Because either AUR helper is going to be pulling from the same AUR repository. Whether you use yay or paru, it is fetching the same files from the AUR. I am sure there are minor differences between the various AUR helpers, but all that I mean to say is that for your purposes it is probably not critical and you should use whichever AUR helper you prefer.

+1 in favor of using proton-vpn-gtk-app. That’s what I use.

I use yay with regular Arch, but any AUR helper on CachyOS should be the same thing.

For most things it has not been an issue. Mice and keyboards have all been plug and play for me. Bluetooth headphones also work just fine for me. Setting up a printer was probably easier to do than in windows. My USB DAC, external hard drives, USB SD card readers, etc. have all been plug and play.

A persistent issue in Linux, however, are gaming peripherals. Anything which requires proprietary vendor software to configure RGB settings may be an issue. OpenRGB detects and allows me to configure the RGB on my Logitech G Pro Wireless Mouse, and I picked up a secondhand Drop CTRL mechanical keyboard which I was also able to reprogram in Linux, but broadly speaking any peripheral which requires dedicated software to program may or may not allow reconfiguration on a case-by-case basis. The last time I had to boot into Windows was to re-bind the key-map on an off-brand USB footswitch, which was a one-time fix and then it has worked fine since then. Similarly, the RGB on the keyboard in my Gigabyte laptop can only be configured from Windows.

On the laptop side, the main things to watch out for will be compatibility issues with fingerprint readers and certain oddball WiFi chipsets, but generally speaking my peripheral experience has been good.

I had a similar issue. I actually wrote myself a text document listing out all of the programs I generally use post-install and any additional setup I did, so that way whenever I am setting up a new system I can quickly refer back to it and save myself a lot of time over doing one-off installs as I run into them.

Welcome! Coming from Windows myself, I made the jump to Manjaro (It has certain issues and I do not recommend it), then to Arch less than a year after. I have been on Arch full time for around 2 years now. After the initial setup, I have found Arch to be pretty low-maintenance and no harder to maintain than any other distro, hardly requiring more than the occasional yay -Syu --noconfirm in the command line to update things. As someone with less computer knowledge than an IT professional, I think Arch’s reputation for being difficult is overblown IMO, and I suspect mostly due to intimidation from the more involved setup process prior to the availability of the install script.

I don’t know if you have any familiarity with Linux already from your work, but regardless of what distro you go with, I would go into it with a mindset that you are learning a new skill. Some things are simply done differently in Linux than Windows and will require getting used to, such as how drives work using mounting points rather than drive letters.

Realistically, setting things up for the first time often requires additional steps and may not “just work,” but when using my laptop and gaming desktop from day to day, it works just like any other OS. Gaming has been great for me generally, and the work Valve has done to improve game compatibility on Linux has been spectacular. Most Steam games do, in fact, “just work” for me.

In the 2-3 years I have been using Linux, I have rarely had things spontaneously break as many folks seem to worry about, or if I do it is because of companies not supporting their Linux communities, like Discord not pushing out updates on time, or major-event changes like the move to the Wayland graphical stack on KDE 6 which undid some of my desktop customization settings.

Thanks for the reply!

I tried this, and it does not seem to have helped much, if at all. Visual elements like scroll bars and text boxes in Steam continue to flicker, and apps like Discord flicker or go completely black randomly. My main use case for this desktop is gaming, so sadly without more of a fix I am not sure that I can move away from X11 yet.

I do not think your issues are in any way unique. I am also using Plasma 6 on Arch with a 3080 Ti. Initially, it simply booted to a black screen with nothing but a cursor, and no ability to do anything.

Adding the changes to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf per @markus@hubzilla.markusgarlichs.de 's reply as well as adding those kernel params to my /boot/refind_linux.conf, and now it boots into a desktop, but I am seeing large amounts of flickering, windows going black, or visual elements flickering in and out. Looking at my installed packages, I already had both xorg-xwayland and wayland-protocols (per @Varen@kbin.social 's reply) installed.

It seems like there are still more steps before what I would consider a usable result. Personally, it was not “obvious” to me when Plasma 6 rolled out that I needed to do any of this.