from Luffy879@lemmy.ml to linux@lemmy.ml on 17 Feb 22:32
https://lemmy.ml/post/26143747
Arch is aimed at people who know their shit so they can build their own distro based on how they imagine their distro to be. It is not a good distro for beginners and non power users, no matter how often you try to make your own repository, and how many GUI installers you make for it. There’s a good reason why there is no GUI installer in arch (aside from being able to load it into ram). That being that to use Arch, you need to have a basic understanding of the terminal. It is in no way hard to boot arch and type in archinstall. However, if you don’t even know how to do that, your experience in whatever distro, no matter how arch based it is or not, will only last until you have a dependency error or some utter and total Arch bullshit® happens on your system and you have to run to the forums because you don’t understand how a wiki works.
You want a bleeding edge distro? Use goddamn Opensuse Tumbleweed for all I care, it is on par with arch, and it has none of the arch stuff.
You have this one package that is only available on arch repos? Use goddamn flatpak and stop crying about flatpak being bloated, you probably don’t even know what bloat means if you can’t set up arch. And no, it dosent run worse. Those 0,0001 seconds don’t matter.
You really want arch so you can be cool? Read the goddamn 50 page install guide and set it up, then we’ll talk about those arch forks.
(Also, most arch forks that don’t use arch repos break the aur, so you don’t even have the one thing you want from arch)
threaded - newest
Any windows power user or dev on a mac can follow a wiki, read a bit and learn.
Good for beginners? I didn’t describe a beginner right here. Anybody with experience in computing will find arch straightforward and satisfying. Heck, a CS student would probably go through a first install process faster than I do after 5 years.
What are the concept involved? Partitioning, networking, booting… These are all familiar fields to tons of very normal computer users.
Arch can be a good first distro to anyone who knows what a computer is doing (or is willing to learn)
Arch was my first distro after going back to Linux. I really liked learning the inner workings of a computer and an OS.
I know plenty of people who just want a plug&play experience with the only input for the install being name, password and date. For them, I would never recommend Arch, simply mint or pop_os would do just fine as the only thing the computer has to do is open up the browser.
I just want more Linux users, not specific distros. In the end if you know your way around Linux, the distro choice doesn’t matter, you just choose a package repo
I agree. There are only two types of distribution, rock solid plug n play and hobbyist/pro .
macOS is my daily driver, but I am a self hosting hobbyist (a bad one) and the moment you become involved with the command line of a multi user operating system, you need a level of skill, curiosity and patience that 99% of people don’t have and don’t want.
Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss, because of the different distros, assumptions, pre requisites, repositories, and so on.
I am a hobbyist, and I don’t mind digging around, but there are several times where I’ve put in a hour or more on what would be a 5 minute job for someone who was fluent - and even then sometimes I’ve got nothing to show for that hour.
It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.
Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.
One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.
the wiki could be way better honestly…
Only gets better if we make it better.
that, or having good documentation could be a requirement
FOSS is great but so much if it has just absolute garbage documentation.
Compared to garbage proprietary software documentation? At least if it’s FOSS garbage there are usually other helpful users on random forums.
The first Linux I used wasn’t part of any distro. A few years later I compiled Slackware to run bind and Sendmail.
Last year I tried Arch in a VM. I got to where it expected me to know what partitions to create for root and swap and noped out. It’s not 1996. I don’t have time for those details any more. No one should. Sane defaults have been in other distros for decades.
Debian welcomes you 💫
one of the main points of arch is for people wanting to learn these details. its not for everyone.
if you want a distro to just work, i second the suggestion from the other dude. get a debian based one.
just because a given person could make it work, doesnt mean they want to. i can personally fix a lot of these issues, but i dont wanna have to bother. i just want to accomplish the inane bullshit i turned my computer on for.
i just think an arch recommendation should always come with that disclaimer. newbies have to know what to expect else they will associate that experience with linux in general.
You’re focusing too much on the installation process, if installing Arch was the whole of the problem things like Endeavor would be a good recommendation for newbies, but they’re not. Arch has one giant flaw when it comes to being beginner friendly, and it’s part of what makes it desirable for lots of us, and that is the bleeding edge rolling release model. As a newcomer you probably want something that works and is stable. Arch is not, and will never be, that, because the core philosophy is to be bleeding edge rolling release. If you’re a newcomer who WANTS to have that and doesn’t mind the learning curve then go ahead, but Linux has enough of a learning curve already, so it’s better to get people started with something they can rely on and afterwards they can move to other stuff that might have different advantages/disadvantages.
We’re talking about the general case here, I’ve recommend Arch to a newcomer in the past, he was very keen on learning and was happy with reading wikis to get there stuff sorted, but realistically most people who’re learning a whole new OS don’t want to ask questions and be told RTFM, and RTFM is core to the Arch philosophy.
Meanwhile random people just using SteamOS and being happy.
SteamOS falls into the category of about 2 arch forks that have a reason to exist.
Don’t know about Cachy but Endeavour is not even a fork. It’s just Arch with a fancy installer.
And nice gui apps, default settings, nice community and cool branding.
Didn’t both distros have Btrfs auto snapshots. Same as Garuda. Anything broken? Just a reboot, arrow keys, and rollback.
EndeavorOS is not automatic but you can set it up with one terminal command.
yea, but I feel like it’s worth saying that steamdeck (where most of the steamos instances are) runs primarily in steam mode, and runs immutable OS by default so it’s pretty hard to actually mess that up. Plus steam manages most updates for you instead of you managing the updating yourself, which also helps remove the skill factor.
Android looks at SteamOS from the distance
Honestly Arch is fine as a beginner distro for the right person - The benefit of arch is the rolling release model and the fact that it’s closer to edge than other distros. No; I don’t want to use that package that’s 6 months out of date – Compile it myself? Well, then why would I run a ‘stable’ distro then?
Someone being on Linux instead of Windows is enough of a win for me. I’m going to praise whatever way they want to approach it, none of this purism shit.
Likewise, SteamOS is based on Arch because of the way it’s architected in the first place. It’s fine to want that. Now…if this were Gentoo on the other hand…
Gentoo is great. If you want that level of control over your system. But it is not a beginner distro. There are too many nebulous choices and not enough clarity.
I mean, you are right, and way more people should be using openSUSE :P
I will say Arch-derived distros are a good experience if you want to learn how the terminal and other systems work. They’re engineered to be configurable; the documentation is great. But if you just want to use your computer without opening too many hoods, it’s fundamentally not an optimal system.
Another thing is that many people just want their new laptop to work, and for it to game on linux. Sometimes it does not just work. If you start pulling in fixes and packages that are not supported on your distro, you can screw up any distro very quickly (and this includes the AUR, unofficial Fedora repos and such). If the community packages these, stages them, tests them against all official packages, and they work out-of-the-box… that’s one less hazard.
I never see Fedora recommended enough, but it’s really good for beginners. And by that I mean people new to computers, not just Linux. GNOME is a good looking by default, intuitive to use, simple DE.
GNOME is explicitly what kept me exclusively on Windows for about a decade - and what made me gunshy about Android & iOS. It's totally impossible to drive anything important, doing anything of value required a DOS prompt and arcane commands that had no relation to their exact counterpart in Windows, and it's just utterly revolting to me.
Cinnamon is the only DE that made me feel comfortable daily driving Linux.
That’s really interesting, because I’ve had a very different experience. Almost anything I wanted to do could be done through a GUI, which looks pretty.
I’m not sure how Android and iOS relate, they are mobile OSs, and both have their flaws, although some more than others.
