A long ramble from a newbie Mint user considering Endeavour and seeking advice

General system Newbie
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(Just warning you, this post turned out to be a huge wall of text that took several hours to write, so I’m sorry in advance! There is a TL;DR at the end)

Good afternoon, everyone! I’ve found out about EndeavourOS a while ago, and recently took interest in it and have been observing it and its community lately. I’ve heard the EOS community is nice and welcoming, so I’ve decided to try to participate in it. c:

I’ve been interested in Linux for quite some time, and wanted to switch to it ever since Windows 7 was End-of-Life’d and I wasn’t terribly fond of switching to 10. Unfortunately, when I had to switch to 10 back in March 2021, my attempt to switch to Linux (I had chosen to dual-boot W10 with Manjaro at the time) backfired horribly as I did not understand partitions and broke my entire installations, and because I was very inexperienced at the time, I decided I was too dumb to ever understand Linux and reluctantly backed away and reinstalled Windows 10 to stick with it.

Nevertheless, as time passed and I grew increasingly frustrated and skeptical of Windows 10, and especially when Windows 11 was announced (which, though I think it looks pretty, worsens the issues I have with 10 and I don’t even know if my mobo has TPM 2.0), I decided to look into switching into Linux again - and, this time, making sure to extensively research about how Linux and its installation work, so I’d be able to actually understand what’s going on and how to pull off my basic computer needs. And, after a long time of researching, reading documents (and the Arch Wiki and ProtonDB), watching various LInux tutorials in YouTube (as well as asking loads of questions on /r/linux4noobs on Reddit), I am happy to say that I finally took the courage to switch to Linux for real (and no dual-booting this time!) since November 2nd, and I’ve managed to adapt quite well to the Linux ecosystem with Linux Mint’s friendly and forgiving UI guiding me through the hard parts ^-^

However, although Mint has worked rather well for me and I love how newbie-friendly it is, I’ve been getting frustrated and disappointed with it lately - specifically, its (and Debian’s) repositories are quite old and missing a lot of things that often were available in places like the AUR, and there have been several moments where I wanted to install a program that either wasn’t in the Mint repos (and required me to either compile it from source or start adding external PPAs and creating a frankenstein), or it had dependencies that themselves weren’t in the repos, or the repos only had a very outdated version that was not compatible with the program in question. I also have been frustrated with Cinnamon due to its filesystem having issues displaying image previews, and it having compositing baked as a hard-dependency to that DE (which kills my game performance because I’m stuck with an old Nvidia GPU), but that’s more of a DE issue than a Mint one.

These issues have pushed me to take an interest in switching to a Rolling-Release, Bleeding-Edge distro instead of sticking with Mint, as I’d like to be able to reliably get more up-to-date repositories, packages and dependencies that can give me better features and reliably work with current programs that depend on them, as well as not having to reinstall my OS with every new release like Point-Release distros do. In addition, I was also interested in being able to set up my OS the way I wanted, as although I like how Mint came with several programs pre-installed to serve as convenience, I didn’t like that I often wasn’t aware of what was already installed and what wasn’t, and the fact that Mint’s repos are so outdated also makes it a bit more grating to me. Plus, I wanna have whatever DE I want OOTB. Based on all those things, I figured that the distro best-suited for me would be Arch due to letting me set it up the way I wanted and having a wide, up-to-date repository and the AUR making things convenient.

But, despite all that, I wasn’t too keen on using Arch; I’m not very fond of using CLI installers as I feel it’s very easy for a clumsy person like me to accidentally break it or get overwhelming, plus the Arch community is pretty infamous for being really elitistic and unfriendly to new users. I wanted something Arch-like that would walk me through its installation in an easy way, but also give me the same powers and freedom that Arch would. Manjaro is popular for being “the easy Arch”, but I heard a lot about it being unstable due to using a different repository and holding back packages causing AUR packages to break, plus pamac DDoSing the AUR (and its installer breaking on me before made me unkeen to use it again), so I’m not interested in using it again. Meanwhile, EndeavourOS so far seems like it ticks all the boxes for things I’m looking for, and it made me feel rather enamored with it from what I’ve seen - it just looks like the ideal distro for what I need.

