this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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I am not a tech wizard. As soon as my new minipc got home with Windows 11, I installed CachyOS on it. I found out later that it's based on one of the "difficult" Linux variants, but everything went super smoothly (I might have just been lucky. i don't know, don't take this as advice!).
Yes I had to follow a few instructions on creating an installation USB key. That was the hardest part. But my relationship with windows had become too abusive. I do want my computer to "just work" and let me do my stuff, but that's not what windows is doing any longer
Arch and its variants(CachyOS, EndeavourOS, and Manjaro) are just "difficult" insofar as they usually need you to understand the basics of using the terminal, and how to look up documentation as needed.
With CachyOS, I haven't played much with the others so I can't speak for them, you could get away with using the GUI tools shipped by default for a long time and not have any problems.
If it works for you, that's what matters! Difficulty is subjective, too.
CachyOS is what I'll be jumping to. Thanks to the stupid hardware price surge, my initial plan of just buying a new stick of SSD and a bigger HDD for stuff for the move is not viable anymore. So it just takes a while because I'm making sure all the personal data I have on my only stick of SSD still running W10 is safely copied off of it. Not a lot can be done with my current NTFS formated HDD unless I want to gamble with my personal data doing partition magic (I don't want to gamble).
I'd like to think jumping to an arch based distro with guardrails will help me learn linux safely. I'd have the cachy and arch wiki and forum to learn from.
It’s somehow satisfying to get a brand new machine with Windows pre-installed and never let Windows boot even once. 😎
I'm on EndeavourOS, which like CachyOS, is a derivative based on Arch. They smooth over a couple of the things that make Arch difficult: the installation, and initial packages.
Part of what makes Arch difficult is that it updates its repositories very quickly. That's good in many ways, because you get new features and new drivers more quickly, but sometimes things are buggy or break. From what I've heard, it's honesty fairly rare nowadays, but it's still a best practice to check archlinux.org before proceeding with a major update.
Anyway, I'm in a very similar boat. I've bounced off of Linux for various reasons in the past, but between Linux getting better and Windows getting worse, Linux is the "just works" option for me. It's not perfect, but any snags I've had have been smaller, less frequent, and more often fixable.
thanks for the advice on checking archlinux.org. I'm still fresh and in the honeymoon stage of this and I'm sure I'll hit some snag at some point!
The general population isn't even aware that Linux exists.
I'm not saying that installing Linux is something the general population is incapable of. My comment was in response to all of the people astounded that people still use Windows.
And I didn't mean to disagree with you. I'd be sheepishly part of that general population too if Microsoft hadn't actively tried so hard to annoy their users. Jumping ship to anything that is not "the default" that comes installed with your machine feels... refreshing after you've done it, but scary before.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I didn't think you were disagreeing, I just thought I didn't make my point well enough (which I didn't since I didn't reiterate the stance I was referring to).