To go in reverse order: iOS & Android are related because they're Linux/UNIX. They're not CP/M based. As a result, my level of trust and respect are always near-zero.
I'm glad you have a different experience with GNOME, someone ought to. I guess it wouldn't be the standard if no one could use it.
Android technically uses the Linux kernel, but is not GNU+Linux, and has had all the good parts of Linux taken out. I didn’t know iOS was based on Linux, but it’s even worse than Android, locks you so much into Apple’s services and spending money. Freedom over your device is the point of Linux, and iOS fails at that even more than Android, at least with Android you can install custom ROMs.
it wasn’t my choice but i recently installed Fedora for a beginner. (They made their research, read about different distros and chose Fedora.) It was surprising to see how intuitive everything is. A beginner can indeed start using Fedora with no previous Linux experience.
By “beginner” i mean somebody who used one or some of these: windows, macos, ios and android. It’s especially easy, i think, for tablet users.
As someone who wanted to jump in with both feet on my journey to using more than just Windows & mobile OSes, I actually started from Arch. Well, sort of. If you have a beginner who wants to try Linux and actually wants to know the discomfort they'll experience, give them Archbang.
It works on very basic hardware requirements, does very well as a live distro, and was honestly an important step in my personal journey that has ended me up in a place where I keep two systems - one with Windows 10, and a separate computer with Linux Mint.
Obviously, I'm not in the place many people are. But I just wanted to toss in my 2 cents. Arch itself is not for beginners. Archbang can be, especially if you have a user who's open to a live distro and doesn't want to try dual-booting yet (and only has one computer). I think that the project deserves more visibility and support than it gets.
Counterpoint: if you have the ability and willingness to learn how Linux works, un-fucking a broken Arch installation will teach you more about the system than spending months with a stable distro. I know because my first serious daily driver was Manjaro.
Agreed. I’ve learned most of what I know about computers by fixing broken stuff. Like you, my first serious daily driver was Manjaro. And after dealing with broken systems time and time again, I’m tired, boss. My daily driver for the last 2 years has been Mint and I love it to death for how stable and functional it is. But the lessons I learned along the way with other distros have been invaluable.
yet another case for how nearly everything is better than manjaro
I have a couple of systems on Manjaro now that used to be Mint and they have been solid, just as they were with Mint.
Counter-counterpoint: Newcomers have enough things to learn and worry about without having to worry about unfucking a broken Arch installation.
Counter-counter point: people don’t get a Mac or windows laptop to learn about osx or windows. They generally want to run software or at least browser to do what they need to do.
Mamma says you’re ornery bcz you have all them teeth and no toothbrush.
What are people doing that breaks their computers? I have used arch for like 15 years now and nothing ever goes wrong?
The closest would be on my desktop sometimes nvidia drivers are in a state that breaks display reinit on wake from sleep but my thinkpad is always fine.
Seriously who are you weird computer vandals going around and breaking everything all the time? What do you do?
I went from noob to arch about 3 months ago, and only had to reinstall twice after I broke things. Couldn’t figure out how to get my vpn and tail scale to play nicely together, even if I only used one at a time. After the 2nd attempt/reinstall I just gave up on tail scale, and haven’t had any show stopping bugs/issues since. Sure would be nice if rustdesk played nice with Wayland tho.
I didn’t realize archinstall existed until I had to reinstall, so I can see why a terminal based install from scratch might scare some people away.
tailscale works without issues on cachyos, i use it so i can ssh to my computer and have automation on my iphone to turn it on when using ssh apps like neoserver. (it drains battery if always on)
Yeah, tailscale also works fine on arch, by itself. But the problem was with tailscale AND a vpn being installed at the same time, even if only one was active/running. Almost certainly not an issue with arch or tailscale, the vpn was probably the problem.
Timeshift has turned my system breaking updates and tinkering into a non-issue. I just set up all my systems with it right off the bat. One snapshot per day, one weekly, and one monthly.
Since doing that, I’ve never had to toss a totally borked install.
I really need to set it up, not because I have issues but because having backups feels so nice.
Recent Python 3.13 update broke the ProtonVPN client
Is the protonVPN package maintained by the arch team? Or did you install it on your own?
If the latter you can’t rely in pacman to know about dependencies you never told it about or took steps to ensure were met.
It’s on the “extra” repo
archlinux.org/packages/…/proton-vpn-gtk-app/ doesn’t list a particular version of python in deps.
Seems like the proton team made a mistake /shrug. Not exactly a system breaking though, it’s a third party piece of software not being kept up to date.
just roll back till they maintain it. Normal enough procedure
Normal enough procedure for you and me, not for someone who’s learning Linux and has no idea what any of that means and needs proton VPN for work.
This is what people need to get through their heads, you’re an expert in the field, this comic applies xkcd.com/2501/
Almost a decade for me (on CachyOS currently) and I also have no idea how people are breaking their systems so much. In that decade, I think my system broke twice due to an update hiccup and both times were easy to fix.
I think people might be saying their system broke when a specific, non critical, application doesn’t work after an update based on an interaction here.
That does become more common if you start installing third party software and/or use less common/recommended tools. Personally I wouldn’t consider that breaking, but I guess to a casual person it might not be clear that rolling upgrade systems have this risk and the weirder your system gets the more familiar you should be with backups and rollbacks.
If that is the case, that’s a weird way to think. I mean, if I was using Windows and one app stopped working, I wouldn’t blame that on Windows, I would just assume an issue with that particular app being incompatible with an update. 🤷🏻♀️ At least, my definition of my system breaking is either it won’t boot at all, or it won’t boot into the DE. Even then, not booting could be a broken bootloader (not a broken system) which is usually straightforward to fix.
Yeah, I would say broken if it wont boot to a normal userspace. Like if you need to insert a recovery tool, or even just login as root and unfuck something before you can get your X/Wayland session up, or if applications start crashing because toolFoo has some critical bug.
But the last time that happened was on Debian when I tried to write a fstab file manually without reading the manual. Also this was the era of CD drives and no multi PC households. Learned a valuable lesson on the ride back from the library, printed documentation in hand haha.
That happens so often that I’ve just bound a hotkey in Hyprland to poke my monitors config (toggling VRR off and on again) in order to force a mode change and wake up the display.
He’s exaggerating, Arch has never broken the system with an update, but it has broken some components in the past. Most of the time you just rollback the package for a couple of days and you’re fine to update again, but you can’t expect a newbie in Linux to know that. For someone who’s already having to adapt and learn a lot of stuff just to get their daily use adding instability to the system is a recipe for disaster.
I had my first ever “breakage” on Arch recently. Actually two just recently (both on an old Mac):
Neither issue seems to be present in the LTS kernel (which is 6.12). I have both a current and an LTS kernel installed. So rebooting to LTS had me up and running. If I did not have that, no WiFi would have been a bigger issue os the MacBook Air has not Ethernet. The lack of a camera would be no video meetings without the LTS kernel as well. The problem has existed for a few days.
So, I can no longer say that I have never had an issue on Arch. I can say they have been rare. I can say I had more issues with Ubuntu or Fedora in the past.
I can also say that the only breakage I have had was mitigated by having an LTS kernel to reboot into.
Fair, that’s defs breakage that would trip up a novice computer user.
I’ve been around enough to know that everyone ignores “have backups”. Although I think pacman can do rollbacks because it keeps a cache by default? I’ve never had to and I use snapshots so /shrug.
