I DONT want to build a system from the ground up, which I expect to be a common suggestion.
Arch kind of is building from the ground up, but without all the compiling and stuff. It’s really not as hard as it sounds especially if you use a̶r̴c̷h̴i̵n̵s̴t̷a̶l̷l̵ and you do get the experience of learning how it all fits together through the great ArchWiki.
That said one can learn a lot even on Debian/Ubuntu/Pop_OS. I graduated to Arch after I felt like apt
was more in my way than convenient and kept breaking on me so I was itching for a more reliable distro. But for stuff like managing systemd services and messing with Wayland, definitely doable on a Debian/Ubuntu/Pop distro. Just use the terminal more really, and it’ll come slowly through exposure.
It does, I wrote it in corrupted text for a reason, but if you want something functional you can use it and then see how it set it up for you and still go set up the rest of the services yourself.
When I switched to Arch, it used the Arch Install Framework, that predates even
pacstrap
, and I still learned a fair bit. Although the now normalpacstrap
really doesn’t hide how the bootstrapping works which is really nice especially for learning.Point is mostly if OP is too terried they can test the waters with archinstall (ideally in a VM).