That said… I’m worried that, precisely because it’s still vanilla Arch besides the installer and shipping with Yay, it may be too much for someone like me to handle. I mean, I don’t think I’m a Linux newbie anymore – I’ve been happily using Linux Mint for nearly a month, and on top of having extensively researched it before switching, I’ve gained enough experience to generally understand how things work, plus I like using the terminal for doing stuff like installing packages and zipping files, as well as running basic debug commands like inxi – but I’m still not sure if 1 month of experience with a beginner Linux distro is enough to carry me through EndeavourOS (especially since I still often prefer using a GUI in most cases, plus I don’t know if Debian knowledge carries over well to Arch), and the first week of me having switched to Linux cold-turkey and being overwhelmed by everything and trying to get stuff to actually work was such a terrifying and stressful experience (though rewarding after I finally got it to work) that I don’t know if I can go through it all over again.

So… ultimately, TL;DR - I guess I mostly wanted to ask, how difficult would it be for someone like me to adapt to EndeavourOS? Is it considered a “hard” distro like Arch is, or is it more of an “intermediate” one? Is my ~1 month experience with Linux Mint and my casual-but-shallow finagling with the Terminal sufficient to carry me through or at the very least serve as a good starting point for EOS, or is it not enough to handle such a more complicated and involved distro?

(Please do keep in mind that, although I want something more customizable and bleeding-edge and am okay with and even expecting to do manual configuration through the terminal to install and setup some programs, I also want something that “just works” without dealing with breakage all the time, so please do let me know how EOS fares on that front, too. Also, don’t worry about anything Nvidia related – I only plan to switch to EOS when I get a new AMD GPU I’ve been planning to get for a while now, 'cause I’m tired of dealing with Nvidia bullshit :p)

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Additionally, there were some other things I wanted to ask, but decided to put on a second post 'cause the OP is already absurdly long enough as it is. They’re basically multiple things I’ve been concerned about;

  • How does EndeavourOS handle sound and wifi drivers? My wifi antenna is from TP-Link but sadly appears to use a Realtek driver (R8188EU); it worked out of the box in Pop!_OS and Linux Mint’s live environments, and in bare-metal after I unplugged and re-plugged it, but I’m not confident they may work in EndeavourOS or anything Arch-based since Ubuntu-based distros probably already include those proprietary drivers by default for convenience. Meanwhile, I have audio issues in Mint that cause the system to blare heavy static noise every time I access some websites (one of them being AMD’s), forcing me to run “pulseaudio -k” on the terminal to fix it, and I don’t know whether this issue will still be present or not in EOS.

  • Between XFCE and Plasma, is there a DE that any of you would consider to be more appropriate for me given what I described? I honestly prefer having a more up-to-date system and I heard XFCE is older, which pushes me more onto Plasma, but at the same time I heard Plasma can be unstable and laggy, plus while looking up EOS experiences I saw quite a lot of cases where choosing to install Plasma resulted in a broken and incomplete installation of Wayland being bundled with it, and then Plasma not working because it auto-set itself to use the broken Wayland. I really like both, especially since there are really cool themes I like for both, but I just can’t decide which one to use. Plus I dunno if either of them would be too advanced for someone like me too accostumed to Windows and Cinnamon. (I disliked Gnome because it was wildly different from what I’m used to.)

  • Some addendums for DEs: I personally like using Cinnamon’s classic taskbar setup where applications you have open are layered like on Windows XP and Vista, rather than the more modern style from Windows 7+, so ideally I want a DE that can be set to work like that. I also really miss the ability to have Discord’s taskbar icon show the little badge indicating how many pings I have like it does on Windows - it worked on Pop!_OS’s Gnome DE, but not in Mint’s Cinnamon for some reason.

  • Despite my earlier worries about Wayland, I was actually somewhat considering switching to it since it’s newer and more secure - which is a big part of why I was considering using Plasma, as it supports that and XFCE may not do so for a very long time as it’s explicitly based on Xorg. I’m just unsure if it’d be wise for someone like me to undertake such a process, considering I’m not exactly a skilled Linux user and it looks like setting it up and getting stuff to run (not just native Wayland apps, but also apps only built for X that have to be run through XWayland) looks really involved. It doesn’t help that the only guide I found for setting up Wayland on Arch was specifically designed for use with Tiling WMs, and I’d very much rather use a traditional Stacking WM shipped with my DE of choice (in this case, KWin; or xfwm4 if I go with XFCE), so I’m a bit nervous it may not work very well. Or if it’ll work with either of the two GPUs I am interested in getting (the RX 570 and the RX 5500 XT), and with multiple monitors as I plan to get one of these later down the line.

I’m once again terribly sorry for making such long posts… I just wanted to leave everything about my situations and concerns clear and clarified to make sure people can help me as much as possible. :c

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Welcome to the forum!

