You're feeling upset about your experience with Arch.
You're feeling upset about your experience with Arch.
If you're referring to archinstall, it's still under development and not fully finished. Using alternatives like Archfi is independent of the developer and isn't supported. I suggest checking the official installation guide at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide. Garuda is quite large and may cause problems, so it's best avoided. Many of their decisions seem unclear and can create extra issues, especially recently. If you prefer Arch-based solutions without complications, Manjaro works reasonably well, though it can run into compatibility challenges with the Arch User Repository and package builds.
The challenge lies in the fact that I haven’t secured the necessary drives yet, and there aren’t any spare drives available at the moment. With Ubuntu/Kubuntu, I’ve been struggling for over an hour trying to activate the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso, but nothing seems to work. I’ve saved it from the Ubuntu repo, yet every attempt results in a 'durrr file not found' message. The host machine has the ISO, but VirtualBox won’t mount it. I’m planning to restart the system and check if that resolves the issue.
I also installed Arch, but it feels sluggish and tends to freeze, giving me the impression it doesn’t perform well in a virtual environment. The hardware I’m using is an older Haswell chipset, which might be the root cause. My experience with Manjaro has included some lagging and instability, and I suspect Garuda might have been overly bloated. For now, I’m leaning toward using Mint or Kubuntu, hoping Kubuntu can run smoothly in a VM.
To be clear, my virtual machines are optimized to use as much processing power as possible—each VM receives 3 cores/6 threads and 16GB RAM. I’ve capped the graphics settings and enabled 3D acceleration, which is suitable for my GTX 980. It’s not outdated, just fairly old.
I believe Kubuntu is the right choice. The everyday machine will run Kubuntu, while my previous setup will switch to Mint.
I prefer setting up from the terminal. Browsers, kdenlive, Audacious, Steam—all work easily from there. The only time I avoid the terminal is when I face a scenario like Linus did with Pop! OS, where he lost his desktop. On my Kubuntu VM, I managed to install Steam through the GUI, but the rest required terminal commands. I watched a tutorial on configuring samba via SSH, and if I had the drives locally, I’d handle it myself right away... But I still need to get the new machine up and running.
In short, if you truly want to use Arch in the long run, setting it up manually is essential. This approach forces you to understand its configuration, which aids future maintenance. Arch is extremely manual—every helpful alias and shortcut from other distros disappears. You must learn everything using full commands, which may take extra time. But it also gives you deep insight into how Linux functions, a skill that applies to any Linux system. Most people choose Arch because their desktop with an old Arch installation running Gnome has over 1,200 packages. A standard Ubuntu install (after the first reboot) usually has more than 2,000. If you didn’t install it specifically or treat it as a dependency, it won’t exist on your system. Some might say the 1,200 packages are too many, but others find it useful. This can be both a benefit and a challenge since you need to remember many small packages for the system to work. Use this guide to get a working setup—https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide. It contains everything you need for a solid start.