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first time using linux, how screwed am I?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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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The whole arch is hard thing is a wildly out of date common wisdom.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.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.
Assuming you're referring to Fedora Atomic, your statement is extremely exaggerated. Out of the top of my head, the current limitations are iffy akmods and UKI/systemd-boot. The latter of which is being worked on currently and might arrive rather sooner than later. Neither of which I'd assume 95% of Linux users ever engage with anyways...
I feel like you don't know what you're talking about. Please be explicit; which tasks are made more complicated on Fedora Atomic?
It's true that you aren't supposed to "fuck" around (most of)
/usrduring runtime. Furthermore, I agree that the existing ways to circumvent/bypass this leave much to be desired. But, again, most peeps use perfectly fine systems without ever feeling the need to tinker with/usr... And if you absolutely must..., well..., Fedora Atomic doesn't actually stop you. It just wants you to adhere to its ways of achieving it. Making it more of a paradigm shift, rather than outright limiting the user.If your criticism basically boils down to "I can't make use of my preconceived notion on how Linux works.", then "Yes."; that's exactly the point. Granted, it wouldn't hurt if Fedora Atomic allowed conventional methods to continue working. But as it's currently in the middle of a architectural shift (going from
rpm-ostreetobootc), I'd argue they've got more important things to work on.I would say the greatest limitation would be repos and your ability to build whatever software you want from source. Having access to the AUR allows me access to much wider array of software. Can you run Hyprland and all of its companions like hyprlock, hyprpaper, etc on bazzite? That’s the setup I prefer, and I’m fairly certain it’s not possible in a Fedora based immutable system.
I don’t want or need guardrails to keep my system running correctly. If you do, or just enjoy the stability, cool. I’m just glad you’re not running windows. I don’t think bazzite is bad. I just don’t think it should be the go to for welcoming newcomers.
Thank you for the quick answer and for providing clarifications!
What do you mean? What's wrong with Fedora's repos? Apologies if I sound obtuse*.
There's nothing preventing you from doing this within a container created by Toolbx/Distrobox. I can attest to this. You can even build it natively. While I haven't personally engaged in building it natively, I can't imagine it would cause any problems. But please correct me if your experience (or otherwise) is different.
Fam, break your leg. Nothing is stopping you; someone else has already done just that. And you can just piggy-back of their effort. In case you'd like to see other (successful) attempts at making Hyprland work on Fedora Atomic: consider taking a look at wayblue and hyprland-atomic.
Huh. Well, today I learned.
You do sound obtuse, but thanks for the education.
I still think bazzite is the wrong suggestion for newcomers, and I don’t care if you like my opinion.
~~Hehe :P . Please feel free to clarify what you meant with the repos being limiting (or something). I'm genuinely interested to know.~~ See Edit down below
It's your absolute prerogative to believe/think/state whatever you wish. However, I don't think you've yet made a convincingly compelling case. You absolutely don't have to, but if you've got more to say on the subject matter, then please do so for the sake of (potentially) enlightening others.
Good.., I suppose. Neither should you care anyways 😜.
Edit: I only now noticed that you had edited your previous post. My apologies.
Agreed. I also occasionally access stuff from there through my dedicated Arch distrobox. I occasionally make use of my Ubuntu distrobox, or Alpine distrobox as well. Thanks to Distrobox (and similar technologies), it has become an absolutely glorious experience to not be limited by the distro's repos. Instead, I can make use of whatever repos are out there. Granted; Distrobox is not exclusive to Fedora Atomic, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another distro on which it works as well as it does on uBlue's offerings.
Honestly it sounds like you’ve mastered a completely new kind of operating system, based on Linux but evolving in its own direction, and there’s probably only a handful of people using it at that level. It’s pretty cool to learn more about, so I appreciate what you’ve had to say.
I already know and love traditional Linux and don’t see a compelling reason to change, and as I’ve repeated, I don’t think it’s the way to point a newcomer.
Lemmy isn’t a courtroom sweaty, chill out.
FWIW, I have edited my previous comment.
Anyhow, if you wish to disengage, then I'd like to wish you a great day. If not, then I'm (patiently) awaiting your return 🙂.
Honestly it sounds like you’ve mastered a completely new kind of operating system, based on Linux but evolving in its own direction, and there’s probably only a handful of people using it at that level. It’s pretty cool to learn more about, so I appreciate what you’ve had to say.
I already know and love traditional Linux and don’t see a compelling reason to change, and as I’ve repeated, I don’t think it’s the way to point a newcomer.
Thanks for the compliment 😅. I do think there's some truth in it being a new kind of Linux-based OS. But it's not as big of a departure like say NixOS. Heck, I'd argue it's grounded within a relatively basic premise: What's the minimal amount of effort required to make our current Linux systems attain desirable qualities like being reprovisionable and anti-hysteresis? The whole
bootc-shebang is just leveraging existing container technologies (I'm sure you're familiar with Docker) to the Linux you run on your computer.If we would (perhaps arbitrarily) choose for "that level" to be "crazy enough to create and run their own image"^[As that's most likely my biggest Fedora Atomic achievement.], then it's true that our numbers are probably only in the order of hundreds. Though, the knowledge required to build your own image is (almost) equivalent to the knowledge one ought to have to create their own OCI image; you know, the very same used for Docker, the container technology that represents a billion dollar industry.
I appreciate it. I like conversing with you as well 😊!
That's perfectly valid.
Please allow me to explain why I differ on this:
The beginner has no preconceived notion on how Linux is 'supposed' to work. As such, they will adapt to whatever you throw at it. Be it Mint, Arch or Fedora Atomic. Heck, it's undeniable that out of these, Fedora Atomic works the closest like their phone. Which has undoubtedly become the most recognizable OS for your average Joe.
FYI, Fedora Silverblue was my foray into Linux. The first one or two weeks definitely gave me a hard time, but that was over three years ago. If I was able to survive in such a 'hostile' environment, then newcomers should have absolutely no trouble getting onboard with the introduction of Bazzite (and the other uBlue images).
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
Cachy is preloaded with Paru. Is yay the better option?
I’ve only used yay but afaik paru is very similar and well put together.
To be frank, I haven't used paru. I'm relatively new to arch but I've had nothing but good experiences with yay
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.
Bazzite's not Arxh based though if thats the OPs.intent?
I have no idea what the OP is trying to achieve though. I just use LMDE with steam
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.
Mint is a fine Distro, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that wants to do gaming right now either. None of the first class DEs are running on Wayland yet, which means that most monitor features of the last decade are not or badly supported.
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.
I recently tried Fedora for the first time last week... and was pleasantly surprised! Out of these 3, I feel like Fedora looks the nicest. Fedora Workstation's installer is a little nicer than Ubuntu's. I also think the update screen during reboot is a nice touch.
Yeah, I stuck with Fedora Gnome for at least a year. It had its limitations for me, so I’m currently on EndeavourOS with Hyprland, but Fedora will always have a place in my heart.
if i may ask, what kind of limitation that makes you switch?
The specific set of baseline dot files I use as a template for my Hyprland setup don’t seem to play nicely with Fedora. I love Fedora, but some of my toys aren’t easily compatible with it.
im not sure if my machine will need that level of stuff for my usage nor my tech level that high to require something like that. so its nice to know that i will not lose much if i change distro with a more streamlined one.
after lots of input i decide to just play with arch until it breaks then switch to bazzite.
thank you for your input
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.