Linux

One thing I suggest is:
You're trying to get something working but it isn't going anywhere? Try again later.

First, because of the obvious calming down, since stress can affect the person's capacity to solve problems.
Second, I've noticed how many things on Linux have some degree of similarity and/or relation to one another. So trying other things in the meantime can give you the needed insight for solving a previous problem.

hey! don’t listen to all the people who are telling you to choose an “easier” distro. my first linux was gentoo. i had never really bothered to learn computers before. that was 20 years ago and i was a teenager. i’ve been using various linuxes over the years since then.

if you want something that mostly just works, don’t want to mess around with your computer, and are fine with having to reinstall every 2-3 years because updates always break, then yeah, ubuntu derivatives are fine. fedora and friends are a little bit more stable and offer a similar experience.

if you want to learn, though? then it’s 100% correct to go with something that lets you do more of the work but has an excellent manual. in that vein, arch or gentoo are the leading experience.

the advantage of these is also that they won’t break as easily as anything debian/ubuntu based will.

you will have to do a lot of reading, a lot of learning, a lot of asking people embarrassing beginner’s questions (DO join the respective IRC channels for support! they’ll love to have you), and you should keep a rescue system on a stick or CD because you have a pretty good chance to break yours.

(strongly recommend putting your /home on a separate partition if not its own drive, so you can simply unmount it and then do with your system whatever you want, without having to worry about your important files.)

as for everyone else recommending you to use a different distro: you will get this advice incessantly. whenever you ask a question or are trying to find solutions to a problem, people will swarm you to tell you to use a different distro. this is an unfortunate habit of the linux community. so my most important piece of advice is to wholeheartedly ignore the distro recommendations at all times except when you have explicitly asked for them.

you know best what your needs and wants are. the whole point of free software is to empower people to do with it whatever the fuck they want.

Don't start with Arch unless you're looking for a trial by fire. It's a distro intended for advanced users who already know a few things about Linux. I don't even use straight Arch, and I've been using Linux for years. I do use EndeavourOS as my daily driver though, and that's basically a pre-configured Arch with a GUI installer.

Ubuntu, or one of its variants like Kubuntu or Xubuntu, is a better pick for someone who's just starting out. Mint is supposed to be decent for new users too.

You made a wise choice picking a Radeon, btw. Nvidia support on Linux isn't the greatest. AMD, on the other hand, is nearly plug and play since the drivers are built into the kernel. You may or may not need to install extra drivers for proper Vulkan support though.

Another thing I should mention; if you decide to dual boot with Windows, it may seem like a smart idea to share your steamapps folder between OSes, but this doesn't usually work out well because of the way Proton uses symlinks. You're much better off having separate steamapps folders for each OS, even if it uses more disk space that way. (Proton is the compatibility tool Steam uses for running Windows-only games on Linux. It even works better than running Linux-native games in a lot of cases)

I mention the steamapps thing, because it's a common newbie mistake to try sharing a steamapps folder between Windows and Linux.

Linux is a pretty deep rabbit hole to dive into, and it's not for everyone. But don't let this discourage you; it can be rewarding if you're willing to learn how to use it.

My absolute, #1 biggest recommendation is to male separate partitions for / and /home.

What does this mean? In short, you're telling the system to treat different sections of the hard drive / ssd as entirely separate buckets. In this case, you're putting all of the operating system and programs in one bucket ( / ) and keeping all of your files and settings in another (/home).

Why does this matter? As someone learning Linux, you should tinker with things, learn what they do and how they work. Sometimes, that means breaking things, occasionally in spectacular ways. Having your files and your OS separate means that you can completely wreck your OS while you learn without losing your data in the process- you can reinstall from scratch or even distro hop (try out a new version) without having to stress over losing anything. In short, you can learn and play and blunder and explore without risking anything more than a 20 minute reinstall if you can't figure out how to fix it.

If you are completely new to linux, you wanna consider other options than arch. Maybe a derivate like manjaro would be for you, if you really need to have arch. If other options are valid as well, i would go with linux mint or popOS. Or just plain Ubuntu.

I see that you already are confronted to the Arch btrainwashers, we made memes about them

Ubuntu is a very solid choice and will give you results very fast without hurdles. You can then look under the hood to see in detail how it work if you want to.

It's important to just stick to your package manager at first, don't jump too fast into the flatpak/snap/container wagon. When you know exactly the purpose of a package manager then you can look outside. Your package manager is your best friend, whatever the distro you use, stick to it as much as possible, you won't regret it.

Also, if you are looking for a program under linux but you only know the equivalent in windows/apple, you can use https://alternativeto.net/. Enter the name of the program you are looking for, then search for the alternative for linux.

For example, photoshop -> Gimp or Krita. Then search for it in your package manager.

