As an Arch user: welcome! It’ll be a little work, but you’re gonna be a-okay.

You, too, can become a 1337 h4xx0r with this one (1) simple trick: Read the manual!

Which is both definitely correct, but also profoundly unhelpful for newbies. But seriously, there is so much documentation, blog articles, video tutorials etc. for Linux, if you put in some effort everyone can go from newbie to hacker/programmer/gentoo user.

Last time I looked, the closest thing to a “manual” published by Linux Mint was mostly a manifesto about why they’re not using various bits of Ubuntu. Sure the good old man command is still in there but Cinnamon is supposed to speak for itself.
True that, it’s more relevant to commandline applications and whatever has a page in the Arch wiki (which is a great resource regardless of distro). Ubuntu itself does have extensive manuals, which are mostly still useful for Mint when they’re not specifically about the desktop environment.
I was recommended mint to start and quickly poked around too much and reached some limitations. Took like a month. Then i switched to arch and have been on that for like a year. The docs are amazing and i have learned SO much in a v short time
What were the limitations you encountered?
I was trying to do stuff with start up scripting and window tile management that my mint install was having a hard time with. Arch and kde plasma fixed it
Sounds like your issue was more the desktop environment than the distro itself. Did you ever try to install Plasma in it?
Nope, it felt too closed for me anyways. I like arch a lot more. I have had next to no issues.
Those penguins appear to be Gentoo penguins, so in a way only one belongs
I bet OP wouldn’t even know if gentoo, chinstrap and adelie are penguins or linux distros
Adelle Linux? I thought there was only Hannah Montana Linux?
No no its a lively neighborhood, Rebecca Black Linux is also there.
Gotta Update on Friday 🎵
welcome in the cat friendly penguin group

Sure, arch has a steep learning curve, but in the long run easier to use than others since it has better documentation.

Since you’re already doing a fresh install, might as well create the root partition as a BTRFS with opensuse-style subvolumes for easy snapshotting and rollback. And since you’re so close might as well also add LUKS1 encryption across the partition, since TPM is untrustworthy for REAL security. You’re going to be using a grub config with rd.luks params and a protected keyfile so you don’t have to decrypt the partition twice per boot like some scrub, of course.

Of course, technically there is nothing wrong just a plain arch install as long you’ve devised a proper opsec strategy, alongside daily, weekly and monthly full-disk offsite encrypted backups!

And yes indeed, Arch linux is the distro that was ordained to me!

Arch forces you to learn about Linux internals and components. Most people don’t need to know these things to work productively with their computers. Arch is more of an „build your own OS“ toolkit than a well defined base operating system. Two Arch installs can be more wildly different to use than Fedora and Ubuntu. That’s why you need the mountains of documentation. Arch wiki is great, but it’s not perfect or correct. Lots of outdated info lingers there as well.

BTRFS with subvolumes is they way to go, I agree. Mint sadly still defaults to EXT4 with only an encrypted /home. I installed Mint recently and a modern partition setup like you describe was difficult to get working. I don’t even remember, what I ended up with.

security

The AUR is a security nightmare.

easy snapshotting and rollback

That‘s an area Mint is pretty weak in.

OpenSuSE

Makes fantastic distros, that more people should use.

The AUR is no more a security nightmare than Linux itself. Much of it is built by god knows who, and the fact that code is inspectable, doesn’t mean it is.
Yer a lizard, Harry.
Tbh as an Arch (btw) user I’m not really some magic computer wizard, I struggle with basic python, I often forget command arguments (I take heavy advantage of fish but sometimes it doesn’t know the arguments either), I don’t know how to do much scripting, I don’t make my own config files, and my de is cosmic. Remember that most advanced Linux users are less advanced than people think (occasionally less advanced than even they think).

I installed arch using archinstall a few years ago just because i got sold on a custom hyperland config, never looked back.

I have yet to understand what the fuss is all about with it being difficult or not new user friendly.

Yes there are weekly updates, and on occasion they do break something, but that was never different on windows.

I’d say most of that is just outdated opinions based on a time when archinstall wasn’t yet included in the live ISO and using it was also more frowned upon and seen as a “cheat”. Thankfully we mostly got over that second part.
You do have to install/setup a lot more stuff yourself, fwiw. That’s probably largely what it is, that there’s little that comes pre-baked. It’s basically a build-a-distro toolkit.

Tbh i think the hypeland configuration solved pretty much all that for me.

The project has been renamed and changed maintainer since but its still very much alive if anyone wants to check it out.

github.com/HyDE-Project/HyDE

I had never seen a tiling window manager before and my only experience on Linux was a little ubuntu server to run my Minecraft server from.