Still a novice computer user would probably not feel comfortable reading manual pages, and even an expert would be annoyed if this happened.
I tried to run linux on a mac once (work supplied) and it was very annoying compared to a think pad. I can’t remember specifically why, maybe the touchpad had low level drag scrolling I couldn’t overrule or something like that. How do you find it?
Hmm, got a question for you about that. What did that appear as for you? Just a black screen and nothing else if it went to sleep?
I had a recently installed app fuck something in my settings so my display is going to sleep after 10 minutes, and when I wake it up I get a normal appearing lock screen with a login. If I login, the screen goes black and all I can see is the mouse cursor. I think about 1 time in 10 it will have no issues and I get back to whatever I’m doing.
Yeah black screen with mouse cursor is the thing. If I check the logs it’ll complain about errors trying to get display foo. Can switch to a TTY session and kill shit and get display back if I restart X.
nfi why the mouse cursor still works.
And I started with Gentoo…
did it go well? I have been running gentoo for a month and think I’m done distro hooping but holy hell it took me multiple attempts to properly install it.
That was in 2004. So yeah, it went well, as I’m still running Gentoo.
The installation went ok, but it took ages. I had Compaq Armada E500: Single core 900MHz Pentium III and 256MB of RAM. I had help from my friend who explained in detail what we were doing and why during the installation process.
Next time I needed to install Gentoo I did it by my self. I had the Gentoo Handbook open on other machine and I followed it carefully. I was surprised by how smoothly the install went.
Few weeks ago I once again installed Gentoo onto a new machine. 36-cores (two Xeons) and 256GB of RAM. It’s always funny to compare how much more powerful my newest machine is compared to my first Gentoo machine. ;)
Oh and welcome to Gentoo. ;) If you need any help the forums are a great place to ask.
P.S.: A great username btw. 😁
The forums are great and in general the Gentoo community just seems much more willing to point you in the right direction. Compared to arch where RTFM just boils down linking a wiki page without further guidance.
Thank you I felt very clever when I came up with it.
it’s a good beginner distro because getting thrown into deep water is how one learns to swim.
archinstallmakes it easy enough to install. some configuration may be needed, but that’s the point of Arch as a learning process! still, i’d recommend Fedora, Tumbleweed, or even Debian (it’s out of date but some people prefer UIs that don’t change very often and it still offers 32-bit for your grandpa and his old laptop that’s now too slow for Windows 10/11) over Arch.Arch is good for beginner sysadmins/programmers/CS students. Fedora and Tumbleweed for enthusiasts who want the latest software but aren’t trying to be that hardcore. Debian for people who have old laptops and only want to learn GNOME/XFCE once and never have to re-learn it with every update.
Gentoo is a good example of a distro that’s absolutely not for beginners. Arch, on the other hand, really isn’t all that bad.
That’s… not how it works, for distros or for actual swimming. Usually when someone who can’t swim is thrown into deep water, they drown and/or reinstall Windows which is much the same thing.
I don’t think archinstall is drowning sysadmins/programmers/CS students. What it will do is teach them to swim.
It’s exactly like getting thrown into the deep end, if you don’t know how to swim you’ll drown. No one learns to swim by getting thrown to the deep end, and you’re more likely to have a bad experience and be discouraged from trying it again.
For people who are beginners when it comes to computers in general, yeah. But for people who are new to GNU/Linux but experienced with CS/math, it’ll really not be that hard to run archinstall and configure from there. It’s not that different than many other distros, which also have an installer and then post-install configuration to contend with. I’d just argue arch has newer packages and better documentation which some beginners (in the sense they’re coming from macOS/Windows but know how basic software concepts) might appreciate.
Is Arch only for people who know how to seek help? Maybe. But it absolutely is not a distro template. It's a distro.
A package manager + some packages in the base system maybe, is basically a distro template. And maybe some kernel tweaks, or a built-in DE/WM. Or opinionated init system maybe.
There are so many more aspects of Arch that you conveniently ignored. The filesystem hierarchy, the special compilation arguments options tweaks and configuration for e.g. dynamic linking, and how Arch has way more packages than just "some packages in the base system". And no, I don't mean the AUR. Arch is no less of a distro than any other distro. What is a distro if not a large swathe of packages meticulously tweaked to interop gloriously?
“Conveniently?” I’m not making a case against Arch. I’m literally using an Arch derivative. Just not trying to sit here listing every single customization they ever made. Chill the fuck out.
I just don't understand how someone can claim that Arch is a "distro template".
Cause there’s like six other distros based on it. The point is that a package manager especially is a huge part of what differentiates the general experience of using a distro, and how a derivative distro works. And sure, lots of other details. Something like Manjaro, Artix etc. is basically cut from Arch as a template, often incorporating upstream changes or packages, with downstream changes based on differences of opinion.
Ubuntu has over 100 forks. Is Ubuntu a distro template? Something being forkable merely means that it is libre software.
I don’t think this is a well-defined term, so not much point in arguing about its definition.
Either way, it's clearly intended as its own thing, its own product, for end-user use, not just distro devs.
I do not recommend Arch to new users but I really wish people would have a point supported by evidence when they post.
There is no 50 page manual to install EndeeavourOS or CachyOS, the two distros mentioned in the graphic. Both are as easy to point and click install as Fedora and maybe easier than Debian. The better hardware support makes the install much more likely to succeed. They both have graphical installers and lead you by the hand. In fact, when it comes to EOS, its entire identify is making Arch easy to install and to provide sensible defaults so that everything works out of the box. And of the 80,000 packages in Arch/AUR, less than 20 of them are unique to EOS (mostly theming).
There are lots of things to complain about regarding Arch related distros. Or maybe there isn’t if we have to lie about them.
Tbh I think endeavor os is a pretty nice beginner way to get into arch–it was my introduction to arch and the aur.
People are recommending arch to beginners? This is genuinely the first time i hear of this trend and Ive been into linux for over 20 years now.
Not once have I heard arch pushed to beginners at my local LUG or any LUG ive attended in other cities or countries.
People usually recommended Ubuntu in the past or Mint. Occasionally Fedora. Then Elementary had some steam. Nowadays the landscape is much more diverse I think.
Maybe there is some folks on the internet who get a kick out of recommending hard things to people who need easy things. To gatekeep and create an exclusive feel. But i think if youre seeing that regularly then you need to reasses where youre spending time. Because core Linux culture has never been that since i can remember. We have always embraced that different distros are appropriate for different use cases. And that has always been our strength.
Unfortunately it’s not, on Reddit and now on Lemmy I see lots of people recommending it, they think the installer is the problem so they recommend something that has a GUI installer but is Arch afterwards, without realizing that creates more problem than it solves. And when pressed they even say stuff like “I started with Arch and was fine”.
Yeah that latter part of “it was easy for me” in particularly stinks of the elitist attitude i was mentioning. I think its a sign of someone thats not really trying to help but rather to make themselves seem smarter.
If you see lots of it here then I guess this post is fair. But i will standby my remark that if you’re seeing a lot of this kind of mentality then you need to reasses where you are hanging out…
Maybe go to a local LUG instead. People are a bit more desperate to actually help others at those usually.
This is funny. I feel like I see a “which arch is better” post almost everyday now.
A lot of people I think would be well suited to be on Bluefin or Bazzite. I really can’t sing the praises of it enough. It has a ton of well developed resources and the Appstore is flatpak centric. It really does give you that ChromeOS like experience for the average user.
End users should really be nowhere near package management. They should just be able to run the apps they want and expect them to work.
