With much help from a friend here (an unofficially related app, so I'm unsure of username here), I successfully dual booted my laptop to Arch Linux.

Tried Debian, but must have missed something, because it tried to format my whole SSD, which isn't good since my work software only works in windows.

Going to be a change, but I'm kind of excited. To the friend who helped me, I appreciate you and how late you stayed up to help me troubleshoot ❤

That's awesome!

Formatted your whole SSD?
SSD's don't like that at all.
They stand only a few formatting processes, until they die in pain.

Why is that?
Because of the technology traits of RAM like storage, which only allows a specific number of read and write access.

@TylerDDevRant That was kind of true for the early ones, the SSDs produced now are quite resistant.

The amount of write cycles is in the thousands. You can easily fill and wipe hundreds of terabytes on a 250GB drive.

After a lot of wear, sectors will move before they fail. Your drive will SHRINK, not die — SSDs even have reserved space to copy to, if your drive is "full". Of course there is a point where it will completely go dark, but it's usually in the multiple Petabyte range.

Not that you shouldn't keep backups of important stuff of course, but there really is no reason to worry too much about wear.

I have even been using an SSD as a security camera drive — it cycles through 80% of the drive every single day, and has been doing that for 5 years now.

@TylerDDevRant *tried to*

@QueenMorgana I hope you have lots of fun with Arch, it's one of the best distros to quickly learn a lot about Linux, and it offers all the tools to make it completely your own customized operating system.

Their forums are not a fun place though... very hostile.

@bittersweet
It depends what it is about. The arch wiki is very well maintained, everything you need is on there. People from every distro go there. The forum is used mostly by the maintainers of the wiki/packages, sure they could be more welcoming. But I also get the "go to the Fucking wiki you're answer is on there... We build it to not have to deal with this shit" kind of Additude.

@Triskelion

Very true. I think it also has improved, but Arch used to be very unstable especially when running updates. Things would just break (and break HARD), and the maintainers knew in advance things would break.

There was this mindset of "lets keep it simple, we don't warn about or automate the fixes within the package manager, we just expect users to keep track of all posts on the forums".

A lot of users considered that a bit of an extremist version of the keep it simple philosophy, and the forums were a continuous flame war.