I’m sure no one in this community needs to be convinced to try Linux. But I love it every time I see a non-Linux person trying Linux and showing other people that it works. (Also nice to see that Jeff Gerstmann is still around and doing alright after getting screwed over by Gamespot for like 15 years.)
Yeah, the Linux community has a lot of ‘If I know something that you don’t then it is because I am smart and you are dumb; and not because we have different experiences’ type people. I’d guess the neurodivergent ratio is a bit higher in general 'round here. It’ll eventually be something you just ignore.
It’s a meme in the Linux community that no matter what distro you pick there will be some neckbeard in the comments who will tell you how wrong you are for your life choices. (Unless you choose Arch, then you are one of the Chosen Ones, btw).
As to your issues, each of those is solvable individually, but you are correct that it is frustrating to have to deal with them all at once on top of learning a new OS.
BTRFS
btrfs is a bit of an advanced topic, ext4 will serve you perfectly fine until you have enough experience to even care about the features offered by btrfs and it’s not like Windows where you’re locked into your choices forever, you could spin up a btrfs volume and move your system to it with minor hassle once you’re familiar with the tools.
Package Managers/Flatpak
One of the biggest difference between different distros is the package manager. You’ve been using apt, but on Arch-derivatives you’ll use pacman to install from the official repository.
However, you will find that a lot of the software that you want to install won’t be on the official repos and so, in Arch, you will need to turn to the AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/).
So, for example, if you search for orca-slicer (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?K=orca-slicer), you’ll see a bunch of packages. orc-slicer-bin and orca-slicer both have high votes and popularity. In the AUR world, you’ll often see package and package-bin. This is basically ‘do I want to compile it myself or do I want it pre-compiled’, also these two package (maintained by two different people typically) may have slightly different versions depending on how actively they are maintained.
Here, we’ll go with orca-slicer-bin. The way you install from the AUR (there’s an easy way, but first the ‘real’ way) is to find a folder where you would like to store these things. I use ~/projects/AUR but the location is just an organization thing, it doesn’t affect anything, the package will be installed via pacman like everything else.
Open a terminal, navigate to your directory, (create it if needed) and clone the project (the Git Clone URL at the top of the AUR page)
Now you have the files locally, so you can navigate into the directory and use makepkg to build and install the package. Since this is a -bin, it won’t need to compile.
makepkg is a script that automates building and installing, -s says ‘find and install any dependencies also’ and the -i is ‘After build (which is done because it is a -bin) also install’.
Then you’ll see some lines where the script verifies that the package is built, grabs dependencies, etcetc. If you’re prompted you can , usually, just accept the default by just pressing enter (sometimes you’ll want to read/modify the PKGBUILD, but generally not).
Eventually you’ll see pacman being called and the application will install like normal.
But, that’s a pain in the ass, nobody wants to have to open a browser and manually clone repos etc. So most people use an AUR helper so that the interface is essentially like pacman.
So, now do the same process as above to install yay (or yay-bin).
…
Once that is done, now you can use yay just like pacman. For example, searching for orca slicer:
Or installing orca-slicer-bin:
You don’t need to use sudo, it will prompt you if you need elevation.
Yay will also install from the official repos (you can largely replace your usage of pacman with yay) and if you just run ‘yay’ with no switches it runs a full system upgrade.
Flatpak
Flatpaks are another way of packaging software. The idea is that it’s a pain in the ass to have one piece of software that requires a package being at version 10 and another package that won’t work unless you have version 11 installed. With Flatpak, the software comes in a container with all of the dependencies (which can include other flatpak images).
You can think of these containers are little virtual machines that only run one piece of software (they’re not full virtual machines, they share the same kernel as your system, but the technical details are an advanced topic).
Much like yay and pacman, you can search install flatpaks with the flatpak command. flatpak --help will give you a list of commands. The wiki ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Flatpak ) is much better. For the average user you really only need to search and install. So:
Once they’re installed you should be able to launch the applications via the usual methods.
The common issues that people will run into is due to flatpak’s essentially acting like a virtual machine.
So, to the flatpak /home/<youruser> doesn’t exist because in its virtual environment you do not have a user directory. So interacting with files on your actual machine, outside of the flatpak, can be annoying in cases. Ideally, the packages will configure themselves to be able to see any relevant directories that they need to see but not always.
The ways to install software on Linux may seem harder than ‘download .exe from Internet, run as administrator’ but it helps protect you from things like running untrusted executables from the internet as root.
If you have a smartphone you’re already with installing from Repos. App stores are just Repos with price tags. Rarely do people go download .apk files and run them on their phones, everyone knows that you use the repos. Smartphones are simply copying Linux’s package manager systems, so you’re already familiar with this process but know it by another name.
I can’t speak to any specific distro (I manually install Arch from the install medium, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster intended) but you’re going to run into similar problems everywhere you go.
You can try to fix your problems by distro hopping and that may work in some specific cases. That being said, you will have more success if you plow through the problem and use that problem as an excuse to learn how that part of your system works so that you can fix it. This will almost certainly be faster than completely reinstalling your system as you go forward in your Linux usage.
If you run any problems and need some help just make a post with as much details about the problem as you can. You’ll get assholes (see this thread) but there are some knowledgeable people who are happy to help fix things.