There is a lot of information…

I would say don’t worry too much, if you are interested in learning I do not think it should be that difficult. It’s pretty easy to get started and maintain your system on eos. The major problems always come up with proprietary hardware and similar problems arise on other distros.

I suggest you try to boot into the live iso and test your wifi and sound. If it works you should be ok. If something doesn’t you can start by checking the AUR whether that particular driver is available. Then make a separate thread focusing on the problem at hand.

Don’t forget, posting your system infos and logs as these are worth more than a thousands words paragraph. That’s the major trouble we encounter in this forum, new users post some sort of description of the problem but key infos about hardware is missing making it impossible to troubleshoot without asking many follow up questions.

It’s also a great opportunity to use the terminal, which is a powerful feature of Linux often hidden in other distros a in a way trying to make it easy on new users. I learned more in 1.5 yrs using this distro than 10+ yrs Ubuntu. Just beware that arch is rolling release and you need to buy into that if you want to switch over. Meaning update your system at least once a week and check what packages get updated just in case. Also make backups, weekly, never hurts.

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We have users here of all skill levels and levels of experience. How long you have been using Linux isn’t really the issue. What does matter is how open minded, patient and willing to learn you are.

There are many people here who will help you and no question is going to get you in trouble.

It depends what you mean by breakage. If you mean the system doesn’t boot, that isn’t common. Especially if you don’t have a nvidia card. On the other hand, since Arch generally gets the newest versions of applications right away, it isn’t uncommon for an application to have a few bugs shortly after its release.

The installer and the kernel install some drivers. If you need a different driver, you generally just need to install it.

No, it is entirely personal preference. They all have oddities and quirks and they all work fine for many people.

That being said, if you like Cinnamon, just use that. It would be one less thing you have to learn.

plasma’s support for wayland is still experimental and has quite a few issues. If you really want wayland, you should consider using gnome.

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Just reading in your post above you learned quite a lot within a month, that’s pretty impressive! I think you will fly on eos :wink:

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If you know Cinnamon and like it. I would start there. You already know it, and from my own experience I’d say it’s one of, if not the most stable DE you can use. I’d start there. Learn all of the other “Arch” stuff, then play with xfce/plasma/whatever you want to try after. You’ll be fine. Learn to search, and then ask questions when you can’t find. Everything in the fine Arch Wiki is applicable. And if you’re willing to learn, as @dalto noted, there’s a lot of us who are willing to help. We just don’t like people who want everything in a copy and paste help vampire scenario. We’ll always help those who are willing to help themselves.

Welcome!

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We are always the harshest critics towards ourselves, but give yourself more credit than that. You tried something. You made an attempt. Sure it ended up a failure, but we learn from good and bad things, it’s how we learn and progress. You are not too dumb if you’ve ended up here, quite the contrary!

With that said though, I tend to recommend new Linux users to give Pop!_OS a try OR Solus Budgie a try. Pop is a stable distro, which works amazing out of the box. Depending on your hardware you may or may not have to adjust some settings after an install. Solus Budgie is a lot like the Cinnamon desktop you are familiar with and Solus provides a very stable rolling release model similar to Arch. I recommend these two because they generally work very well out of the box and you don’t need to configure everything in the terminal, which is kind of the point on EndeavourOS, the “terminal-centric” approach.

Being new to Linux is fine, we’ve all been there before, but if you’re looking for a Linux experience that is stable and gets out of your way (aka gives you no headaches), I’d try Pop!_OS or Solus Budgie. IF you want to get your hands dirty so to speak (and don’t mind getting a headache once in a while), and have a desire to learn and troubleshoot things, then EndeavourOS would fit that bill in that case. Keep in mind EndeavourOS is an intermediate type of distro, the other two I mentioned I would argue are very beginner friendly. I also recommend them because I have loved and used them both in the past.

It all just depends on your hardware and what you want to do with your system. But there’s nothing wrong with trying things out and see how it goes. As others have said, if you have the patience and the time to learn give EndeavourOS a try. Most issues you’ll come across others will have already dealt with them, so you’ll have some good reference points on the EndeavourOS wiki here: https://discovery.endeavouros.com and for most everything else the Arch wiki has a lot of useful information as well, though it can be daunting at first so just a heads up: https://wiki.archlinux.org

Whatever you choose, just remember to be kind to yourself, be patient, try to understand how things work, and the most important one is have some fun doing it :slight_smile:

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That’s it and welcome here!

