Intro
Technically speaking, I’m pretty new to Linux, I started playing around with it about a year ago, and I made it my daily driver in January of 2025. Against every recommendation ever I decided to install Arch Linux as my first desktop Linux OS. Needless to say this was not a good idea. Here is an overly long and complex answer that barely explains why:
Arch Linux is NOT Built for Beginners
I found this out the hard way after ignoring every Linux user on the internet. I think I decided to go with arch because everyone said it was super difficult but a really good OS, and I just couldn’t see why I should go with something else. Now, 1 year later and I’m still using arch with no intentions to switch any time soon. I think the reason that people tell new Linux users not to install Arch is because of how discouraged they will be when (not if) their first installation fails. Despite the documentation being incredible, new users don’t know Linux and likely aren’t super comfortable in a terminal, I was a developer with some Linux experience who was comfortable in a terminal, and it took me 8 tries across a whole day to get my first installation working. Ubuntu on the other hand takes about 5 minutes to install with its own fancy TUI. I tend to be extremely determined and stubborn which is probably why I was able keep going after failing so many times to install this OS. Now, as someone that has been daily driving Arch for 9 months I would absolutely NOT recommend it for Linux Beginners.
Do you Even Know what a Bootloader is?
One of the biggest things I had trouble with was a mis-configured bootloader. I was not ready to completely let go of windows yet because there were a few programs that I didn’t know how to replace, because of this I decided that I was going to dual boot my laptop. I had also decided that GRUB wasn’t gonna cut it as my bootloader. Why? You ask, well, like the idiot I am I had taken a look at some posts on r/unixporn and I decided that if my OS didn’t look like that then I had failed. So I did the bare minimum amount of research and picked rEFInd to be my bootloader, because there were cool themes on GitHub, literally no other reason. This decision made things immensely more difficult for myself because literally every Arch Linux install guide uses GRUB but NO, I just HAD to have fancy themes (I’m still using rEFInd and my theme doesn’t even look that good). You may be thinking about how stupid I am for not realizing that GRUB also has themes (a lot more of them) but, at this point, I KNEW that GRUB had themes and I still decided to use the weird bootloader for some reason.
It has just occurred to me that I typed the last 200ish words without addressing the heading of the section at all, hopefully I’ll get to that eventually. Kidding, the reason that I had so much trouble with rEFInd was because I treated it like a drop-in replacement for GRUB, every time the install and configure GRUB step(s) came up in the Arch Wiki Install Guide I would ignore all of it and just install and configure rEFInd according to its docs. Now to many of you this may not raise any red flags but doing this is an easy way to ensure that your OS will not boot after you install is complete. This is where that quip about me doing the “bare minimum amount of research” comes back to bite me in the ass because rEFInd has to be installed and configured AFTER you install the system which means that you need to set it up with GRUB as the bootloader while chrooted during the installation process and swap your bootloader after you boot into the installed system. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this, especially given that on my 6th attempt I installed Arch EXACTLY according to the Wiki with GRUB, and it worked, I then tried again with refined 2 more times with it breaking before I realized what was happening and fixed it.
Wow That Was Long, Lets Talk About Something Else
The first time I broke my OS was at one of the most inconvenient times it could happen, approximately 10 minutes before my data structures class. Oops. It wasn’t too bad of a fuck up and I was able to fix it before my class started. As I mentioned above my bootloader is interesting (I swear every problem I’ve ever had stems from this thing) and I had been messing around with my configuration the night before, and I had accidentally modified my SSD UUID, so when rEFInd tried to boot it couldn’t find my SSD, and it decided that instead of offering up any helpful error message or something useful I was gonna make like Elvis and die while shitting itself (no offense to the rEFInd devs btw, literally every problem I’ve ever had with this thing is my own fault). Lucky for me, I already had some idea of what the culprit could be, so I grabbed my tactical Arch Linux installation USB stick that I always keep on me (I’m not kidding its sitting right next to me as I write this) and, like the Linux chad that I am, I mounted my boot partition, checked my boot config against my drives UUID, saw they didn’t match and copied the correct one over. Then I loudly flexed on an entire classroom of collage students and one sad professor who couldn’t care less that I used Arch Linux (for legal reasons that’s a joke).
“I want to start using Lin–”
STOP, if you finish that sentence 10,000 unshowered Reddit moderators are going to descend on you like moths to a flame and try to get you to use some obscure niche distro nobody knows about. If you want to get into Linux and you’re reading this, you probably have a framework machine, and if that’s the case then lucky you, these things are pretty much as close to “built for Linux” as you can get. In fact there is a whole page dedicated to telling you exactly which distros work best with your machine, you can find it by going to frameworks website, picking the machine you have from the top bar, scrolling down, and clicking on the Linux tab, there you will find a short list of both officially supported and community supported distros, if you’re reading this and intend to reply, work the word banana into it somehow just to confuse people. If you don’t have a framework (how did you even get here) and are looking into Linux, go with something easy and beginner friendly and make sure you do your research before trying to make any modifications to the installation process. If the sheer number of options is just to much for you there’s a great quiz on distrochooser.de that could help you narrow down your search. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what distro you choose because of how flexible Linux is, you can switch easily (look up “distro hopping” if you want more info on that)
bye, i guess.
Edit 1: omg I didn’t even get to talk about desktops/window managers