My job is literally to make Linux distros using Yocto for various boards. I’m constantly writing new build scripts or updating build scripts, debugging the kernel/systemd/glibc and whatever libraries are on the system.
All of my work and personal desktops run some version of Fedora Atomic or a uBlue variant right now.
With distrobox/toybox/brew and using podman/docker/KVM+qemu, even as a tinkerer, it’s great
I never saw what was so hard about arch. But not doing anything weird so maybe I missed all the bad stuff? Wiki is nice.
Nixos, now there’s a distro for beginners, lol.
NixOS is theoretically great but fucking hell they need better docs.
People want to switch from baguettes to bread. So they get flour, water, yeast and salt and are asked to bake their own bread. “I never saw what was so hard about baking bread, the seller says.” Well the issue is not the difficulty of baking bread. They simply don’t want to spend time baking bread. They are used to going to the store to buy an already baked baguette.
then someone comes along with a bread making robot. so convenient! unfortunately the documentation is on a 300 foot long paper scroll.
why are you making shit up tho, whos install bricked, mine has no issues, neither does any other linux newbie ive talked to, it has an easy to use gui to setup and then it just works?
My main issue with linux rnow is davinci, and houdini, davinci is easy to pirate, but no redgiant, etc. The effects I use can be remade following tuts or with other addons, symbol bitmapping, and pixeldither. But houdini specifically is just so expensive for hobby use, im addicted tho. I will never make money off that shit if I magically do ill spend 2.5k on the perpetual license. Cant find anyway to pirate an up to date version.
I thought piracy would be easier on linux but it seems to be much harder to find resources if they even exist. Nice for foss stuff tho.
Your main issue with Linux is that it doesn’t help you pirate proprietary software made for another OS?
Oh no someone’s doing piracy! I don’t know about their addons but DaVinci and Houdini have Linux versions. Seems like a valid complaint to me. Piracy is no worse than paying for proprietary software.
They have linux versions?
I said its easy to pirate on other os not that they arent available on linux?
Thats not a strange issue, shits expensive, ppl pirate, lemmydbzer0 is here for a reason
He’s exaggerating a little bit, but he’s not entirely wrong. Arch does have bleeding edge packages, and if you haven’t ran into an issue because of that you probably haven’t been using it for long. Now, it almost never is system breaking bad, but it might be GUI breaking bad, or it might require editing configs by hand, and I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen people complain that an update broke something only to be a pacsave/pacnew file. Arch philosophy is incompatible with people who’re learning the system now and just want stuff to work. Just because it worked for you doesn’t mean it will for others.
Forsure, if i do run into issues I’ll switch to Bazzite. I always have windows to return to if I need to, still using it for some programs and im keeeping most files that cant be just be reinstalled when I need it on an external ssd.
I mean, Manjaro wasthe first distro I truly used regularly.
But I’m no stranger to command lines, so there’s that.
I was one of the lucky users who used Manjaro on my old laptop for over a year and never had any real problems.
I was very confused when I started getting more involved in the Linux community and kept hearing about how terrible Manjaro was.
For me, vanilla Fedora has actually been the most consistently problematic distro. I’ve had more random issues getting it set up and working properly than any other distro.
God bless Mint though, it has been basically flawless for years.
I think that one’s experience with Manjaro is often heavily dependent on how many AUR packages one has installed. Were you using many AUR packages?
Manjaro was my first distro for a year and it was fine. The occasional AUR dependency blockage was irritating for me but did not break anything.
Man, I’m just glad to finally see someone else saying they have issues with Fedora. Everyone seems to think it’s amazing and stable but it never lasts more than a few months for me. I don’t do any tinkering or hacking or anything, just web browsing, Python coding, some light gaming with Steam. Arch and Debian both hold up great for me doing the same stuff.
The real problem: Define beginner distro
Every user is starting from a different point. There is no such thing as a beginner distro. You can say this distro is good for people who can grasp the idea of a command line or this distro is good for people who have no idea command line interfaces exist, but that doesn’t differentiate between beginner friendly or not.
.
I pretty much just don’t help arch and arch derivatives users any more despite using it for over a decade now. It’s not worth the time nor effort.
My first distro was an Arch fork and I moved to vanilla Arch a year later. My problems in that time have been minimal. Personally, I am glad that someone recommended that I use an arch-based distro as a beginner. Mind you, I came in as a modestly computer-literate Windows refugee willing to learn. I think for those types of people it can be appropriate to recommend Arch-based distros.
So, yes, if you are not willing to google a problem, read a wiki, or use the terminal once in a while, Arch or its forks are probably not for you. I would probably not recommend Arch as a distro for someone’s elderly grandparent or someone not comfortable with computers.
That said, I do not know that I agree with the assertion that Arch “breaks all the time,” or that I even understand what “Arch bullshit®” is referring to. This overblown stereotype that Arch is some kind of mythical distro only a step removed from Linux From Scratch has to stop. None of that has been my experience for the last 4 years. Actually, if anything, it is the forks that get dependency issues (looking at you, Manjaro) and vanilla Arch has been really solid for me.
That’s like 2% of the people who want to switch to Linux
How so? I see plenty of posts by folks who recently switched from Windows, and I imagine the ones who are willing to take that leap in the first place lean towards the more tech-literate side.
“Willing to learn” is more subjective, perhaps, but I do not think my case is that uncommon.
I’d argue the demographic that writes posts about switching their OS is more likely to be happy switching to Arch than most of the people who switch. The way I imagine the average Linux noob is a university student who installed Ubuntu for their coding class.
<img alt="GIF" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c7813ad2-1b7b-4cf1-aa04-af25777900d2.gif">
This post is a little cringe. Endeavor OS is a great Arch Experience for those who want a little preconfiguration and a GUI install. I’ve since moved onto doing it the arch way, but EOS was a great foot in the door and I know for a fact I’m not alone. Ive learned more about Linux in 2 years going from EOS to Arch (and running a proxmox server) than I would have running some “beginner friendly” distro. Really wish folks would stop gatekeeping.
This was a big driver for my distro hopping, until I landed on purple Arch. I’ll either go to the blue team or Gentoo or LFS or something if I decide to hop again.
My struggle was that more beginner-friendly distros like mint and Fedora workstations were too beginner-friendly. I struggled to find things to learn because I installed it and had an out-of-the-box windows experience
And that’s a good thing! Non-technically-inclined ppl are wary of instability issues and having to work with the terminal to fix their daily driver. If the OOTB experience is good and the UX is comparable or better than Windows - they will be more likely to stay.
If someone is accepting the fact that shit might go sideways, is willing to learn through experiencing issues first-hand or simply likes to spend time fiddling with their OS to find the perfect setup for them - that should be the Arch- and Arch-derivatives audience.
Agreed! It was a struggle for me and a boon for others.
This is something I run into rather often because I crunch through information. Just skip me to the intermediate course and give me a synopsis of the beginner course and most of the time I’m off to the races
But once you leave the comfort of your parents house, time is money and no one has a spare twelve hours to get a functional OS together when another distro would do it in minutes.
EOS btw.
Absolutely agreed! Arch wiki helps with this as well.
Although Ive been using linux for 2 years now, and i still want an installation manager with sane defaults.
Have you heard about our Lord and Saviour, Debian?
Arch users are the sanctimonious vegans of the linux world. Bacon is delicious, and you are not special.
I can not agree more not everyone that uses arch is like this but every one of the Linux users that wants to be elitist about their distro runs arch based on how hard it is.
