There’s a particular kind of confidence that only comes from not knowing
anything. I had it in abundance the evening I decided that my next operating
system would not be Windows 11, would not be a gentle beginner distro, but
would be Arch Linux — or at least an Arch-based distro, chosen after roughly
forty minutes of watching other people’s desktops on YouTube.
My qualifications at that point: I had once used the Windows Subsystem for
Linux to run a single command a tutorial told me to run. I did not know what
a display server was. I believed, genuinely, that “the terminal” was one
specific program.
The plan, such as it was:
- Back up the important things (I forgot two categories of important things)
- Flash a USB stick
- Install Linux
- Be a Linux user, smugly, by bedtime
Step 2 produced the first casualty of the evening. The tool I used cheerfully
offered me a dropdown of every disk in the machine, and I can now tell you —
with the calm of a man who has done his grieving — that an external backup
drive and a USB stick look remarkably similar in that dropdown.