RalfWausE

Honestly? Do you want the "real experience"?

Set up a VM (or a spare computer) and start an Arch install following the various tutorials.

Why?

Well, Arch may not be the best daily driveable distribution if you want just an uncomplicated experience, but setting it up from the bare bones boot medium and slowly following the (very well written) instructions in the wiki it will give you a solid foundaition going forward and UNDERSTANDING what you are doing.

Also - while not explicitly Linux and quiet a bit dated - i HIGHLY recommend to read The UNIX Programming Environment, written by the guys who are responsible for this branch of the OS evolution in the first place. It is a nice read to understand why - to this day - some things are the way they are.

Edit: Typo

You really don't see it, right? This whole "Oh my god, he is a fash!" talk has to be a godsend for big tech and the corpos as a whole. Instead of cooperating - even with people who might hate your guts in another setting, and fighting THE MAN - you rather opt for infighting and purity testing. If you would think about it - just for a minute - you would discover that you have more in common with an ultra conservative, confederate flag waving redneck than with the "nice, diverse, clean and woke" corporations and organisations who are removing freedom from us all, cut by cut, slice by slice...

I pay for Posteo and Metager, i would never want to go back to Goole...

If you drive in germany with this mindset you have a very good chance to get the opportunity to exchange your drivers licence for some bonus points in Flensburg.

Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse... in the end, it doesn't matter. If you (you as in "newbie Linux user") find a distro that captures your attention that is all that matters. For me - personally - it was some Slackware based distribution that hooked me back in the 90s....

Yes, Omarchy is in some ways quiet... hacky and has a bit of a "style over substance" approach, but i think that is not THAT important for the role it fills. It remembers me of the various riced up setups from the early 00s (and perhaps late 90s, but my memory is hazy in that regard) that simply looked cool (i just say "compiz") and had this WOW effect on regular Windows users.

Omarchy has this and also benefits from an idiot proof setup routine. If it drags in people from Windows its good, some will start tinkering with it, some will dig deeper into the Linux / Unix world... its an entry level drug in a way.

I, personally, think Omarchy is the best "easier to install Arch" out there - you can hand out a flashdrive to anyone with at least the most basic IT-knowledge and they would get a working, useable and upgradeable system within ~20 minutes.

You spelled Forth wrong.

I don't give a shit about the political views of the creator of the software i use. I use Omarchy, i use Brave... it works great.

This is the point. About twenty years ago when I first met this guy I thought I HAD to convince him to upgrade to something more modern because, well, "new is better" I guess. Luckily he declined my offers and stayed with this system.

Now, this man is for me what would call a living legend. He bought this system when the PET was brand new, state of the art tech and was perhaps the first veterinarian in a radius of 100 km with a computer. From this point on he wrote himself tons of software for his personal use, modified this software for changing circumstances (and still does so!) and kept this system running.

THAT is permacomputing!

Honestly, the very best i got from a client of mine, a veterinarian who is about 80, he runs his whole Praxis on a Commodore PET (i mean, its a natural choice for a veterinarian), which he bought somewhere around the time i was born. His reason: "I don't need no Windows, i need no Linux or anything other than the computer i am accustomed to. It does what i need and it will do so till the day i die".