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- It doesn't really matter much which distro you choose.
- Use flatpaks - flatpaks sandbox your apps more than traditional packages. As a side effect, the package manager of the distro won't matter anymore.
- There are thousand of distros, stick to a popular one.
- Install packages on distrobox instead of directly onto your system if you use the terminal. Stay as close to the base image as possible. If you want to have access to all packages, install arch/endeavouros on distrobox and use the aur. If a package is not on aur, it's not published yet. With distrobox there's no reason to switch to another distribution because of package availability.
- Use a distro with which you can roll back to a previous state easily. If things go downhill, youcan always fall back. There are many distros that provide a very easy out of the box experience for that. If you can't fall back easily, ignore the distro or be prepared for the worst case
- Arch is for advanced people because you may set up your system as you like. There are many great distros that choose the base packages for you. You will have a great experience on most big distros. Most of them use GNOME. GNOME is great. KDE is awesome. Tough decision. Watch youtube vidoes about both. Install the other one in a VM to check it out. You may use an immutable distro like fedora silverblue/kinoite. You can switch back and forth by rebasing to the respective desktop environment.
Following is a good source for anyone looking into desktops https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/ they focus on an educated distro choice.
Read the arch wiki whenever you want to do something or want to know something. https://wiki.archlinux.org/ you want to know more abiut piewire? aw! You want to know about GNOME? KDE? Type
!aw KDEinto ddg, qwant or brave. Read the respecting documentation of your distro. Follow them on mastodon. Register to the forum. Join a matrix community.Watch great channels like "the linux experiment" on peertube. Yes peertube, why should you watch it on youtube if it's on peertube?
Arch is for advanced people
I'd say mid.. the Arch install process has got a lot simpler over the years and the wiki a lot better.
If you can
googleduckle effectively, I reckon even a sharp-minded beginner could handle it.The thing with arch is that you have to know a lot of stuff. You have to take care of selinux yourself etc. If you know what you do, everything is fine. At the same time you can be on tumbleweed, kinoite or any other distro and install aur packages with distrobox. For me, there's no reason to use arch. If you want to tinker with your system, go for arch.
If you kind of know what you do as a beginner, you can go for it as well, steep learning curve but you'll be more advanced than others in the same time.
I haven't actually touched selinux at all.. It's not 'officially supported' in Arch yet, although there are compatible packages available. I only recently discovered PAM which I have yet to learn too.