Why Linux Noobs Should Start With Arch

📆 15 Jul 2026 18:35 UTC +01:00
📕 594 words ⏳ 4 min.
🏷️#Linux#Rambling

In my last blost, I said that I recommend Arch as a starting point for new users in Linux. And to those who know Linux, this might seem a bit odd, but hear me out.

There are a few reasons why Arch is great for beginners and this blost is going to be me going over these.

Reason One - Learning

The biggest and most important reason is education. Seeing as Arch makes the user do everything for themselves in terms of setting up, etc, I see it as a perfect opportunity for new users to learn how Linux works and learn the different tools. Yes, things will break, but that’s part of the fun. I left it years before I tried to install Arch myself, and when I finally did, I regretted having not done it sooner. It taught me a lot, and all the problems I had along the way gave me the reason to learn how to fix them. I built myself a decent system that was fun and enjoyable to use, and I could say was handcrafted by me. You don’t get that with Ubuntu, Mint or anything like that.

While this might sound counter intuitive, a new user breaking things that is, if we just baby new users, they will never learn to figure things out for themselves, and will become help vampires (I heard this term a couple of years ago in The Linux Cast’s Discord server). Constantly bombarding online communities with “How do I fix x?”, “Why doesn’t y work?”, etc, which, while they will get an answer, most likely, it will be a copy paste job and move on. There’s no learning there. And that’s what new users need, the knowledge and confidence to troubleshoot and fix problems, or at least be able to give more details when asking for help than just “It’s not working. Why?”.

And, even with the big desktop environments, the included GUI application stores don’t work. Pacman doesn’t work in a way that Software and Discover can handle. So to install and manage software, users have to use the terminal, which turns some people away, but new Linux users should learn the command line, so they can look after their system, and get things working again, should a graphical environment fail and you be left in a black and white TTY console with no explaination of what’s going on. - This happened to me once, but now I can do a bit of digging and at least find where the issue is coming from.

Reason Two - Newer Software

One thing that Windows has over Linux is the plethora of cutting edge application versions. Many Linux distros don’t push version updates as frequently, before they have been tested. Debian for example can get very outdated, but Arch is all the latest versions of packages in its repos. Windows users always have the newest, latest & greatest versions of their software - because it’s pushed upon them - so this could be something that new users are looking for when they switch to Linux.

Final Thoughts

I was amazed by how much I got taught when I manually installed Arch Linux and then by maintaining my system for over 6 months, it was a huge learning curve but I loved it.

Now that I’ve experienced Arch, I am building my specific knowledge of Debian using the generic knowledge that Arch and the Arch Wiki has taught me.

And that’s all for this one. BYEEE!!!

I Use Debian BTW!