recently i just finished building a new pc. mostly for gaming since my only exposure to linux is steam os and i heard its uses arch with kde plasma so i try to emulate it as close as i can. however soon i realized how different it is and it requires more setup than i initially thought. i spent a whole day or two setting it up and i read now im responsible on maintaining it, what does it mean? is it just finding and testing drivers? or system update? what is the easiest way to do it? and what i getting myself into?
when i was about to install steam i found a tutorial on it with 3 - 4 pages full of text and was a bit overwhelmed, i decided just set it up using discover with flatpak, the problem is when i was about to find out how to do that i read mostly people really hate when you ask how to enable it in arch, is it really bad? should i just use konsole instead?
im not very tech savvy and at first I was really reluctant to use konsole but since i decided to use arch its inevitable that i have to use konsole and so far its not that bad, yet.
I’m just wondering for the long term, should i just change distro? or i should just powertrough arch and see where it goes.
thank you for your time.
You’re not screwed. Depends on how much you enjoy tinkering and troubleshooting.
My main advice would be to keep your data backed up and completely disconnected from the PC. And make sure your machine is not critical (i.e. for working from home or something). Other than that you do what you want. If you want to dive deep in Arch then that’s fine.
One thing to know is that the important part relevant to you is: the desktop environment (KDE) and the Linux distro (Arch) are different things. The far more important thing for you is to have KDE… the distro underneath just needs to not get in the way.
If you’ve got Arch up and running then stick with it until it gives you trouble. I naturally ended up distro hopping in the beginning because I would catastrophically break something I couldn’t repair and could change distros naturally when reinstalling.
Good options for easy distros with KDE would be:
Tuxedo OS (or Kubuntu) - easiest and there’s lots of support online.
Fredora - rock solid and highly recommend. Although I would recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed instead, this got me hooked on Linux and was the least problematic for a bleeding edge updated distro, where I happily used Discover for installing and updating.
CachyOS - good option for sticking with Arch.
this pc is mostly for gaming and entertainment so not much is lost if its wiped or broke.
i do love tinkering, just that software tinker is a bit out of my depth
thank you for your input. after a lot of other input and consideration i’ll keep playing with arch until it broke then ill decide later if i want to retry it or go with bazzite. or maybe see other enticing distro too. there is so much…