After some experience with Linux Mint, I gathered the courage to try another distro. I’d like to turn an old laptop into an IPTV receiver plus FTP/OpenVPN/HomeAssistant server with occasional desktop use. I first installed Windows 11 just in case my family needs to use it (it fucking sucks, the built-in PS/2 keyboard doesn’t work half the time but that’s an issue for later) but now I’ll be turning it into a dual-boot setup with Debian as the primary option. Please give me some encouragement, I’m really afraid of new things.
I’ll be installing Arch on my main laptop when I make the disk space and get the motivation (my mental state is almost as messy as the drive). I’ll also take the opportunity to reinstall Windows because it’s an old copy where I chose my real name as the user directory name (I didn’t know better back then), with a space and diacritics, which broke lots of things. But this is a server and I preferred Mint to Manjaro so Debian it is.
I would suggest when you decide to give Arch a go for the first time to start out with something like CachyOS to get your legs under you so you can easily understand it. That being said Arch is painfully easy to install now thanks to Archinstall but going the CachyOS route it’ll install the packages you need and then you can understand what you do and don’t need when it comes time to install regular Arch. Otherwise you might just install Arch and then wonder why some stuff doesn’t work because you didn’t install certain packages.
Why is archinstall “painfully” easy? Do you think its users will do badly at troubleshooting because they didn’t go through a setup process that teaches more about the system?
it’s because with Archinstall it tells you what to do/setup as opposed to the user having to utilize something like the Arch Wiki to set it up. So it acts almost like any other distro install. It walks you through the process.