I've had some pretty fantastically horrible experiences trying to get Linux set up, but Arch was one of the smoothest installations I've had (apparently, I am l

I've had some pretty fantastically horrible experiences trying to get Linux set up, but Arch was one of the smoothest installations I've had (apparently, I am learning!) I've finally been running Ubuntu for about a year now (as a dual-boot with a Windows machine, but I use Ubuntu for almost everything now on that box). Back to the point, I got Arch up and running in a VirtualBox VM on the first try, and adding packages has been pretty straightforward (slightly different syntax, have to su to root instead of sudo, but aside from that pacman seems pretty similar to apt-get). Good luck!