If you want to be low level to learn you run Linux from scratch. If you want bleeding edge you run tumbleweed or debian sid. If you want to run a distro that is only mildly harder to configure than a debian bootstrap install but less hard than running debian or redhat back in the 90s just for bragging rights you run arch.
Which always makes me laugh because I use Arch mainly because I’m a lazy ass and want something easy to maintain.
I tired it as well to see what this aur was all about but kinda hated it since it’s so opaque if they wanted to be as hardcore as they say they would build packages by hand and that can be done on any distro.
Zoomers will never know the pain… and the joy and actually getting it installed!
That what makes it so cringe that they want that with arch.
Remember the first time you got a printer working in Linux? Better than sex…
Damn why did you have to bring vegans into this lol
Because vegan bashing and arch bashing have in common having broadly stupid opinions ;)
My other thought was “obnoxious American tourists,” but the bacon thing sealed it.
If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.
To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.
Arch can be forked into a beginner distro, just look at SteamOS, but one of the major advantages of Arch is the AUR and to be able to use it you have to have packages in the same (or similar) enough version to Arch, and THAT is not beginner friendly. But having an Arch fork that can’t access the AUR loses most of the reason people would want to use Arch, so you end up with distros aimed at beginners that are also running bleeding edge packages which is a recipe for disaster.
Cachyos can access aur? Thats what Paru is for? I could be mistaken, still very new
I’m sure you could make a “beginner” Gentoo distro but it’s really so counter to its purpose I don’t see it happening.
(something something ChromeOS)
Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).
I watched a 9 year old install a fully working version of Arch with no GUI…
I think you’re just making it harder than it has to be… lol
EDIT: Or maybe she’s 10? Not sure. But either 9 or 10.
Has this kid installed Linux before? Or at least some tech background?
Even without it, you know kids learn really well, right? Can you say the same about a 40 year old?
No. I sat behind her and encouraged her to read the prompts in their entirety. She asked questions (like the difference between sys/data partitions, etc), that’s basically it. I maintain that if a child can do it, anyone can. People don’t read as well as they should.
This is the worst excuse in the history of excuses… Quite literally pathetic.
Not every kid will be able to do this. Most kids are so used to phone apps just installing and working they haven’t built tech curiosity skills. And from the teachers in my family, the current 9 years olds struggle with reading and thinking skills
Yeah if you don’t tech a kid how to do something and they don’t learn it themselves they won’t learn it. A lot of kids are way more willing to learn things than people give them credit for because no one is putting in the effort to teach them.
That’s a problem and I remember talking about it in the 2000s when everything started to become user friendlieness. plug and play, just works and so-on, worst part is stuff being locked down and harder to jailbreak.
It’ll be fine though, I’m sure AI will install their OS for them, I won’t have a clue how it did it, but it’ll probably be better than I could do.
You’ll just add “without backdoors” to the prompt and it’ll be secure too.
She’s just a regular kid. She has trouble with multiplication tables and likes to play outside. She also has difficulty reading. It’s not like she did it totally unassisted. But she did everything. I’m also not implying that “every kid should be able to do this!” like you seem to be implying.
I’m challenging the notion that IT’S SO DIFFICULT to do, especially when I’ve seen a young kid do it myself.
I get that challenge part, I installed Arch ( pre script days) to see what the fuss was about, it was not that difficult if you follow steps.
I’m just parroting what teachers have been telling me; that the newer generation lacks problem solving skills and other skills (on average). No doubt there are awesome parents out there fostering learning and you will have some kids engaged, but we do have a situation where parents aren’t following through on what the kids should be doing at home to help them in their future, and use the iPad or game console as a babysitter. Ask any teacher that has been doing this for a while and the trend they are seeing.
Then you’re just an ablist who thinks everybody is the same. Go be a motivator or something.
Installing is just following directions. It’s maintaining it after you Frankenstein the hell out of it that most new users struggle with
Now this I can agree with.
That’s why you shouldn’t Frankenstein it
The point of Arch is not that it’s hard to install the point is that it’s modular and you can choose exactly what you need. So in order ton maintain it you may need to know about pipewire, bluez, Wayland, synaptic, tlp, …
Once you know the name of most modules and graphical application it’s indeed pretty easy because Arch’s wiki is great. But I don’t think it’s a great way to discover the ecosystem and you would probably not benefit from Arch specificities compared to another distro.
I think the only person I would recomand this to would be a computer scientist who needs to learn as much as possible about Linux in two months.
Uff, great, so I still have 3 to 4 years to teach it to my son
Thanks for that age recommendation 🫡
Was feared he’s already behind
IMO learning the basics of computing, go for as early as possible. Especially with this new generation of kids.
2 months ago she didn’t even know how to use a mouse properly, and now she’s a whiz. The funniest is when you try to show her something on the screen and she tries to click it like it’s a touch-screen and I have to be like “no, use the mouse!”
It’s a struggle to get started, but once they have that foundational knowledge they pick things up so quickly.
😆 yea, I showed and let him play Rubiks Games (abandoned ware that I played in school (yea, fun teacher) in ~2006) that I got to run via proton and it was exactly the same! As soon as I point on something to tell him about it, his reflexes kick in and I have a new fingerprint on my 4k, lol
Linux Mint.
MX is better than Mint.
That’s arguable, but I get where you’re coming from.
AFAIK no systemd -> no flatpak -> don’t recommend to newbs. Say what you will about flatpak, but it is the official distribution method for some popular pieces of software and large GUI software generally works better through it (in my experience) - think Blender, GIMP etc.
No software worth its salt offers only flatpak installation. I don’t use flatpak at all and Blender works flawlessly. I’m not sure what a flatpak version could possibly do any better than the version I use.
The official OBS flatpak supports more codecs and integrations than some distro packages.
Stability is also a factor, especially on rolling or cutting edge distros. Fedora RPM release of Blender did not work for me at all with an nvidia GPU, for example.
But we’re not talking about rolling or cutting edge distros. MX is based on Debian Stable. Also last time I checked (about a month ago) MX Linux does support Flatpak. Also also, you can enable systemd if you want, but seeing as we’re talking about a distro for complete beginners, I don’t think they’re going to notice, know, or care. Also also also, I really don’t care enough about this to drag it out into some protracted argument.
Download ventoy, slap a few distros on a usb stick, try them, use what you like.
No flavour of Linux works well with them. That’s the joke or something.
funnily enough, i see it as one of the advantages of arch, and a reason i’ll keep putting up with the constant updating for the forseeable future - nvidia support has gotten way better recently, and since arch has very recent packages i haven’t had nvidia issues in quite a while now.
Once it all lands in debian i’ll consider giving debian another shot on desktop… but that’ll take a while.
Debian SID?
also systemd is just assumed in 99% of Linux tutorials and questions.
And then wonder why everybody having a good time with their nvidia on smooth wayland vs you on your
ancient, ok now only old Kernel since the last ubuntu upgrade, and outdated nvidia drivers.Oh wait, with mint, you are forced to use clunky Xorg aren’t you
I am sure that gives any noob the vibes of using a modern OS like windows/macOS /s
wayland is still too unstable for me to recommend. what is clunky about xorg?
Do you use a modern kernel? And, do you use a multi touch trackpad? That only works on wayland well.
I personally see the difference in for example window movement Xorg VS wayland. And I have more artefacts from window manager if use Xorg BS when O use wayland.
yes, yes, and it works without tearing in xorg no problem. multitouch is not xorgs nor wayland’s responsibility.
