You Guys Were Right About Arch Linux

Everywhere online, people are telling me to install Arch. Why are you all so obsessed with this distro? It looks like something Neo uses. But after the past couple of months trying Linux, I think I might be ready for it. But it's not what you're thinking. Hold your horses. Apparently, there's an easier version of Arch for beginners called Endeavor OS. So, I'm giving in. But what I need to know is, is it really worth it? Is the Arch experience really as great as everyone says it is? Will this distro change my life once I learn how to use it? Or are Arch users just in it for the love of the game? Like playing Dark Souls. You like torturing yourself. So, I've been using Linux for a couple months now with distros like Mint and Fedora, which are the ultra accessible ones where you never need to touch that scary command line. Now, Arch is hailed by its users as an endgame distro. A distro to end the long and arduous distro hopping journey that any Linux beginner must take. Now, you'd think that you can just install something like Mint and be done with it. That's impossible. All of us are stricken with a sickness of hopping from one distro to another, to another, until we decide to commit to the perfect one. And for many, it's this one. Now, I know what some of you might be thinking. But keyboard lady, you already used Arch with Omarchi. Maybe. Omarchi is a distro that uses a combination of Arch plus HyperLan, but it also comes with a bunch of pre-installed software. And that makes it easy to use, just like Mint and Fedora. So sure, Omarchi uses Arch in its name, but it's not truly Arch. You don't have to build it from the ground up. And after my experience with Omarchi, the questions about Arch still haunt me. No matter how many videos I watch or forum posts I read, everyone has a different way of viewing Arch and what it means to use Arch. Last time I tried, I couldn't even pass the install. It's embarrassing, I know. So this time, we're leveling up the Linux experience by a single notch with Endeavor OS. Apparently, it is just Arch, but with an installer instead of doing everything for yourself in the command line. Don't get me wrong, I'm not afraid of the command line, but sometimes it's nice not needing it. But before I actually install it, there's one big decision that has to be made. Which laptop do I install it on? This thing started the whole Linux journey because it was bad. 2021 Dell XPS. We meet again, my friendesses. So this time, I'm going to the Endeavor OS website and the first thing that hit me was how outdated it looks. Look at these buttons! It looks like a college freshman made this thing in their basement and they're obsessed with space. But honestly, it's nice that they're going for a cohesive theme rather than looking ultra minimalist and modern like Zorin's website. You've got a list of continents followed by a list of countries and there's North America right at the bottom with three download links. Now underneath that, there's instructions on how to check that your ISO is legit. But it's not really beginner friendly. So I downloaded the 3 gigabyte file and then it was time to flash the drive. I'm playing it cool and just straight to flashing the ISO. But this time, I also wanted to try something different. Ventoy. Apparently, it's the perfect thing for distro hoppers. It lets you just drag and drop whatever ISOs you want onto your USB drive and then boot into them from the menu. So convenient! So with my little boot drive in tow, I stuck it into my laptop via the USB-C side since this laptop only has two USB-C ports and now it was time for the magic to happen. Or lack thereof since for some reason, when I entered the Ventoy menu to select the Endeavor ISO, it just kept loading back into the main screen over and over again. Even after turning off secure boot, I got nothing! So that was a short-lived adventure. I'll look for another alternative next time. Anyway, I flashed the USB like a normal person, plugged it into the laptop and it booted directly into a live environment. A little bit different than the usual way of doing things which is going straight to install into the menu but that's probably for the best. Trust me, you need to boot into the live environment. That's how you end up with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi cards not working. Another smart thing to do would be to follow a guide but I don't need that. I've done this a million times. How bad could it be? First off, why is everything teeny tiny hand size? Is it actually that small or am I just getting old? It looks pretty modern compared to its outdated website. Probably because it's using everyone's favorite KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. I've got a taskbar, a start button, a file manager. Pretty much everything is where it should be and I can get into the Wi-Fi with my keyboard and mouse like normal. Now Marchie tried to gate keep me from my own Wi-Fi last time so I'd say we're off to a pretty good start. If you're curious about distro hopping but you don't have another device to try Linux on, you can try this with a practical option called a VPS. A VPS, also known as a virtual private server, is an environment you can set up, test new distros on