and Debian specifically are designed to work well with KDE, although Fedora will have newer versions.
You certainly seem willing to learn (you got through the Arch install process), and I think you still have a great opportunity to enjoy Linux, but considering you’re calling the terminal emulator “Konsole”, your self-description is probably apt. FYI Konsole is just one application to access the terminal, kind of like how Firefox and Chrome are both web browsers, but you don’t use “Chrome” to refer to web browsers.
anything that have good implementation of kde is worth a look for me. i love kde.
thank you for your info
Go with Bazzite, it tries to mimic SteamOS out of the box. Very easy install/setup process (easier than windows).
Bazzite is Fedora Kinoite with some extra stuff, Kinoite might be better for a desktop setup but either one is totally useable for gaming and desktop so don’t overthink it.