Parts are absolutely fine. If you're a beginner I'd advised against Arch as it's high maintenance. If your hell bent on a Arch distro I'd recommend EndeavourOS as it's Arch with an installer and the base system will cover most use case without too much tinkering.

Linux has 'swap'. Pretty much it's a back up to prevent your computer from crashing if it tries to use more ram than it has, so it allocates hard drive space to be used as ram.

Different distributions have different suggestions on how much space to allocate for swap. Depending on how much ram you're putting in your machine and how you plan on using your machine will heavily influence the size of swap you need (ram intensive vs not ram intensive).

You can set up with a 'swap file' on a hard drive after you install your OS.
Or you can set up a 'swap partition' on your harddrive when you're setting up your partitions prior to OS installation
Or you can set up a separate harddrive as a swap drive
Or if you have a lot of ram you can avoid setting up swap entirely. This is not advisable though, it sucks finding out something is ram intensive when what you're doing crashes.

It's good to have an idea of how you want to map out your hard drives before installing your OS.
The world is your oyster.

If you're dual booting windows you need to turn off 'safe boot' in your BIOS.

Pressing ctrl+alt+ a function key, should drop you in a tty.

Running killall kwin, or killall kwin_wayland (if on wayland) should restart kwin.

Avoid the greens; don't touch grass, vegetables, or Nvidia.

Good luck.

Willing to learn how it works Arch is a good choice.

My only tip is to maintain the system do as much as possible from the command line. You will learn much deeper how everything works together.

If you want a distro recommendation, then Fedora Workstation. There is nothing more clean, well crafted and well maintained as Fedora. After that clean Arch is also good. I would stay far away from Manjaro, not just is it trash, its maintainers are amateurs that again and again showed that they do not have the know-how or the needed sense of responsibility needed to maintain a distro.

I'm running KDE on Archlinux. I had used Linux Mint with Cinnamon before, and only Windows other than that. My advice is don't use the arch installer script (it just didn't work for me at all), but follow this guide. It worked perfectly for me.

They also have a guide for installing KDE. If you want a lean system, don't install the kde-applications package, however that will mean a few things like printers won't work without installing the printing service, but kde-applications installs a lot of apps you probably don't want.

[Edit]: I also meant to say put home on a different partition. It makes life a lot easier if you mess up your system or want to reinstall or want to distro hop.

Once you've picked your flavour I'd say choose how you want to partition and manage backups / snapshots. I see you have 2 ssds, so are you planning on raiding them with something like btrfs? Do you want to encrypt your drives?

Doesn't matter what distro you choose. I'd suggest picking one with a large support base, and not a niche distro.

But ultimately, pick one, don't become a distro hopper, or one of these folks that's always asking "what's the best distro".

As a new user, if you try out a distro for a few months and it's just not "clicking" for you, there's nothing wrong with trying something else out.

More than anything else, once you do find the distro that feels like home, learn to tune out the haters, because they're going to crawl out from under their rocks every bloody time you mention the distro you use, and try and tell you why what they like is better.

You'll notice I haven't mentioned which distro I use. And that's for a reason. I happen to think it's pretty damned fantastic, but there's at least one other person that will read this, and feel its the worst thing ever, of all time.

As far as tips go? Learn to read error messages, learn how to use a websearch, learn how to ask intelligent questions when you need help.

I highly recommend giving this a read: https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Yes, it's old, but it's just as relevant as it was when Eric Raymond wrote it back in 2001.

My general advice is to spend some time making your command line look just like you want it to (font, colors, prompt, etc.), and then try to live on the command line. Just about everything you want to achieve can be done through the command line. It's not always the easiest solution, but it will teach you the ins and outs of Linux, and it'll help prepare you to solve whatever challenges you may encounter.

Your system will almost certainly get irrevocably broken by something at some point and you'll have to reinstall. This isn't a failure on your part though, it's a rite of passage that everyone goes through at least once, especially if you have Nvidia drivers lol. It'll happen less and less over time the more you learn how to fix stuff though.

Also back up often!

An AI search is your friend.

I recently switched to Fedora to help get into the Arch based Linux realm. Historically been on Debian based distros. You can’t go wrong with many of the “mainstream” distributions as your first intro to Linux. If you come across any issues ask away and that it a how you’ll learn more about how Linux works, Arch, etc with your hardware too.

If you're installing Arch, one trick the installation wiki article doesn't tell you:
If you type "archinstall", it has a command line installer there that'll do the install for you, and lets you pick from several desktop environments as well. I've had it crash before more than once, so it's not perfect, but it's less of a pain then doing it all by hand...

My best advice is: Try to use it as a daily driver. It was it finally worked for me. Solving the everyday problems is the best linux teacher :)