all without needing to actually own a second PC but don't worry, I'll show you how to set it today with today's sponsor Hostinger. You just add the plan to your cart and when you're checking out, make sure you use my code SWITCHANDCLICK that gets you 10% off. I'm using Hostinger's KVM2 plan here. You get 8GB of RAM, 100GB of NVMe space and 8TB of bandwidth. So this behaves like a real machine, not a slow shared environment. This is the fun part, you get to choose your distro. Hostinger gives you a ton of options between Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Linux, Kali and more. I'll choose Fedora, one of my favorites, just to show you how easy it is to set up and if you're newer to this and you just don't want to remember every command, Hostinger also has an AI assistant called Kodi built in. You can ask it questions to help manage the server, handle common tasks or troubleshoot things, which is surprisingly useful when you're still learning. Between full root access, a built-in security like DDoS protection and automatic backups, it's a really low stress way to experiment with Linux. If you want to try this out yourself, check it out at hostinger.com switchandclick and don't forget to use code SWITCHANDCLICK for that extra discount. The next step was going over all the packages that was about to be installed. The installer lets you see exactly what's going on in the drop-down menus and you can choose if you want to install some other things too, like printer support, LTS kernels, whatever that is, probably not popcorn. If you're someone that likes to know exactly what's going on with your computer, this is probably a great feature for you but for me, it was honestly kind of scary and I didn't want to mess anything up, so I just went with the default option, the safe stuff. Next was to partition the computer. This isn't super interesting, I was lazy and I just let Endeavor OS cannibalize the laptop drive. I sat and spun in my chair for a couple minutes waiting for it to install and voila! I was finally ready to get my hands dirty with Arch and what better way to do that than to fist fight with an age-old Linux battle than drivers. It's always the drivers and it's always my dock. You see, I noticed pretty quickly that my cursor looked like it was jumping around the screen like Goku does in a fight with Vegeta. Apparently, the dock I was using throttled my fancy 240 hertz monitor to 30 hertz and that is unacceptable but of course, I needed to install the drivers to get the dock to work and I'm just not gonna click on a .exe or this Ubuntu installer either. Arch and Ubuntu run on different code so just because something works on some Linux doesn't mean it'll work on all Linux and Endeavor doesn't even have a software app like other distros. You have to do this in the true Arch fashion and that means running the command line, hacker mode. Well, I still needed help so I did a Google search and there was an entire page on the Arch wiki dedicated to this struggle. When I scoured the internet for reasons why I should try Arch, the wiki always seems to come up and they weren't lying when they said that the Arch documentation is a perk. Hundreds of pages dedicated to teaching users like me how to use it which is honestly pretty amazing. Unlike most challenges I faced in my Linux journey, I can't just copy and paste command lines this time. I'm playing Linux on hard mode and according to this page, I had to install a bunch of things. DKMS, Linux headers. I don't know what those are but it's from the official wiki so it's probably fine. Eventually I figured out these are just like drivers but for Linux and that's when things got complicated. For those of you who've used a Debian distro like Ubuntu or Mint, you're probably familiar with the apt command when you install things. Arch uses pacman but that wasn't the complicated part. The complicated part was figuring out how to install things from the AUR or the Arch user repository from the command line. While pacman just installs things on your computer with one line, the AUR makes you go through a couple more steps. They really made me work for it. So I read the wiki page and that helped out but I'll be honest, a lot of it just flew way over my head. I cloned the git like it told me to but I had no clue how to use the make package command or the package build file and all that stuff. After about another half hour, I just gave up and I used a yay command in one of the comments of the ebdi page. I know, I shouldn't be using commands I don't know off the internet but come on, we've all done that and it worked, yay. Now my dock works and my mouth is smooth. Another nice feature for my eyes were all these space themed wallpapers that come with Endeavor. I doubt that's a vanilla Arch feature but it's a pretty cool bonus point for Endeavor. That's probably where it got its name from not because using Arch is an Endeavor like I thought it was named for. While we're talking about the pretty stuff, let me just say, KDE Plasma is pretty awesome. I can install a ton of different icons, cursors, themes, basically almost anything through just a settings tab. It just works. It was a nice change after all that chaos that was installing drivers earlier. My brain was getting a little