I know my way around a command line. I work in IT, but when it comes to my personal fun time more often than not I’m quite lazy. I use windows a lot because just plugging in anything or installing any game and it just working is great.
But support for windows 10 is ending and I should probably switch sonner rather than later, so I’m wondering if Arch would be a good pick for me? For reference, I mostly game and do Godot stuff in my free time.
My 2¢ is that running Linux, you play the role of user and of sysadmin. On some distros you only put on the sysadmin hat once in a blue moon, but on others you’re constantly wearing it.
My Arch experience is a few years out of date; I felt I played sysadmin more than, say, Debian Stable, but it wasn’t too onerous. I also had an older Nvidia card, so there were some…fun issues now and then.
I use Debian on my machines now, and am happy. Try some different distributions! Even better, have
/homeon its own partition (better yet, own disk) — changing distros can be nice and easy without worrying about your personal data.I tend to agree, but I also don’t see it as a fault of Linux/Arch. If you’re not the sysadmin for your own system, who is? I’d rather do it, assisted by the collective knowledge of the community, than have Microsoft do it for me. For the last few years it’s only required a handful of interventions, with the vast majority of time being spent on initial setup and (re) configuration rather than fixing bugs or addressing breaking changes. So IMO it’s more of a test of your personal willingness to invest time into learning and building things than your ability to diagnose and solve technical issues.
I don’t mind being the sysadmin of my own machine (I prefer it, in fact). It’s just that I don’t want to spend free time troubleshooting some obscure problem specific to my build because I chose an ASUS motherboard and I don’t have drivers for my wireless headset or something. At least not when I’d rather unwind playing a game.
If you’re already an admin at work, you might not want to do any system administration at home. Well, until you find out that Microsoft is making some obnoxious decisions on your behalf, that’s when you suddenly find the motivation to do some research and tweak a bunch of settings. Situations like that will also lead to frustrating moments when you find out that your hands are tied, and you end up looking for workarounds. Spoiler: It doesn’t get any nicer after that.
On the other hand, if you’re running a system that requires you to take responsibility, a lazy admin will end up in frustrating situations too. It’s not that simple to balance these things. You need to know what your priorities are and what kind of sacrifices you’re willing to make.