I’ve been using PopOS for a few months now, and I’m interested in Arch, but I’m worried about whether or not I have enough experience to do that successfully. Also, I have an Nvidia GPU until I start a new build in the next year or so. I don’t know if that’ll be a problem in Arch. It was a major issue with Fedora for me.
I’m willing to learn the terminal, but right now I’m still pretty dependent on tutorials to do more than basic things, like installing software. Most of those are catered to Ubuntu-based distros, so I’m concerned I won’t have the luxury of guides to more complex terminal stuff.
Am I overthinking this? Or should I wait longer (maybe even until I build a new PC)?
How difficult is the transition from Ubuntu-based to Arch?
I’d say use EndeavourOS and if you choose NVidia in the menu when you boot the installer it will install the distro with NVidia drivers from the start and there’s nothing to fiddle with. The updater (called yay) will henceforth update NVidia drivers as needed. It’s one of the most handsfree NVidia experiences there is as kernel and driver updates are automatic via Arch.
I also suggest installing apps via Flatpak, this way there wont be problems with library versioning and system and apps are separated nicely. You can install KDE Discover for example to have a GUI app “store” that supports Flatpak. Just make sure to have the right Desktop portal installed. I run KDE but for some reason needed both the kde and gtk portals to get nice fonts everywhere.
You install stuff with Yay or Flatpak, e.g. “yay -S xdg-desktop-portal-kde” or “flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam”. If you use Flatpak install Flatseal, it can handle permissions, for example you can give Steam access to another folder you want to use for games, for example I use /home/protonbadger/Games/ and gave Steam access to the folder this way.
SUSE Tumbleweed is a good alternative and more polished for desktop users, but you’ll have to install NVidia drivers manually afterwards, there are wiki guides and youtube videos showing how. Occasionally when a new kernel update comes out the NVidia drivers trail a day or two so be aware of that on SuSE. NVidia have their own official repository with SUSE drivers.
I suggest trying both first in virtual machines for a few weeks.
In my experience the only library versioning conflict I encountered was with GNOME and Budgie which has been fixed. Flatpak separates every single app which also means complicated directories so I avoid it and don’t really see the necessity of it.
I didn’t like it because of discussions of it online. But then my Steam malfunctioned because of a Mesa update and I decided to try it anyway and form my own opinion. Turns out it works really well (for me), it’s performant and I like that it installs without root password and is mildly sandboxed so installers can’t put files just anywhere in my system.
It’s not so much about necessity of it as it’s pros vs. cons of different package managers, Flatpak vs. pacman vs rpm vs snap vs appimage and repositories (the AUR is nice for example, but also a bit like the Wild West), etc. Pick what fits your personal philosophy and enjoy.