Admittedly, I did dabble a little in Ubuntu and Mint years ago, so I had some level of familiarity.
I wanted something gaming focused to minimize setup, so I went with Garuda, which is Arch based. I had some issues early on with discord and steam that I thought having a gaming centric distro would have prevented, but it didn’t. If I didn’t have to reinstall things I would probably switch to something more vanilla, but stick with Arch.
The file structure and cli commands have been the biggest hurdle having spent my life in a Windows environment, but it’s coming along. It’s weird needing to think how to do things and look up commands for things that are second nature. Like ipconfig /all in Windows. Linux has ethtools with a million switches, and ifconfig which is similar, but different. I run a Pihole docker on my unRAID server, and setting a static DNS was a pain. Some of those things which could give a new user enough problems that they just give up and go back to Windows is why I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone on a whim. Best to get a more user friendly distro and dabble before committing.
Nice! I’ve been using pure Arch for like a decade, I’ve tried other distros but I haven’t found anything that I like better than it.
I remember the struggles of overcoming the Windows indoctrination, it took a while, and caused a lot of frustration, but that was back when Linux was a lot less developed, back around 2005. Keep hacking at it and it will eventually become second nature. Don’t slack on using man command or the help flags, they’ll save you a bunch of time.
Setting static DNS servers should be as simple as using PiHole to hand out the DNS servers via DHCP and if you’re setting a static IP for the Linux host then you could either just define it in /etc/resolv.conf or set it with systemd-named (I think that’s what it’s called, I forget, it’s the systemd implementation.)
Once you get the hang of Linux, you’ll realize that it’s actually a lot easier to use than Windows.
Actually just last night I dipped into a vanilla Arch install on an old laptop. The wiki is pretty good, but I feel it skirts over some things that true beginners don’t know. I misread a line when seeing my efi partitions, which caused a cascade of issues that took some fixing. Then it took me a while to get a numlock hook set, mainly because I was trying to build a package as root, which again led to other issues with access rights. And I finally got microcode added to my boot file, which took an embarrassingly long amount of time, because I didn’t see the line that says I can’t update efistub, I have to replace it to add options.
All of that said, the process has definitely forced me to learn a lot of things I didn’t know, and I already feel a bit more comfortable rooting around the system with confidence I can fix my problems. I’m ready to install a DE, so I need to do a little reading on some of those. It’s been already been quite a journey, and I know I’ve barely scratched the surface.
As someone who’s seeing a lot of this for the first time, I think the toughest part is understanding the jargon. The tutorial will reference some file, or the kernel, or things in the bootloader and ramdisk, but without any prior knowledge of most of those, it’s like reading a foreign language. Seeing the big picture of how things jive together so that the small things make sense is a rabbit hole of pages that are easy to get lost in.
Admittedly, I did dabble a little in Ubuntu and Mint years ago, so I had some level of familiarity.
I wanted something gaming focused to minimize setup, so I went with Garuda, which is Arch based. I had some issues early on with discord and steam that I thought having a gaming centric distro would have prevented, but it didn’t. If I didn’t have to reinstall things I would probably switch to something more vanilla, but stick with Arch.
The file structure and cli commands have been the biggest hurdle having spent my life in a Windows environment, but it’s coming along. It’s weird needing to think how to do things and look up commands for things that are second nature. Like ipconfig /all in Windows. Linux has ethtools with a million switches, and ifconfig which is similar, but different. I run a Pihole docker on my unRAID server, and setting a static DNS was a pain. Some of those things which could give a new user enough problems that they just give up and go back to Windows is why I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone on a whim. Best to get a more user friendly distro and dabble before committing.
Nice! I’ve been using pure Arch for like a decade, I’ve tried other distros but I haven’t found anything that I like better than it.
I remember the struggles of overcoming the Windows indoctrination, it took a while, and caused a lot of frustration, but that was back when Linux was a lot less developed, back around 2005. Keep hacking at it and it will eventually become second nature. Don’t slack on using man command or the help flags, they’ll save you a bunch of time.
Setting static DNS servers should be as simple as using PiHole to hand out the DNS servers via DHCP and if you’re setting a static IP for the Linux host then you could either just define it in /etc/resolv.conf or set it with systemd-named (I think that’s what it’s called, I forget, it’s the systemd implementation.)
Once you get the hang of Linux, you’ll realize that it’s actually a lot easier to use than Windows.
Actually just last night I dipped into a vanilla Arch install on an old laptop. The wiki is pretty good, but I feel it skirts over some things that true beginners don’t know. I misread a line when seeing my efi partitions, which caused a cascade of issues that took some fixing. Then it took me a while to get a numlock hook set, mainly because I was trying to build a package as root, which again led to other issues with access rights. And I finally got microcode added to my boot file, which took an embarrassingly long amount of time, because I didn’t see the line that says I can’t update efistub, I have to replace it to add options.
All of that said, the process has definitely forced me to learn a lot of things I didn’t know, and I already feel a bit more comfortable rooting around the system with confidence I can fix my problems. I’m ready to install a DE, so I need to do a little reading on some of those. It’s been already been quite a journey, and I know I’ve barely scratched the surface.
As someone who’s seeing a lot of this for the first time, I think the toughest part is understanding the jargon. The tutorial will reference some file, or the kernel, or things in the bootloader and ramdisk, but without any prior knowledge of most of those, it’s like reading a foreign language. Seeing the big picture of how things jive together so that the small things make sense is a rabbit hole of pages that are easy to get lost in.