this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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first time using linux, how screwed am I? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Cikos@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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recently i just finished building a new pc. mostly for gaming since my only exposure to linux is steam os and i heard its uses arch with kde plasma so i try to emulate it as close as i can. however soon i realized how different it is and it requires more setup than i initially thought. i spent a whole day or two setting it up and i read now im responsible on maintaining it, what does it mean? is it just finding and testing drivers? or system update? what is the easiest way to do it? and what i getting myself into?

when i was about to install steam i found a tutorial on it with 3 - 4 pages full of text and was a bit overwhelmed, i decided just set it up using discover with flatpak, the problem is when i was about to find out how to do that i read mostly people really hate when you ask how to enable it in arch, is it really bad? should i just use konsole instead?

im not very tech savvy and at first I was really reluctant to use konsole but since i decided to use arch its inevitable that i have to use konsole and so far its not that bad, yet.

I'm just wondering for the long term, should i just change distro? or i should just powertrough arch and see where it goes.

thank you for your time.

edit:

thank you for all the kind words, support and information everyone. i decided that i'll stick with arch until it breaks and ill see either i retry arch or try different linux flavors. i never feels so excited about os since i was messing around in win 2000

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[–] bigpEE@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

I second this. The initial setup is the hard part. Give it a couple days. The arch wiki is the best resource in the whole Linux ecosystem in my opinion. If that's the long manual you were looking at for installing steam, know that 90% of it is info on strange edge cases and all a typical user will need to do is sudo pacman -Syu then sudo pacman -S steam (I forgot you have to enable the multilib repository if you haven't already. You seem smart, you'll find the info in the wiki)

A couple times a year or so something will break after an update. When that happens

  1. Google if anyone else has posted your exact problem
  2. See if chatgpt knows anything
  3. Humbly post in the arch user forum

One of those will solve it. Good luck!

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 6 points 3 days ago

WHOA. Please be VERY HESITANT to use anything ChatGPT outputs. Sanity check any commands it gives you from other places first.

[–] Cikos@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

i see. thank you for the info. i dont exactly remember if i have enabled multilib, it does sound familiar. maybe i alr enabled it when i tried a bunch of random things..