Why switch?
I played with the idea of switching for quite a while. Having switched my daily driver from Windows maybe 6-9 Months ago I made many mistakes in the meantime.
Good and bad
This may have led to a diminshed experience with ubuntu but all in all, I was very pleased to see that Linux works as a daily driver. Still, I was unhappy with the kind of dumbed down gnome experience.
Problems
There were errors neither I nor people I asked could fix and the snap situation on ubuntu (just the fact that they’re proprietary, nothing else).
Installation
Installing debian (and kde) was easier and harder than I expected. The download mirror I used must not have been great although its very close to my location because it took ages although my internet connections is good.
Apps
Since I switched to Linux, I toned down my app diet a lot. Installing all my apps from ubuntu was as easy as writing a short list and going through discover. Later I added flatpak which gave me a couple apps not available through discover (such as fluffychat). The last two I copied directly as appimages.
Games
I was scared that the „old kernel“ of stable debian would be a problem. As it turns out, everthing works great so far, a lot better than on ubuntu which might or might not be my fault.
Instability
Kde does have some quirks that irritate me a bit like installing timeshift (because I tried network backups which dont work with it and the native backup solution does not seem to accept my sambashare) led to a window I could only close by rebooting.
Boot time
What does feel a bit odd is the boot process. After my bios splash, it shows „welcome to grub“ and then switches to the debian start menu for 3 seconds or so, then shows some terminal stuff and then starts kde splash and then login. This feels a lot longer than ubuntu did. Its probably easy to change in some config but its also something that should be obvious.
Summary
So far I‘m incredibly happy although I ran into initramfs already probably because of timeshift which I threw out again. I might do a manual backup if nothing else works. My games dont freeze or stutter which is nice. All apps I had on ubuntu now work on debian and no snaps at all.
TL;DR: If you feel adventurous, debian and kde are a pretty awesome mix and rid you of the proprietary ubuntu snap store. It also doesnt tell you that you can get security upgrades if you subscribe to ubuntu pro. Works the same if not better.
Sorry but you’re oot. People who switch to linux today are complete noobs compared to you and will do a ton of things you consider crazy.
The other distros will accept this or prevent it but arch wont even boot to the DE if you dont follow the wiki to the letter. I had to reaearch some stuff since I didnt get it from just the wiki and still got repeated freezes although I‘m a sysadmin for many years and have two linux servers (one of them for two years) which make no problems at all.
Arch is a pro distro, feel free to prove otherwise.
I agree that Arch is a pro distro. I do IT tech support, have background with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Knoppix, and Fedora and installing Arch was hard mode for me. Would I do it again? Hell yeah. Would I recommend it as a second or third install experience? Nope. Too many distros that are beginner to intermediate friendly. That said, I will forever have a fondness for pacman just because I like the name. I am still working out device drivers and a few smaller details a month later. Also, the wiki is written by someone who doesn’t do good technical writing. It assumes too much back end knowledge. I kept having to follow blog or article posts and still had to sandwich those snippets I got together hoping something worked…and again, I have some background knowledge of Linux already. An absolute beginner would be totally lost.
You put this a lot better than I could. Its exactly what my experience was as well.
Glad I am not alone, though I follow unixporn and other communities so was very familiar with the overall sentiments about Arch before diving in. I look forward to when I know a bit more about it. I put it on a laptop I specifically bought to install Linux alongside the existing windows install (LG Gram) so I knew I had nothing to lose and my whole intention was to learn. I would have never installed Arch on a machine I actually need to use at this point. I am lucky that I got as far as I did so quickly. lol.
I’m suggesting it to you, not to a completely noob. You know this caveats and probably will be fine
Anyway, use archinstall script. You don’t have to follow the wiki to the letter anymore.
I get that. But people will take „its a myth that arch is not stable“ out of context. It is absolutely not as stable as any other OS, at least if you use the wiki. I have not known about the script until recently.