Isn’t Hyprland created by a fascist?
I used to do that but switched away from Hyprland after cosmic released.
Ha, this is basically me. Still wouldn’t recommend rolling release to newbies, but my Linux knowledge is basic at best.
The closest thing to a programming language that i know is html. Messed around with bash once. Love arch
All roads lead to Debian. Except for Gentoo and Slackware. Those are deadends.
A few times per year I distrohop, but there’s always small glitches in every distro I try, except for Debian. At least on my laptop, Debian just works.
I have the Mint (it’s fucking good) and no need nor ambition for any other system. Especially an elitist shit which break after an upgrade.

I distro hopped for a week, and it was the little things that were dealbreakers.

I love Mint. Mint is love.

Running Mint xfce on an N100 HTPC with couple of docker containers. I believe this is the most stable OS I ever used. Never breaks, updates are coming regularly. Easy to use for my wife who’s never seen Linux in her entire life. Makes 0 hustle and barely consumes any resources. Kind of a “set it and forget it” setup. Fucking love it!
Mint’s a solid choice, I used Mint as a primary or only distro for 10 years, and I’ve still got it on my laptop. But don’t pigeonhole yourself trying to be not like the other girls. I’ve got Bazzite on my HTPC because Cinnamon is kind of ass at 10 feet, I’ve got Fedora KDE on my desktop for better Wayland support, and Fedora Gnome on a tablet because it’s the only thing that remotely works as a touch-first OS that I could get to actually run on that tablet.

See? I knew doomscrolling served a purpose. Bookmarked for the info about the tablet.

Does it work well with low spec tablets? 2Gb RAM 32 (64?) disk?

The machine I have it on is a Lenovo Duet 3i, which has a Pentium processor and either 4 or 8GB of RAM. I bought that machine specifically to use in my wood shop, I wanted a fanless machine that could run FreeCAD.

As a touch device, it’s just this side of unusable. It likes to forget what orientation it was in when waking up from sleep, and doesn’t like to correctly find out while waking up. Gnome will sort of mostly function with gestures and larger touch buttons, most apps are still designed very strictly for mouse and keyboard. The onscreen keyboard isn’t fantastic. I can confirm that Windows Vista had a better tablet experience than present day Fedora Gnome. But it functions.

I tried Fedora KDE, and trying to get Fedora KDE to be a tablet OS was a fool’s errand, the features aren’t even half-baked, they’re on the counter waiting for the oven to preheat. Fedora offers a KDE Touch image which I found runs like boiled butt.

I have no experience with ARM tablets; this is on an x86 tablet (or one of those Surface knockoffs with the keyboard that pops off).

haha imagine having to wait for an update to break your system (i use arch, and tried to config limine snapper sync)

once had arch, once cachy os, in both the cases after few weeks something was broken after update (libreoffice, matlab)

never again

I had a Kubuntu install go south on me after an update and replaced it with Cachy and I’ve been really digging it so far.
I have been in Debianland for the last few years, and I’m also in Cachy right now. Not all wine and roses, but I’m also liking it.

i actually switched from cachy to arch because when kde plasma 6.6 released it wouldn’t let me past the login screen (i’d log in, it’d start loading and freeze the system)

i used a snapshot to roll back the update and waited for plasma 6.6.1, where instead of freezing it’d just restart. then 6.6.2 released with the same issue as 6.6.0 so i just gave up and installed arch

btw, i still havent figured out limine+snapper configuration yet

This is a kind of bullshit troubles what I am talking about. And they can arrive when you are in hurry and really need your computer. In my opinion, Arch is just for tinkering fun and ego boosting.
Im the guy who has to tell all the kids mint is run by volunteers who are not actually up to the task of running a secure OS. It’s not as bad as manjaro but it is not good either. Please stop making this people’s first distro, it’s an ubuntu fork that hasn’t needed to exist since spins came out.
I put a lot of will strength to not downvote this.
Why? It’s the cold hard truth. Mint was created as an Ubuntu alternative that would be prettier and appear more like windows. It has never had solid corprate backing or even pillars of the FOSS community working on it. It’s a hobby project and not even a unique one anymore. Just use a fedora, buntu, debian or suse spin for new people.
The “cold hard truth” is that volunteers are more than up to stripping some the nonsense back off of ubuntu, and plenty of the people that made it good back in the day are involved with mint now. It’s no one’s favorite but this much hate for the beigest of distros is weird to me and your take on its origins is just plain wrong

No. They are not up to it. It’s the #1 distro on Lemmy and it shouldn’t be.

To be clear the only distro I hate is Manjaro, mint I only think about when people here remind me it’s popular. Downvote away, your oppinion is meaningless.

Manjaro is a very good Distro

It has never had solid corprate backing

This is why I love mint, among other reasons.

Recommending Ubuntu in place of Mint is a total derangement.

And thankfully you will never work any real security job
Isn’t Linux mostly either a hobby project for a huge majority of it’s contributors, or the origin of the rest?
Why is Mint less secure than other general purpose distros?