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Welcome @SimplyTadpole
The first thing you could do is boot on the EOS live ISO and post your hardware info using this command. Post the link that it provides.

inxi -Faz --no-host | eos-sendlog

Personally i don’t think you’ll have too many issues but you will need some help along the way. Cinnamon is good on EOS but so are any of the other desktops. Each one is unique in some way and it will take some time before you get to see and understand some of those differences. You may not until you actually use a different desktop. If you’ve only used Cinnamon you will find differences. I like Cinnamon but i prefer KDE Plasma and i also use Xfce but i have installed and used all of the desktops here. Gnome is great also if you like Gnome and so is Mate and so is Budgie. There is also I3 Window magaer and Lxqt and the two Community Editions Bspwm and Sway. I currently run dual boot Windows 11 and Eos Xfce. I also triple boot Xfce, Cinnamon and KDE with rEFInd boot manager.

It’s best if you could provide us with the hardware info up front and we can look at it and see if there is anything to watch for. If you are switching to amd then it makes things easier also because it uses amdgpu open source drivers. As @fbodymechanic said if you know and like Cinnamon it’s a good place to start because you are familiar with it. Then once you get an understanding of EOS you’ll be in a better position to switch to a different desktop at some point. We are here if you need help. No questions are dumb questions. Mint is a very user friendly distro and i have helped other users with no Linux experience to using 4 or 5 different distros including EOS now.

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That is exactly what will happen when packages out of the AUR are installed - you get a Frankenstein distro. AUR packages can introduce funny dependency quirks over time. The more you take from the AUR, the greater the chance of breaking something.

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That is pretty extreme perspective. Installing packages from the AUR doesn’t create a “Frankenstein distro” Also, if you manage your AUR packages, they won’t create “create dependency quirks over time”

It is always true on any system that the more packages you have installed, the more complicated maintenance becomes. Even if they are all repo packages.

Further, if you don’t manage your system properly, you will have problems no matter where your packages come from.

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Someone new to Arch may see the AUR as a fantastic playground and install whatever tickles their fancy. Eventually, they will learn a lesson, that the AUR should be used sparingly and carefully. You are an expert, I am not. I have seen numerous complaints from people who dive in with excitement, only to have problems they did not anticipate. The AUR is not an official Arch source of software and some software is poorly maintained. It is a buyer beware place, for sure.

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I guess it depend on what programs you are installing from the AUR. Obviously if you install a huge pile of AUR programs you could run into issues. I don’t think this is a normal use case. I have AUR programs installed and i don’t have any issues but i only have a few such as spotify, pamac currently. I have had others installed but i wouldn’t see myself having more than maybe 6?

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Do you like cinnamon? If so, EOS has cinnamon. I use cinnamon myself, and as far as I can tell, there are no differences between the Linux Mint and EOS implementations of the basic DE.

As far as alternates to cinnamon, XFCE as it has a closer “feel” to cinnamon, in my opinion. Also, if you like the XP/Vista look, you can get some nice themes here.

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That is OK.

That is OK too, jumping in with both feet and ending up over your head is a good way to learn. But the lesson shouldn’t be “Don’t use the AUR or you will have problems”. The lesson should be, “Even when I mess something up, it can be fixed”.

That is the same as the people who have a problem with one distro or DE and so keep switching to new ones only to find different problems with each new selection.

Taking the time to learn how to overcome those challenges is not only rewarding but it leads to a successful time with an Arch-based distro.

If you don’t want to learn and grow, an Arch-based distro isn’t right for you.

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Thank you for all the help, everyone! I really appreciate all the support and advice c:

(I don’t really know how to quote other posts on this thread, sorry… I’ll just include my responses in Blockquotes)

Zircon34:
Don’t forget, posting your system infos and logs as these are worth more than a thousands words paragraph. That’s the major trouble we encounter in this forum, new users post some sort of description of the problem but key infos about hardware is missing making it impossible to troubleshoot without asking many follow up questions.

Ohh, gotcha, thank you for the heads-up! That will spare me from potential future embarrassments ^^’ And I’m once again sorry for making such a huge post.

