I’m a chronic distro hopper and here is my advice. If you want to try out new OSs make sure to backup your data as the probability of screwing everything up is relatively high. I use syncthing to ensure all documents I have exist outside my laptop so there is no cost to me breaking everything, but you can also just use an external hard drive and not be fancy. Whatever works for you.

Arch really isn’t hugely different especially through the Endeavoros route which gives you sane defaults and packages without grinding through documentation. Just be prepared to be the car enthusiast of computing. Car people love understanding internals, messing with stuff, fixing issues that bother them, looking under the hood, asking for help, etc. That is the best analogy for the more, let’s just say, enthusiast Linux environments.

Don’t let that scare you though. Be prepared to learn a thing or two, backup your data, and make sure you have a backup stick with another OS on it to undo whatever you break and you’ll be fine. I think I have literally gone through 100 reinstalls on the low end and everything is fine. Unlike a car your computer is fairly cheap to fix if it is just software.

I can only recommend EndeavourOS, it’s a fantastic way of getting into Arch

Linux newbie who also started with PopOS here. I’d definitely recommend Endeavour, It’s been my daily for 2 months now and what finally let me ignore my Windows drive completely.

Only thing I’d add is grab timeshift, it’s saved my bacon more than once already.

EndeavourOS is cake to install and maintain. NVIDIA drivers will install out of the box.

No need to wait.

To use the AUR, use yay instead of pacman ( same syntax ). Or use eos-update —yay to update as it takes care of a couple common Arch upgrade pitfalls ( infrequent ).

The Arch wiki is great so documentation should not be an issue.

With EndeavourOS, I would just use yay. It is pre-installed, uses the same syntax, and includes packages from the AUR.

If you ever have trouble, try eos-update as it builds in a few tricks that Arch users will eventually run into ( like having deal with outdated keyrings or pacman lock files ).

Pacseek can be a nice addition as well when you are searching repositories for something or trying to understand what a package is. Not essential but nice.

Imo it’s better that you wait, you could try installing vanilla Arch in a vm and distrohop once you’re ready, if PopOS is suiting all your needs imo there’s no reason to get Arch on bare metal (A vm for fun and learning would be satisfying ig), on a side note, getting the proprietary NVIDIA driver to run is very simple in vanilla Arch (like a 4 steps or so)

Pacman is the most braindead straight to the point package manager of them all, it won’t take you very long to memorize the 3 letters you need to use it.

Use a pre packaged easy to use Arch like Endeavour OS, Garuda Linux (best arch I’ve tried, very fast) etc. But avoid Manjaro - it WILL break your system.

I’ve also switched from Debian-based disrtos (Ubuntu) to Arch about two year ago. I installed EndeavourOS and to be honest, it’s simpler in some parts and I understand it better. But in using Arch, you should have a look at wiki too for things you do, since you should do some little things by your own (In my case, it was enabling Bluetooth, Fstrim, Hardware Acceleration, …).

Here’s a good place to start: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations

Also AUR is a really great way to install any package that it’s not in repos. It actually turn anything into a Pacman package.

Arch is fairly easy, the difficulty is a bit of a meme:

• Wiki is huge, read it before you do things.

• As others said, pacman and AUR are dummy easy to work with, you generally don’t need to worry about dependencies etc, pacman and AUR helpers (like YaY) will install everything for you.

• AUR is massive but understand that it is maintained by users.

• The part that is hard is installing arch manually, archinstall mitigates this, you don’t learn too much by doing it manually, except how to partition disks through CLI and mount them (which, granted can be useful), also chroot is a good thing to know how to do if you brick something.

• A clean arch install will give you a TTY environment, if you depend on wifi, make sure the install sets up networking before you reboot (archinstall has a separate option for this). Archinstall does give you options to install a WM / DE.

• I recommend checking out Hyprdots by prasanthrangan for a very comfy Hyprland environment, but you could of course just set up something you are more comfortable with.

• Nvidia drivers are not too hard to set up, the above dotfiles do it for you on a clean, minimal install. But if you want to do your own thing just follow the wiki on NVIDIA, you will need to be able to string together a few concepts independently by following the wiki links (to remove the KMS hook and add nvidia modesettings.

I would stay on PopOS, Arch is a huge hassle sadly, and it doesn’t have the nice touches pop os does. If you want a rolling release I suggest openSUSE Tumbleweed

Installation is a breeze with archinstall and the wiki makes most tinkering/ problem solving fairly easy. Having used mint and Ubuntu for a short time previously, I personally find it easier to tinker in arch than either of them.

Archinstall should offer installing the proprietary drivers once it detects your gpu. Other nvidia gpu problems depend on your de/wm choice. I use Wayland on kde with an Nvidia gpu and the biggest problem I have is some xwayland windows flickering, other than that it’s just small nuisances.

For installing and updating packages get yourself an aur wrapper and enable the optional repos.

Go for it, I say. YMMV, but Pop!_OS for me was a headache, just didn’t play nice with my rig. I’d go with Endeavor over vanilla Arch, just to make the install process simpiler.

For the terminal, you can learn how to use it at a basic level, I believe someone here already posted some commands. Write those down and what they do, or use Endeavor’s Welcome Screen, and you’ll be alright…or you can just install Pamac (yay pamac on the terminal. Go with pamac-all or the one that says no snaps) or Octopi, or re-enable the Discover Store if you wanna go with KDE or Gnome software and have a GUI menu for all that. If you feel lost, Google, the Arch wiki, and the Endeavor forums are your friends. The Arch wiki especially is super detailed, and can be applied to Linux in general.

Transitioning, i feel, YMMV. Again, i had a pretty bad time with Pop!Os and I wasn’t a big fan of adding PPAs in general. It’s nice not having to deal with any of that, personally. And up-to-date packages means my stuff isn’t behaving oddly for the most part (there’s breakages, small and big, but that’s with all distros. Something is bound to screw up sooner or latter) Only thing I mind is constantly having to babysit the system…but that’s the nature of rolling releases (by babysit, i mean updating is a daily thing. i know i can leave it for a week or two without upgrading and it’ll be fine, but outta habit, I do a system wide update (yay in the terminal, or through pamac if ya got it) before shutting down for the day.) but I haven’t found a stable release I vibe with, so I put up with it

Try Garuda Linux. It’s even easier than EndeavourOS and it’s great. I am using it myself and I prefer it over EndeavourOS.

I’d say use EndeavourOS and if you choose NVidia in the menu when you boot the installer it will install the distro with NVidia drivers from the start and there’s nothing to fiddle with. The updater (called yay) will henceforth update NVidia drivers as needed. It’s one of the most handsfree NVidia experiences there is as kernel and driver updates are automatic via Arch.

I also suggest installing apps via Flatpak, this way there wont be problems with library versioning and system and apps are separated nicely. You can install KDE Discover for example to have a GUI app “store” that supports Flatpak. Just make sure to have the right Desktop portal installed. I run KDE but for some reason needed both the kde and gtk portals to get nice fonts everywhere.

You install stuff with Yay or Flatpak, e.g. “yay -S xdg-desktop-portal-kde” or “flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam”. If you use Flatpak install Flatseal, it can handle permissions, for example you can give Steam access to another folder you want to use for games, for example I use /home/protonbadger/Games/ and gave Steam access to the folder this way.

SUSE Tumbleweed is a good alternative and more polished for desktop users, but you’ll have to install NVidia drivers manually afterwards, there are wiki guides and youtube videos showing how. Occasionally when a new kernel update comes out the NVidia drivers trail a day or two so be aware of that on SuSE. NVidia have their own official repository with SUSE drivers.

I suggest trying both first in virtual machines for a few weeks.