fried but hey, I was learning things. Surely what I went through was just a learning curve and I also cheated a little bit with that yay command but now it was time to install something for real. I gained some more experience. So I scrolled through the AUR website and saw this discord alternative called Vestop. It looks decent, it's got a whopping 9.5 popularity, 140 votes. So the first step was easy, cloning the git page. Been there, done that. Then I realized my skill issue from the first time. I had to actually open the folder that was in the home folder made by the git clone command and then type make package. I'm not a programmer, I'm just following instructions. I spat out this package sorts file that I could finally install with pacman and with Vestop now installed, that was a true mission success. I installed plenty of other things like local send from the AUR after that but now I was curious. That was a lot of work compared to just clicking a button on an installer or running a DEB file. What's the point of all this? So what was yay? And why did the wiki not tell me to just do that? And why does ARCH use pacman over abt? It makes no sense. So I did some research, then things made sense a little bit. I don't want to bore you with all the nerdy words like the wiki, so let me just explain it like this. Pacman and abt are like Amazon, they carry different products. Our case, they carry different software in their warehouses. When you run pacman or abt, you're ordering that product to be installed onto your computer. But the AUR is like its own warehouse where any random person can come in and put a bunch of parts for a product in a box. All that cloning and make package that I did was just me going there, getting those parts, assembling it for myself onto my computer and yay is like DoorDash. It goes to the AUR, it packs up the parts and installs it for you in one command. It also updates everything for you just by typing yay into the terminal. Yay. I think I'm starting to feel a Pavlov effect happening here, but the reason I'm assuming the wiki doesn't tell you about yay is that because anybody can put stuff in a box. You don't want to accidentally build a software bomb that'll blow up your computer, so probably don't just use yay without knowing what you're doing. The advantage of Arch doing things this way is that everything always has the latest updates. They call this rolling updates. While abt might update a certain software every few months, the AUR is bleeding edge. But sometimes things can actually bleed if the latest update has a bug, like I discovered with Docker. So rolling updates aren't always the best, you've just got to know how to maintain it. Now with all that hard stuff out of the way, it was time for something fun, video games, because who doesn't use their computer to play games every now and then? I installed Steam in just a few seconds because I know what I'm doing now and I started downloading Repo. This is a Dell XPS, so I'm not expecting it to run amazingly, but running Repo was surprisingly functional at the lowest settings and it ran on the first try, even though I had no clue what the right drivers were. I'm getting pretty good at this. Somewhere along the way, I also had to wrestle with the Bluetooth in the command line since it's not enabled by default and pressing the buttons in the taskbar does dilly squat. It'd be nice if something just worked without the command line once in a while, but hey, it's Arch. It wasn't just a simple solution, like typing enable Bluetooth, but eventually I made it work because I'm unstoppable now and I had the patience to read more docs. Always read the docs. You gotta do that if you're using Linux. At the end of all this, I've realized that the more I use Endeavor and the more docs I read on the Arch wiki, the more I'm learning a bit of how Linux works. Sure, I'm kind of just being forced into it, but I think that might be the point. I never would have learned any of this stuff otherwise and I definitely wouldn't be able to explain it to someone else if I was just using Zorin or Fedora or copy pasting commands in the terminal. Using Endeavor so far has felt like trial by fire and this is supposed to be Arch on easy mode, but the ultimate burning question, is it really worth it in the end? For me, it's hard to say. I enjoy the challenge. I like tinkering, but at the end of the day, I'm just someone that wants my computer to work so that I can work and learning repositories and package managers through the Arch wiki has been an enlightening experience and it seems like I've only barely scratched the surface. Who knows? Maybe next time I'll actually succeed in installing the real, real, real vanilla Arch, but like I said, I'm not a programmer. I'm just someone who's used Windows for a long time, then a switch to learning Linux and even then I was looking for something that looked and felt like Windows, but if you're someone who loves to learn, you love the challenge to just figure things out from the inside out and you want to earn some bragging rights of using Arch, this could be the perfect distro for you. Now it's time to play around with Endeavor a little bit more and see how fun it can actually be. Maybe I like playing Dark Souls on hard mode.