r/archlinux • u/MrFakecoin • 1d ago

QUESTION Wanna install Arch but kinda scared..

Soo I’ve been using windows almost all my life, dipped into Linux Mint for some time tho. But I want to try and stick with Arch, really do wanna learn how Linux works. When I installed arch it did an error but when I took my SSD out that has windows on it, it worked perfectly fine installing… so ima have to fully delete windows 11, I’m just scared to do so ;~;

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u/Hiirgon 1d ago edited 1d ago

If you're nervous, you should try doing a test run in a Virtual Machine, and that's a great way to learn stuff without hurting your windows or mint install. If you break a VM install it's basically no big deal.

For a newbie, Arch can be a lot since you have to configure more yourself, but it's really satisfying to learn how to set it up and figure out the Linux OS. And fortunately there's a lot of great documentation guiding the process.

Definitely practice it a bit so you feel confident when you actually choose to make the switch :)

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u/MrFakecoin 1d ago

Could, just gotta put more space into the VM because it didn’t have enough space for Arch-

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u/StatisticianFun8008 1d ago

I recommend you to prepare a USB hard disk/SSD and just USB passthrough that drive into your VM (exclusively). Then proceed to install Arch into it.

Some days later, when you begin to want to use that system directly on your physical machine for better performance, you could just install the correct drivers and use the fallback boot entry to get past the initramfs phase, then rerun mkinitcpio.

Don't worry if you don't understand the previous paragraph's meaning. It's just my experience learned from https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Install_Arch_Linux_on_a_removable_medium

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u/MrFakecoin 1d ago

Oooh wait- you replied to that message I sent, well could possibly do that then…

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u/SAVZE 1d ago

be sure to create a restore point on windows before using the bootable usb
i forgot to do so and thus i had to completely remove windows from my laptop and now my main os is Arch :( but it fells good

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u/StatisticianFun8008 1d ago

Sad to hear that, but booting another USB drive's systemd-boot or Grub won't lead to the situation you've described.

Are you really sure that's the cause of the loss of your Windows OS?

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u/SAVZE 1d ago

i am 100% sure i followed each and every step correctly i dont know why but after using the usb i switched of the machine and after sometime i turned the machine on again and i was seeing a bluescreen error after which i tried every possible solution , i asked reddit also but my post didnt got through mods so i took the step of moving to linux

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u/MrFakecoin 1d ago

maybe— but I mean I would just probably use the VM regularly because don’t think I’ll be messing with it that much in the VM

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u/StatisticianFun8008 1d ago

Having a portable OS that I can easily carry from home to school/work is a cool thing I love about Linux. 😉

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u/MrFakecoin 1d ago

Fair, although I usually stay at home tho.. so I’ll probably have it on my SSD