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’m a chronic distro hopper and here is my advice. If you want to try out new OSs make sure to backup your data as the probability of screwing everything up is relatively high. I use syncthing to ensure all documents I have exist outside my laptop so there is no cost to me breaking everything, but you can also just use an external hard drive and not be fancy. Whatever works for you.
Arch really isn’t hugely different especially through the Endeavoros route which gives you sane defaults and packages without grinding through documentation. Just be prepared to be the car enthusiast of computing. Car people love understanding internals, messing with stuff, fixing issues that bother them, looking under the hood, asking for help, etc. That is the best analogy for the more, let’s just say, enthusiast Linux environments.
Don’t let that scare you though. Be prepared to learn a thing or two, backup your data, and make sure you have a backup stick with another OS on it to undo whatever you break and you’ll be fine. I think I have literally gone through 100 reinstalls on the low end and everything is fine. Unlike a car your computer is fairly cheap to fix if it is just software.