>>16 Is there anything in particular you're thinking of that has high variables or tedium getting set up that you can screw up easily?
I'm OP. I got pretty tied up with networking, I'd say this has the highest chance of tripping people up. Second highest I'd say is sound. I am glad that I had the experience of getting stuck and solving these issues though and I'd know exactly the steps to take if I had a networking issue on any other distro now as well. I think Arch pays off the best and is your best friend for information. Yeah the Arch-based distros are a good choice too because you pretty much get the consistency with arch's documentation. When I was on Debian I found myself using Arch wiki and since slight differences slowed me down I decided I prefer Arch so it's all consistent syntax and and directories and whatnot.
Honestly apart from networking and sound proving to be a bit of a challenge (I just didn't get how exactly I was meant to use Pipewire at first, regular PulseAudio is probably ez), I have found everything else easy. Getting on a DE and playing a modern game on Steam was ezpz with minimum chance of breaking anything. You are honestly mainly just installing a package and then potentially also enabling something in systemd most of the time, very straight-forward.
Since you have to do things bit-by-bit and it can take an hour to be set up nicely, I'd strongly recommend something like Manjaro if you need to experiment or test something quickly in a fresh environment, though.
Is there anything in particular you're thinking of that has high variables or tedium getting set up that you can screw up easily?
I'm OP. I got pretty tied up with networking, I'd say this has the highest chance of tripping people up. Second highest I'd say is sound. I am glad that I had the experience of getting stuck and solving these issues though and I'd know exactly the steps to take if I had a networking issue on any other distro now as well. I think Arch pays off the best and is your best friend for information. Yeah the Arch-based distros are a good choice too because you pretty much get the consistency with arch's documentation. When I was on Debian I found myself using Arch wiki and since slight differences slowed me down I decided I prefer Arch so it's all consistent syntax and and directories and whatnot.
Honestly apart from networking and sound proving to be a bit of a challenge (I just didn't get how exactly I was meant to use Pipewire at first, regular PulseAudio is probably ez), I have found everything else easy. Getting on a DE and playing a modern game on Steam was ezpz with minimum chance of breaking anything. You are honestly mainly just installing a package and then potentially also enabling something in systemd most of the time, very straight-forward.
Since you have to do things bit-by-bit and it can take an hour to be set up nicely, I'd strongly recommend something like Manjaro if you need to experiment or test something quickly in a fresh environment, though.