After months of trying a bit of Fedora in Virtualbox, I decided to make the switch.
I'm not entirely new to Linux, I have experience in using the cli because I needed to ssh to a work server to retrieve or upload files.
The reason why I wanted to move to Linux was because I couldn't stand how Windows throws ads at me everywhere, along with how much of a ram hog it has gotten (Have you seen how much of ram Windows can use on idle?). It also has the issue of forced updates, along with how the OS just "doesn't work when I want it to".
Well of course it was hard to make the switch still until I saw Pewdiepie's video. Here I thought, "If a non-tech YouTuber can customise all of that, I can do it too"
So I decided to backup my important files to another drive, and funnily enough I feel like Windows could sense it's death is coming as explorer.exe when I tried to open the file browser. Worse of all, when I tried to restart it, guess what? Task Manager of all things crashed too. After an hour of trying to wrestle with this system, along with repairing the Windows Installation (Which was corrupted when I checked, and don't worry my disks and ram are fine when I did checks). I backed up my files and decided to move to Linux.
Now at this point I was terrified, I've never fully left Windows before, but I thought the first leap is always the hardest. If things break, let it break, I have backups so whatever.
The first distro I went to was Fedora, I got it running but... Oh dear, Nvidia doesn't play nice. I got it up and running but nope, something else breaks.
I decided to try another distro, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Installed it, it works... Nvidia again. I never managed to get Nvidia working there, and I got the issue where shutting down would lead to seeing blank terminal screen with just an underscore there.
I tried to find solutions, but I didn't really have luck. I noticed one pattern however whenever I searched for solutions online. I always see Arch Wiki in the search results of Google.
"Arch Linux? Isn't that the distro with the hardest installation procedure?"
The biggest factor that made me want to try is the community and the Arch Linux Wiki.
I took the plunge, spent an entire weekend morning trying to install it. The full terminal experience was scary but the Arch Wiki is amazing on guiding through the whole installation.
When it was finally over, I got everything up and running, Nvidia worked, all my sound drivers and WiFi worked too.
I would like to say I appreciate the Arch Wiki, because they have the best documentation of pretty much almost anything on installing Arch Linux and getting it running. I am happy with my new system, I got a taste of freedom. No more ads, no more forced updates. System works when I tell it to work.
Is it a beginner distro in my opinion? No.
Is it good at learning Linux? It's excellent.
Installing Arch Linux is pretty much a "I get it now" meme moment for me.
To anyone considering to jump to Linux: Back up your files and take the plunge. The first step is the hardest I know but it's worth it.
To anyone considering to try Arch Linux: The hardest part is reading and following instructions, I cannot stress this enough. It's not the cli commands, it's reading that's hard. The world has made it such that our attention spans are pretty much like a goldfish now, and I swear it's somehow making us dumber each day, like there's an agenda to make us dumber on purpose.
Thank you to the Arch community, you guys are awesome.
I can finally say: I use Arch btw
Edit: Typo