Umm no. Xorg only knows keyboard and pointer devices
Everything must be put into one of those in hacky ways to work with Xorg, meaning you using a protocol for a device that can move itself, scroll and register clicks and keyboard to multitouch efects
This, for example, results in swiping on Xorg is just clicking a keyboard shortcut, while in wayland you can smoothly scroll for and back between the virtual desktops mid animations
Mint works like Windows and has a lot to offer any Windows 10 user who's already using FOSS. And tbh Hypnotix alone justified the install of Mint for me. I got a great IPTV viewer, plus a PC that runs everything I want.
Note: I only regularly want Discord, Firefox, Endless Sky, OpenTTD, RetroArch, and LibreOffice. I'm sure everyone else has different goals.
Windows 10 doesn’t feel like a modern OS…
Then whatever a modern OS is under your model is not an OS I'm willing to use. I've seen Win 11. I'm going to stick with 10, as I stuck with XP through Vista, had a second machine with 7 through 8(.x), and then surrendered and used Win10 when the 32-bit Win7 machine finally stopped working for love or money.
Well that is fair and I am very glad that Linux still offers you what you need and that you are fine with using X and have (still) more compatibility like this 😇
I’m not sure a newcomer will notice the difference between xorg and wayland?
If you have multiple monitors with different refresh rates, you’ll notice immediately.
I did, before I knew what wayland is, I did some distrohopping (see path below), and recognised that sometimes it feels more nice than other times. First I thought it was just GPU driver stuff, but later learned that it was something called wayland that does something underneath your desktop management (didn’t know that there is another layer below at that time)
(mint->manjaro->manjaro(after it died once)->Opensuse TW(after manjaro died again)->Arch(because I liked installing from AUR more than from suse community hub)->EndeavourOS(because I don’t have time to do Arch manually and archinstall was to difficult/time consuming with dualbooting macOS)
It’s the best beginner distro for those beginners who want to learn about linux.
Just like the ocean is the best body of water for children who want to learn about swimming
And not just “a beach on the ocean”, but literally just the open ocean.
I agree, there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to know exactly what is good or bad for a new user. But I don’t see many being sensitive to what the user might actually want to achieve. New users are not a homogeneous group.
If the user wants to both use (stably) and learn (break stuff) simultaneously, I’d suggest that they start on debian but have a second disk for a dual boot / experimentation. I don’t really use qemu much but maybe that’s a good alternative these days. But within that I’d say set them self the challenge of getting a working arch install from scrath - following the wiki. Not from the script or endeavourOS - I think those are for 4th/5th install arch users.
I find it hard to believe that I’d have learned as much if ubuntu was available when I started. But I did dual boot various things with DOS / windows for years - which gave something stable, plus more of a sandbox.
I think the only universal recommedation for. any user, any distro, is “figure ourt a decent backup policy, then try to stick to it”. If that means buy a cheap used backup pc, or raspberry pi and set it up for any tasks you depend on, then do that. and I’d probably pick debian on that system.
EndeavourOS is the best 💪
Debian is the best distro for newbies, it may require setup and reading some documentation but afterwards you get a stable distro.
Newbies can not handle apt and just random deb they find in the internet and wonder why linux is so tedious to update
Most noobs I know did not understand what repo management means and are just copy pasting terminal cammands like a madlad or running random bash script with sudo because the developer thought it was the easiest way to get noobs to add their repo
I prefer giving noobs a single place of truth, if no flatpak available, like:
software.opensuse.org/packages
Or
AUR
i wouldn’t wish apt on my enemies. terrible habits with all the ppas and piping curl to bash in every forum post
I literally consider Debian to be less functionally stable than arch because of Apt. I’ve had apt completely eviscerate systems and then just bail out leaving you with a system that has a completely empty /bin with seemingly no easy way to recover.
Meanwhile pacman has literally never done that, and even on systems that became horrifically broken due to literal data corruption I was able to just chroot in, download a static built pacman, and reinstall all native packages with a single command… It’s nuts how much more reliable and repairable arch ia but people act like it’s frail just because it gets updates more than once every century
Debian doesn’t support PPAs. That’s an Ubuntu feature. Even if you somehow managed to enable a PPA on Debian, the packages will be for Ubuntu and are likely not install or work correctly.
ahh its been so long since I used regular Debian in school I thought it had ppa since raspbian does
Debian stable is always outdated and testing is not stable enough. I think Debian is good for servers but not for desktop.
Stable doesn’t mean what you think it means. Stable means not updated.
I‘d rather have a system that is stable and a few months out of date than a system that is so up to date that it breaks. Because then I cannot, in a good conscience, use that system on a device that I need to just work every time I start it.
Again, stable doesn’t mean what you think it means. An unstable system is not one that breaks, but one that doesn’t keep a stable base. For example, Debian will not update a major version of almost anything, since that could potentially break dependencies, so it is stable even if it released patches as fast as Arch. On the other hand Arch is unstable, even if upgrading your system never broke anything because it can at any point change the version of any library you have installed.
That’s still exactly what I meant? Sure, arch may never break even though it’s unstable but it being unstable heightens the risk of it (or some program) breaking due to changing library versions breaking dependencies.
Dependency issues happen much more rarely on stable systems. That’s why it’s called stable. And I very much prefer a system that isn’t likely to create dependency issues and thus break something when I update anything.
No, you’re still not understanding, say libX current version is 1.2.3 and we have two distros A (a stable distro) and B (an unstable distro). libX now releases 2.0.0, A remains on 1.2.3 B moves to 2.0.0. libX now releases 1.2.4 which despite being just a patch breaks everything. A update and breaks, B does not.
Stable just means stable API, it says nothing about system breakage. System breakage can happen regardless of stable API, and it’s up to distro managers to not release a package that breaks their diatro, and the Arch ones are excellent at their job. An update breaking Arch is as likely to happen as on Ubuntu, but an upgrade on Arch can break other stuff which on Ubuntu can only happen when doing a version upgrade.
Ok, so arch doesn’t break because it’s unstable, it just breaks anyways. And it doesn’t break more in general, it just breaks worse more often. Got it.
I’ll still stay away from the bleeding edge.
If you want to talk about breakage we can, as long as you understand that’s not what people mean when they say stable. About breakages Arch doesn’t break that often, or at all, I can’t recall a single time my system broke for an update or for something that was not entirely my fault.
Oh no! I haven’t got the latest push from 30 seconds ago. My operating system is so out of date and I’m so uncool!!11
Nope, you’re missing the point entirely. It’s about versions not frequency. For example Ubuntu 16.04 used python 2, despite python 3 having been released for 8 years at that time and other distros like Arch having migrated to python 3 years before. Now, Python 2 still got regular updates that Ubuntu released, but Ubuntu 16.04 was maintained until 2021, whereas python 2 reached EOL in 2020, that means that for 1 year Ubuntu was using a deprecated and unmaintained version of python.
One could also make the argument that Arch broke a lot of stuff when they did that upgrade, and there’s an argument there, but it’s not as simple as receiving less frequent updates.
You’re going to be horrified to discover the software versions the military use.
That very setup is why I do not recommend it to newbies who don’t have someone experienced around. Debian, even Debian 12, is not holding your hand and directing you. You’ll have to figure a lot out by yourself, and this adds to the steep learning curve.
Also, a very slow update cycle means the newbie will be stuck with outdated packages (sure, flatpaks are there, but the base system will be old, like, very old). And new hardware might face issues.
