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

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
    0·
    24 hours ago

    Yes, you’re screwed.

    You’re mega extra screwed.

    They know where you live.

    They’re coming for you.

    Hide.

  • Horse {they/them}@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    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 backups

  • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • Cikos@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      17 hours ago

      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.

    • TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.world
      0·
      17 hours ago

      from Arch Wiki FAQ:

      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.

  • Regular Water@lemmy.eco.br
    0·
    1 day ago

    Try bazzite if you are willing to learn, otherwise just pick Zorin OS or Linux Mint and you will be fine (You will just have to learn the basics of how linux works, but nothing too complex as arch linux)

    • youmaynotknow@lemmy.zip
      0·
      1 day ago

      If you’re using an Nvidia card, the easiest way into Linux for gaming (in my opinion) is Bazzite, as aguasemgas mentioned.

      Otherwise, any distro will do. I prefer Fedora Workstation, which is what I use for work (as do my wife and kids) but use Bazzite in my laptop because it’s a System76 Gazelle with a 3050TI,and I don’t like the current status of PopOS. All my games run great, and everything else is a FlatPak, so not much need to tweak anything really.

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Cikos@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      17 hours ago

      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

    • bigpEE@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 day ago

      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 -Syu then sudo 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

      1. Google if anyone else has posted your exact problem
      2. See if chatgpt knows anything
      3. Humbly post in the arch user forum

      One of those will solve it. Good luck!

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        1 day ago

        WHOA. Please be VERY HESITANT to use anything ChatGPT outputs. Sanity check any commands it gives you from other places first.

  • dil@piefed.zipEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    cachyos, post install click install gaming packages, in steam goto compotability switch it to proton cachyos, done, there is no struggle, it grabs heroic and lutris too for non steam stuff

    • Uairhahs@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 days ago

      Highly recommend this for you OP. This would be the easiest course of action. Do you have to use Konsole, yes but for a few commands and once done you can do everything you need via GUI and not have to touch shell again for daily operations.

      Catchy have a very powerful script that attaches all their pacman.conf (list of places where arch will look for it’s software)

      Here’s a link to the section Adding CachyOS to existing Arch Install

      Once that’s done you only need one more command

      sudo pacman -Syu octopi

      Octopi will let you manage all your software and kernel updates without having to touch terminal or having to use flatpaks.

      I would recommend packages:

      • cachyos-hooks
      • linux-cachyos
      • linux-cachyos-header
      • cachyos-kernel-manager
      • proton-cachyos
      • wine-cachyos
      • cachyos-gaming-meta

      This will have you fully set up and ready to seamlessly game on your machine without having to reinstall a OS.

  • silasmariner@programming.dev
    0·
    2 days ago

    Once your computer’s working to your satisfaction, pretty much all you’ll need to do is alias sudo packman -Syu and 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.

  • Joe B@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 days ago

    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 ?

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 days ago

    Uninstall Arch and install Linux Mint. Give yourself that gift. It 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.

  • ratatouille@feddit.org
    0·
    2 days ago

    I admire your energetic here. I only installed the latest ubuntu (cause of latest gpu driver updates) then I installed steam from software center and it works nothing to do anymore.

  • dil@lemmy.zip
    0·
    2 days ago

    Cachyos bro, installing all gaming related things is one click or installed by default on Bazzite

  • twice_hatch@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    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.