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.
Did you find you had a lot of trouble getting new peripherals to work? Things like wireless mouses/headsets?
I’m on a distro another commenter suggested, EndeavourOS, and the only time I encountered an issue was a laptop with a less than common fingerprint reader. But it just took 15 minutes of searching to figure out how to see what the exact hardware was, and once I did, I saw someone had a driver for it in the AUR, which is a blessing in general. Everything else has just worked, including my 15 year old printer haha
For most things it has not been an issue. Mice and keyboards have all been plug and play for me. Bluetooth headphones also work just fine for me. Setting up a printer was probably easier to do than in windows. My USB DAC, external hard drives, USB SD card readers, etc. have all been plug and play.
A persistent issue in Linux, however, are gaming peripherals. Anything which requires proprietary vendor software to configure RGB settings may be an issue. OpenRGB detects and allows me to configure the RGB on my Logitech G Pro Wireless Mouse, and I picked up a secondhand Drop CTRL mechanical keyboard which I was also able to reprogram in Linux, but broadly speaking any peripheral which requires dedicated software to program may or may not allow reconfiguration on a case-by-case basis. The last time I had to boot into Windows was to re-bind the key-map on an off-brand USB footswitch, which was a one-time fix and then it has worked fine since then. Similarly, the RGB on the keyboard in my Gigabyte laptop can only be configured from Windows.
On the laptop side, the main things to watch out for will be compatibility issues with fingerprint readers and certain oddball WiFi chipsets, but generally speaking my peripheral experience has been good.
I personally had a ton of issues getting a cheap Bluetooth adaptor to play nice with my switch pro controller at first, but I recently did a clean install of EndeavourOS and it has since worked quite well.
Other than that, the only hardware issues I have had was Fable Anniversary trying to light my GPU on fire for some reason.
Hehe.
I haven’t had any issues getting stuff to work on Arch. I had a really hard time getting my webcam working in Pop, which is plugged into my monitor, and then the monitor into my computer. When I plugged it directly into the computer I was able to configure it and then I could put it back into the monitor and it worked. But those kinds of edge case scenarios will pop up when using Linux, regardless of the distro. The difference is that the OS is not going to try to block you from fixing it yourself, like Wondows or Mac do.