I’m not a computer expert or planning to be. I’m just a computer user, a coder, a gamer, and I think I will get the opportunity to afford cheaper PCs if I use the Arch distro from Linux which is very lightweight and fast. I’ve heard Microsoft forces you to bloat your PC with win11.
I don’t use Arch, but my perception is that it is meant for people who want to be computer experts.
Do you have any reason not to use Linux Mint? As others have mentioned, Mint has 95% of the benefits over Windows that Arch has, and Mint is designed for folks who just want to use their computer.
Arch is for people who want to think they are computer experts.
Debian/Fedora are for the experts that have moved beyond reading release notes.
Linus Torvalds uses Fedora last I heard, LTT built him a beast pc, take that for what it is worth. He likes to test the kernel and he says Fedora is most accommodating for him.
Yeah Linus uses Fedora because:
I know KDE devs rate opensuse highly for similar reasons, if you primarily develop 1 app/framework/kernel you don’t want the fun of irregular updates that haven’t been properly tested (or have been tested and need manual intervention anyway) especially if those updates could potentially break your thing.
Arch-based I find is a good middle-ground. I use CachyOS and it’s more or less preconfigured, there’s a selection of packages preinstalled, but it’s still pretty baseline so you can build it up to whatever you want. There’s probably enough to get you going out-of-the-box if you’re new.
But yeah if you’re brand new to Linux there’s distros designed for that audience and you can always hop away to something when you’re ready or if your use-case changes.