To me, the perfect pipeline is something like Linux Mint, then Fedora, then either Arch derivatives or Debian, depending on what serves you best. Alternatively, if you don’t mind some challenge after an easy entry, start out with Manjaro and then get another Arch. But that one’s more controversial.
I use Debian on a regular basis and have for years, but I wouldn’t recommend it as the starting distro unless I knew that the user would have very ordinary hardware and no special software needs. It’s just annoying if you have to learn how to install Chrome, or your wireless drivers, for example.
It’s almost simple enough, but not quite, in my view. But if I were helping them get it installed, then after that they would probably be good to go.
Those guys should just role with a Tumbleweed
No scary terminal required
Just do not get scared by YaST
And don’t forget Packman repo
And always use either flatpak or search here to find “single click” file that needs to be double clicked (lol) to install it using YaST
software.opensuse.org/packages
The level of disillusion in the thread is insane. At no point in time is it a good idea to recommend Arch and it’s derivatives to Linux newbies. They will 100% wreck their install in the first two weeks. Even I, as a pretty experienced user had to wipe my arch install after failed update attempts, luckily I had a separate home partition. Anything else like fedora or tumbleweed will provide packages that are very up to date, but that are also tested. For example I don’t fear that updating my fedora install will completely brick the networking of my system like what happened to me on arch.
Ironically I wouldn’t recommend any Ubuntu derivatives as for some reason, every single time I’ve installed Ubuntu or one of its variants like PopOS they ended up messed up in some way or another, albeit never as critical as Arch did to me numerous times. Probably some kind of PPA issues that make the system weird because it’s always the fault of PPAs
Mint has worked consistently for me on the PC it's installed on.
Second this. Am not a huge fan of ubuntu itself and I have had issues with other debian based distros (OMV for example) but mint has always been rock solid and stable on any of my machines. The ultimate beginners distro imo.
Honestly, as someone who ran Arch and its derivatives, no one should be running upstream Arch but the testers.
No amount of experience or expertise will save you from breaking it. It WILL break, and you’ll be mocked for that as well by “Arch elitists” who will then face the same issue.
That’s why Linux veterans are rarely using Arch. It’s good for its purpose, it’s very important both for downstream Arch and for the entire Linux community, but it is NOT the distro you should run on your PC.
Go Fedora. Go Debian. Go to the downstream distros if you’re strongly into Arch, take Garuda for example. Make your machine actually work.
What do you define as breaking? I ran arch and cachy and never once had a breaking issue.
Some functionality (menus, networking) working not as expected, random glitches, bugs, instabilities…also, now coming from the experiences of others (wasn’t there at the time), one time even GRUB had an update that broke it on all systems with Arch, forcing many to halt updates. In my eyes, from personal experience and experiences of others, it got a reputation as a quite messy system.
Oh wow yeah I had forgotten about the grub update, the only way to not have a bricked computer was to be active in the arch communities because they didn’t remove the faulty package even though it was known to brick computers
.
The GRUB update is why more Arch needs more testers lol. They do have separate repositories for testing, but none of the active testers had the relevant problematic configuration that caused that problem during the testing period, and then it shipped to stable. The package maintainer did configure the package to not include the breaking change that same day, but it doesn't look like that was ever shipped for some reason.
Even Mint? Seems to be the go-to recommendation for newbies.
Never was able to try mint, I only did once but the installer didn’t work for some reason, probably Nvidia related so I don’t blame mint for it.
AMEN!
Fucking hell this is what I’ve been trying to hammer into people for a long time
If I hit my Alex Jones InfoVape™ hard enough I can probably weave a conspiracy theory on how Micro$oft started the “arch btw” meme in order to hurt Linux in the eyes of new users
Everyday I see people saying they are having issue with Linux and its always because they went straight to arch and used archinstall. They have no idea how any of their system works and when they run into an issue thry do a full system reinstall.
Hey, you forget about Gentoo Linux!
The real distro for newbies… (Provided the newbies are expert cs graduated and crazy nerds…)
All depends on what a beginner is… Not all beginners are tech illiterates or people who only want to use office.
I’ve been using Garuda, and though I’m not a beginner, it’s been great. It’s a simpler experience than I had with Fedora, and better than Mint or Ubuntu, though those were about a decade ago. Arch is a fantastic base. Pure Arch is probably bad for beginners, but there are great Arch-based distros out there. SteamOS as another example of this. This post is bad.
To me, every distro that seriously requires you to read through all changelogs before updating is BS, and it doesn’t solve a basic problem. No one in their sane mind will do this, and the system will break.
That’s why, while I respect the upstream Arch, I’d say you should be insane for running it and trying to make things stable, and mocking people for not reading the changelogs is missing the point entirely. Even the best of us failed.
Arch is entirely about “move fast and break stuff”.
It is not as overwhelming as you make it sounds, you don’t need to read the whole changelog every time you update just check Arch news page and they state any manual action an update might need. I run arch since like 1 y and I almost never had to do such manual actions. You can see on archlinux.org news it’s not that bad although I can totally see why it is not suitable for most people
Is there anyone here remember Gentoo and the merge/split
/usrperiod?Gentoo developers are kind and super helpful that they put out any important notice after you pull upgrades to your system. Run
eselect news readto know what the breaking change is going to be, and carefully perform the required actions one by one. It’s a great distro made by great fellas.I don’t mind there is breaking change at all. I do mind that you don’t tell me about it.
Yeah, Gentoo puts serious emphasis on that, I have to give them a credit. I liked it.
But yeah, I’d rather not have breaking changes in the first place.
Arch doesn’t require you to “read through all changelogs”. It only requires that you check the news. News posts are rare, their text is short, and not all news posts are about you needing to do something to upgrade the system. Additionally, pacman wrappers like
parucheck the news automatically and print them to the terminal before upgrading the system. So it’s not like you have to even remember it and open a browser to do it.No, it’s not. None of the things that make Arch hard for newbies have to do anything with the bleeding edge aspect of Arch. Arch does not assume your use case and will leave it up to you to do stuff like edit the default configuration and enable a service. In case of errors or potential breakage you get an error or a warning and you deal with it as you see fit. These design choices have nothing to do with “moving fast”. It’s all about simplicity and a diy approach to setting up a system.
I subscribe to the arch news letter, and they email me about potentially breaking changes like 4 times a year. Usually I don’t have to do anything about them but it’s good to be aware of, just in case.
Arch is good but tbh if you arent prepared for having to keep everything up to date and if ur a beginner in general u are not gonna have a good time
The install guide is not 50 pages-long, common!
the arch experience is weirdly weird honestly. arch is not hard to use, the wiki documentations are pretty extensive. but still there are people who dont even know how to use a wiki. what people needs to do is not learn how to use arch, but learn how to change their perspective on arch instead
I’m not completely up to speed with the core principles of Arch, but I think it revolves around KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!). Meaning that Arch doesn’t hold your hand with nice GUIs. Instead, it tries to make the command line interface as easy to understand and use as possible. So if you run into a problem, you’re more likely to understand how to fix it, or at least what the root cause is. Which is not a given when you’re used to distros with more abstraction like Ubuntu. Then again, this design concept is not for everyone.
I don’t think arch does much to make commandline easier to use it understand - instead I’d say it aims to teach you how to use it, because it might be easier than you realize, but importantly it tries to tell you why. Instead of just giving you the command to run, the wiki explains various details of software, and the manual installation process tells you which components you need without forcing a specific choice. As a result, hopefully after using arch you’ll know how your system works, how to tweak it, and how to fix issues - not necessarily by knowing how to fix each individual issue, but by understanding what parts of your system are responsible and where to look.
is the basic arch CLI commands any different from discord bots? it feels easier to use if you think its same as playing with a discord bot. using CLI isnt some kind of programming
Thanks for the hearty chuckle, zoomer.