Zircon34:
Just beware that arch is rolling release and you need to buy into that if you want to switch over. Meaning update your system at least once a week and check what packages get updated just in case. Also make backups, weekly, never hurts.

sudo pacman -Syu, right? Does it really let me know what packages will be updated? I thought it was automatic ^^’ Either way, I actually thought that updating it so often would actually be risky due to me potentially ending up with broken or glitchy updates (one thread in this forum mentioned someone who ran -Syu weekly often getting bugs they had to manually repair, which scared me from updating that often when not installing new packages)… Either way, I will definitely make extensive use of Timeshift :stuck_out_tongue:

Zircon34:
Just reading in your post above you learned quite a lot within a month, that’s pretty impressive! I think you will fly on eos :wink:

Oh, I didn’t think I came off like that, actually… I was pretty scared I’d visibly look like someone who knows basically nothing ^^’

fbodymechanic:
If you know Cinnamon and like it. I would start there. You already know it, and from my own experience I’d say it’s one of, if not the most stable DE you can use. I’d start there. Learn all of the other “Arch” stuff, then play with xfce/plasma/whatever you want to try after. You’ll be fine.

Actually, I want to switch away from Cinnamon as there are multiple things about it I’m not very happy with (one of them being that there aren’t really any themes for it I’m interested in, while there are multiple for XFCE and Plasma that I liked), plus I’ve had issues with Cinnamon’s Window and File Managers. I still like it and respect it for helping me ease into Linux in a familiar environment, but in the long-term I want to use something else.

Scotty_Trees:
We are always the harshest critics towards ourselves, but give yourself more credit than that. You tried something. You made an attempt. Sure it ended up a failure, but we learn from good and bad things, it’s how we learn and progress. You are not too dumb if you’ve ended up here, quite the contrary!

With that said though, I tend to recommend new Linux users to give Pop!_OS a try OR Solus Budgie a try. Pop is a stable distro, which works amazing out of the box.

Thank you for the kind words, really. I appreciate that c: The failure did indeed help me learn a lot, as that’s what kickstarted my desire to actually learn from what I did wrong and realize that Linux is not a drop-in replacement for Windows and I needed to adapt. (Which also helped me actually understand how partitions work; I had no idea how they worked before!)

I didn’t mention it in the original post to avoid making it even longer, but Pop!_OS was actually the first distro I tried out! But sadly, I didn’t really adapt very well to it, as its DE and layout were super confusing to me and I had a few issues with the Pop Shop (I don’t really remember what happened, sadly), so I wound up distrohopping to Mint the next day and found it much easier to get into than Pop. ^^’

Scotty_Trees:
Being new to Linux is fine, we’ve all been there before, but if you’re looking for a Linux experience that is stable and gets out of your way (aka gives you no headaches), I’d try Pop!_OS or Solus Budgie. IF you want to get your hands dirty so to speak (and don’t mind getting a headache once in a while), and have a desire to learn and troubleshoot things, then EndeavourOS would fit that bill in that case. Keep in mind EndeavourOS is an intermediate type of distro, the other two I mentioned I would argue are very beginner friendly. I also recommend them because I have loved and used them both in the past.

Very interesting and fair analysis, thank you. c: (I had no idea Solus was rolling release as well o_o)

On one hand, I would indeed rather have something that doesn’t give me many headaches, as while I have a lot of free time I also deal with a lot of anxiety, and I don’t want my computer to make me collapse from despair as I freak out I irrevocably broke everything and I’m too stupid for Linux and I should’ve stuck with Windows where everything just works ^^’ Yet, on the other hand, I consistently get cravings for more when I’m on beginner-friendly distros and feel the desire to have more control over my OS (especially when I look at what others do on Arch-based distros), and I also do genuinely want to learn more about how it works. (Even while I was on Windows, I already took an interest on Linux and actively researched more about how it worked because I wanted to understand.)

I think I will probably give it a try, and do my best to learn and adapt to EOS’s way of operating, as despite its challenges, I really admire what it’s capable of, and I don’t think I’d be happy if I remained in Mint. It’s reassuring that EOS is an intermediate distro instead of an advanced one, as it means it’s probably able to lend more easily to people like me who have enough experience to easily handle the beginner distros, but not enough to handle the hard ones. ^-^

ricklinux:
The first thing you could do is boot on the EOS live ISO and post your hardware info using this command. Post the link that it provides.

inxi -Faz --no-host | eos-sendlog

It’s best if you could provide us with the hardware info up front and we can look at it and see if there is anything to watch for. If you are switching to amd then it makes things easier also because it uses amdgpu open source drivers.

