My first foray into Linux was Mint on an old laptop. Then on my desktop I can't quite remember what I used, but I stumbled across the rolling release versus point release divide in distros. I think I wanted a more up-to-date PHP version at the time, and debian/ubuntu were both slow to update to cutting edge had me jump to Arch, at least for development purposes. That was 2017, gaming on Linux wasn't really great back then.

I ended up dual-booting Arch on my desktop, and for all the supposed complexity, if you can read a manual properly, and work through the guides on the wiki… it actually leaves you with a better understanding of how Linux is put together. So long as you're aware of what commands you're putting in.

If I were to compare it to anything, then it's the same sort of difference between building your PC for yourself (Arch), against getting something custom built (ubuntu) versus getting a prebuilt system (Windows). And you know, since migrating to Arch I haven't actually reinstalled once—people who do that are, and this may be controversial, but they're doing it wrong. If you fuck up majorly, like running rm -rf / then sure, you'll have to.

A tip for using the terminal, when you're trying to discover things, you can use tab completion to speed things up. You don't have to type entire commands, or entire directories/filenames. Of course it won't give you any arguments for a script or program, that is what man <command> is for, or a quick search online.

Only a few weeks ago did I finally scrub Windows from my system, I'm never going back, and if I really need it… I'll look into a virtual machine.