"I use arch btw..."
Now that's something we all have seen or heard on the internet. I agree that the Arch community can be a little bit toxic, in toxic means they expect everyone to do the same amount of research like they did and finding out a solution on their own rather than spoon feeding them the information.
Arch Linux is a rolling-release distro , yada-yada-yada we all know that. Here is why I kept falling back into Arch even after being having a messed up system , multiple times.
In my early days of Linux usage , i was limited to a very very under-powered computer. A Pentium e5500 and 4gigs of ram just did not simply make the cut. And hence i had to resort to very less resource intensive things like a custom and striped down version of windows!
That is when i met Linux. I started off with Ubuntu , and later found out that Linux can go even lighter. I went and distro hopped for a whole year trying everything from Peppermint OS , Elementary to even Gentoo! I tried sticking to Debian based distros in the beginning because i was in 8th grade and boy I had no clue what "rm -rf /*" did back then let alone a whole different package manager like pacman.
I stuck with Linux Mint for a long while until i got my solid roots in Linux. Basic bash command, what services where, X11 , window managers etc. I read a lot of things about Arch. It was not for the faint of heart, It will take time to install , very unstabel takes too much effort , VERY LIGHTWEIGHT!
Aha I found arch to be a walking flag with one green flag and I fell for it (Not the first time ugh~). Anyways , downloading arch and finding a blank tty was well disappointing. Off to a VM i went , installed arch onto it and boy oh boy was i surprised by the 450Mb ram usage of the Arch+Xfce i did back then.
After a few weeks in VM i installed arch and used it for 2 straight years. Without any crashes? Well mostly yea!! Untill and unless i decided to well change the display manager a bit , or get another DE installed , it was just basic config errors which kinda made me unable to get back in and things. (I did not know about arch-chroot could fix all this back then , shame on me haha).
In the end Arch did exactly what it had to do for me. A very lightweight distro where I am in control , which is not much complicated. You can easily daily drive arch if you set it up correctly! A proper timeshift is probably all it takes for you to get it running for years!
Top comments (3)
I have a rule in place that whenever I need to do a Windows re-install (e.a. it crashes so hard it doesn't work anymore) that I would try Linux next time.
I already have a headless Ubuntu server. But I am not that experienced. And I just want to game on the machine (Like Apex Legends, Diablo IV etc.) I searched for some with NVidia support and Pop OS and Mint where some advises I got from people that I know.
What do you think?
PS I also own a Steam Deck with SteamOS which should also be some sort of Arch if I remember correctly.
Gaming from the headless Ubuntu server? I don't know the specs. But as a general reference if you have a pretty decent GPU , you can play a lot of games in Linux using Wine or Steam (I used Lutris to make life easy). Some games I played included , CODMW2, Forza 4 & 5, GTA V , ETS2.
I got almost the same performance as that on windowsn but with slight screen tearing in GTAV probably due to some drivers issues. This was in Arch and I think you can get this working in Ubunut too.
Lutris
Hey buddy, are you still in Arch? Just curious.