Oh, that sounds handy, gotcha! However, should I wait until I’m able to get the AMD GPU first before I boot the EndeavourOS live environment, or will I be fine with my current Nvidia one? Will it risk messing up with my Mint settings? (When I tried out Pop!_OS in a live environment to experiment with it first, it often messed up with Windows’ clock timezone, for example.)

ricklinux:
Personally i don’t think you’ll have too many issues but you will need some help along the way. Cinnamon is good on EOS but so are any of the other desktops. Each one is unique in some way and it will take some time before you get to see and understand some of those differences. […] As fbodymechanic said if you know and like Cinnamon it’s a good place to start because you are familiar with it. Then once you get an understanding of EOS you’ll be in a better position to switch to a different desktop at some point. We are here if you need help. No questions are dumb questions.

Thank you for being so supportive ^-^ Like I mentioned, I actually wish to use something other than Cinnamon, but I understand that many of them are very different from each other (for example, I couldn’t adapt to Gnome at all), so I hope that XFCE and Plasma aren’t too difficult to adapt to from Cinnamon. I tried out EndeavourOS in distrotest.net, and XFCE seemed pretty easy to get into and relatively similar to Cinnamon, though I didn’t quite understand how to customize themes and the appearance of the taskbar. I also have yet to try out Plasma…

(All the AUR talk)

I admittedly did not know that using too many packages from the AUR was risky. That sucks :confused: I was already aware from the Arch Wiki’s warnings that AUR packages are not officially maintained or supervised by the Arch developers (and that there were also a few cases of malware being uploaded to it), but I was also under the impression that there were certain AUR uploaders flagged as “trusted” and that I could look up more information about specific AUR packages to learn more about their stability and potential compatibility issues. Is this not the case?

I heard that the official Arch repository itself is really small compared to other distros’ like Ubuntu’s, and that most of the softwares and programs more casual users would like to install would be unobtainable through Pacman and only obainable through the AUR. If the AUR is inherently unstable and should be used as little as possible, then what should I do when I want to download programs that are only available in there? Would I have to just compile everything from source?

dalto:
That is OK too, jumping in with both feet and ending up over your head is a good way to learn. But the lesson shouldn’t be “Don’t use the AUR or you will have problems”. The lesson should be, “Even when I mess something up, it can be fixed”.

That is reassuring to hear, but admittedly I’m still in the dark regarding the issues that would pop up when overusing the AUR. What are some examples of problems that could crop up, and do you recommend any resources that explain how to fix them and recover from them? (Preferably, something that is easy for less-experienced users to understand because I don’t want to get overwhelmed ^^')

nohbody:
As far as alternates to cinnamon, XFCE as it has a closer “feel” to cinnamon, in my opinion. Also, if you like the XP/Vista look, you can get some nice themes here.

I’ve ran into these, actually! Sadly, the Windows XP theme doesn’t look very accurate, but I did like the 95 and Vista themes. ^^ I just hope it’s possible to tweak it a bit to my liking. I also really liked Chicago95 as I’m an absolute sucker for retro aesthetics, but it adds some stuff I didn’t like, such as editing the terminal to display a Microsoft copyright and a C:\ faux drive prefixed to all terminal directories.

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You’re really kind of overthinking things.

It’s just an OS. Install what you want. If a problem of some sort arises, deal with it when it happens. You may never have any issues at all.

Relax. Enjoy the ride.

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Highlight the text you want to quote and a “quote” button will appear.

Yes, it will give you a list of packages that will be updated and ask you to confirm.

Jumping in really is the only way to go. If/when you hit snags, feel free to ask. We don’t mind helping here.

That may be because there are two ways to look at the system clock. It can be set to match the local time or UTC. If you had Windows set to local time and Pop set to UTC they would constantly be resetting the clock on each other.

Generally speaking, the OSes should co-exist just fine.

Plasma is probably easier to customize and more customizable.

It really isn’t. At least, not in the sense of making your system unstable as a result of having AUR packages.

Not exactly. Each AUR package has a web page that you can view and read other peoples comments questions and feedback.

The repos are pretty large actually.

I don’t think this is the case. We have a topic here where people list how many AUR packages they have and most people have less than 20 I would guess.

It isn’t, that is nonsense.

The most common problem is when an AUR package is built from source and when the libraries change versions you need to rebuild it.

The next is probably that a dependency conflict appears and you need to intervene. This is less common but does happen.

I recommend you wait until you actually hit one of these problems and then ask us about it. We will explain what to do and after a couple of times you will understand on your own.

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TLDR; If you want to learn, are willing to read, and will ask questions, then not very difficult at all.

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Just jump in and enjoy the journey. :rocketa_purple:

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