I’ve been using PopOS for a few months now, and I’m interested in Arch, but I’m worried about whether or not I have enough experience to do that successfully. Also, I have an Nvidia GPU until I start a new build in the next year or so. I don’t know if that’ll be a problem in Arch. It was a major issue with Fedora for me.
I’m willing to learn the terminal, but right now I’m still pretty dependent on tutorials to do more than basic things, like installing software. Most of those are catered to Ubuntu-based distros, so I’m concerned I won’t have the luxury of guides to more complex terminal stuff.
Am I overthinking this? Or should I wait longer (maybe even until I build a new PC)?
How difficult is the transition from Ubuntu-based to Arch?
How to search for a package:
sudo pacman -Ss packagename
How to install a package:
sudo pacman -S packagename
How to update:
sudo pacman -Syu
How to remove a package:
sudo pacman -Rcns packagename
How to clean old packages:
sudo pacman -Sc --noconfirm
Arch linux installer (official):
archinstall
…and that is (pretty much) all you need to learn to use Arch linux in an acceptable fashion. Now go ahead and give it a spin – you’ll love it.
Or just use
yay
with EndeavourOS.yay is also preinstalled on Endeavour; its main sells are fuzzy search, bundling AUR and treating just “yay” as update and upgrade everything and "yay " as fuzzy search for that package and you can select items to install. You still have to learn the rest of the commands though.
Yes, let me reiterate for OP that
archinstall
is how you want to start your arch setup. The tutorial will guide you down the manual path to setup which is a lot more laborious and doesn’t always work the way you hope. The built-in script will do all of the manual setup tasks for you.