Arch is great. However, I would never recommend Arch (or an Arch derivative) to a first-comer to Linux.
Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go crazy.
Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go crazy.
Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few months & a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat. Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.
I will say Arch wiki is amazing, even if you're not using it. I'm on Debian nowadays and still often refer it for random obscure hardware setup details.
What mattered most at the beginning was good installation documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was intentionally simple, largely because it was created and maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally understood by a single human mind.
Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware/Arch approach depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but then what? From a beginner’s perspective, you’ve just installed something somehow—and it looks like a crippled Windows machine with fewer buttons.
Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what each component was and how it fit into the whole. The realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks—and that I might actually master the entire structure, or even build my own pieces—was deeply motivating.
That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which stayed with me forever.
That was when you compiled your own kernel and installed software by running ./configure && make && make install
Normies fleeing Windows dumpster fire today won't do that.
Arch Linux just sits somewhere in the middle, where you don't build anything, but you get a guided tour of partitioning and formatting a disk, installing some set of packages and setting up a bootloader, from a fairly rich adn comfortable command line environment of a USB live distro.