Bash and all other shell languages are programming languages. The terminal is just a REPL for a language primarily meant to be used as a REPL for managing your OS.
learning CLI commands is 10 times easier than HTML
If you’re mindlessly pasting commands, sure… but you have zero idea what your fucking with if you think bash is simpler than HTML.
In the context of maintaining an Arch distro you will absolutely need to understand that executing CLI commands is in fact programming.
hard disagree on this… while for people who don’t know it it might look like programming, it’s really not much different than editing config files (which people who don’t know it will assume is programming too).
Sure, the language used by bash can be used to write massive programs. But in 99% cases using the CLI is like using a gui with a button and a text field - type some text into the field and then click the button, letting whatever software you’re running take the content of the text field and do something with it.
way closer, in fact, to executing a discord bot command, than to actual programming as in software development (what i’d argue people think of when talking about programming)
If you even write one line of bash you are programming. The way you’re describing it only makes sense if you’re using the terminal like
dmenu_run. You metaphor breaks down the moment someone so much as usescd. Even worse once you throw a pipe or redirect in. All of this you absolutely will have to do when installing Arch.Its absolutely irresponsible to tell people that installing and running Arch Linux is like talking to a discord bot.
They’re a liiittle harder but yeah basically
Admittedly, the installation for Arch Linux is not that difficult.
It’s the General Recommendations that become bullshit.
with archinstall as part if the ISO now it is genuinely easier to install than most other distros.
I’ve heard about that, but I haven’t tried it myself.
Thanks for mentioning it.
What do you mean by “become bullshit”?
Is there really enough of an epidemic of newbies being recommended Arch to warrant this amount of ire? All I ever hear is how Arch is the “hardcore” distro and beginners should all use Linux Mint.
I’m someone who has only ever poked around with Linux Mint on a thumb drive a few times to see what it’s like and thinking, “Yep. This is a working operating system.” and then going back to Windows because there was never any compelling reason to switch.
But I recently decided to have a dedicated PC with Linux on it and I chose CachyOS because I want to play games. (Yes, I know you can game on other distros.) And I’m… fine. I’m computer literate, I did my research, and I knew that using an Arch-based distros was “being thrown into the deep end.” But I followed the instructions, as well as some advice, and the setup completed without any issues.
I’m using my PC and things “just work.” Apparently I’m just an update away from everything collapsing into smoldering wreckage. If that happens, I’ll try to fix it, and maybe I’ll learn something in the process. If not, I’ll try to keep my files backed up so I can restore things. Or maybe I’ll decide that I hate it and try something else, but… so far so good.
If timeshift is not already installed, please do. Do a snapshot before you update and set the settings to auto delete / keep only a certain number (or do it manually) so you don’t fill your hard drive. I usually keep 1 monthly, 3 weekly and 3 dailies on a rolling basis
If you do the snapshot religiously then when an update breaks it you can just boot a liveUSB and restore (mint iso is a live USB and has it already installed).
You do of course then need to work out what broke and why once you’ve rolled back to the prior working state
.
Arch is for control freaks, which means it takes a lot of work and patient to get it to work for your specific needs. If you don’t have the time and patient for that (which is more then understandable) then you shouldn’t use it.
Nah that’s gentoo
Arch is for people who want bleeding edge and the aur. Gentoo is for people who really hate one particular thing that everything tries to use or have a system with very specific requirements.
Nah, maybe 10 years ago or so. Now you install it with a script and it just works.
Installing packages on Arch is way, way easier than doing it on Ubuntu, the OS that for some reason people keep recommending for newcommers.
And since installing packages is about the only thing that you do with your OS as a beginner, that’s a big deal
this guy is so damn right i cant argue. arch isnt hard to use, whats hard is experiencing different things and learning
“I didnt read the changelogs”
I have never read the changelogs and I have never broken my EOS install ever.
Weak bait.
.
Granted that for most newbies doing archchroot from a live USB is complicated enough to reinstall. In any case, as you said, systemd-boot works fine and it’s the default now in EOS so who cares.
For example a friend of mine decided to reinstall bazzite because he changed his GPU from nvidia to amd, when and uses the default drivers… Yes a simple search in bazzite’s download page shows the three coands that have to be executed to rebase the system to the non nvidia one if you like having extra space but… A full reinstall is crazy.
Try explaining that to a newbie
I am not a newbie and wouldn’t even know how to do it without using a manual (archwiki)
You would, it’s very very straightforward they made it very simple. I literally walked multiple non-technical users through it when it happened because I have moved some of my friends and family to Linux. I won’t say that it wasn’t tedious and that it wasn’t annoying for them but they got through it just fine
I stopped using grub after that pain in the ass
Make it make sense
while you do have a point, i’m still having issues with taskwarrior printing it’s update notifications, even after opening an issue and the maintainers patching it.
The thing is, i use arch on 3 different devices, and i don’t need to see every news entry 3 times, so yes in my case having it as default in pacman would indeed be bloat.
That said, there is PLENTY of places where I think arch could have saner defaults. but the beauty of arch is that it is made to be configured exactly the way you like it, so you really can’t fault arch as much in this case, compared to other distros that try to take all decisionmaking away from the user.
You can never be 100% certain the news file didn’t update between the three invocations. If you aren’t refreshing that page between invocations then you aren’t actually using Arch the way it was designed.
well you can never be 100% certain your laptop won’t spontaneously die either.
for any new arch user, i do recommend keeping an archiso live USB around in case something really does happen - since every arch user should know the basics of how it works, it should be easy enough to recover as well.
knowing that, i really only check the news out of curiosity, since i’m not a grub user i haven’t had arch be unbootable since i started using it years ago. even if it did i’m confident enough it’d be a quick fix.
Then I never want to see you telling someone they should’ve checked the news file before updating!
To half the users in this thread, normal people use computers as a means to an end.
“If you’re not prepared to get your hands dirty this OS is not for you” you’ve already lost me, this is unhinged behaviour. You have one life and you choose to spend it fixing your computer so it will do the same things except slightly differently.
But I know this is an unpopular opinion for Linux users.
It’s about as unhinged as someone assembling their own bicycle really. Most people (well, in a reasonably bikeable place, i.e. not in the US) just use their bikes for commuting or whatever, and don’t want to assemble a bike (I sure don’t). Some people like tinkering with their bikes though. That’s totally fine.
If you’re not prepared to get your hands dirty, don’t buy bike parts you have to assemble yourself. And don’t install Arch. You are correct in the assessment that Arch isn’t for you (or me).
There are bicycle repair shops, but there are no Arch repair shops. You have to be able to fix it yourself. OP is correct: Don’t recommend Arch to people who can’t do that. Recommend something that doesn’t push bleeding edge untested updates on its users, because it will break and the user will have to fix it themself.
tl;dr: Arch existing is fine, in the same way any tinker hobby is fine. What is not fine is telling people to use it that just want to get work done or won’t know how to fix it.
Larger downstream distros like manjaro (and steamOS for that matter) can be stable. I wouldn’t call manjaro a beginners distro though, like mint would be (No Linus, there’s no apt in manjaro) but it’s very daily-driveable.
Although, if you’re most people, just stay away from rolling release distros. There’s so little benefit unless you’re running bleeding edge hardware…
If it‘s your first time trying linux, go with mint. It’s stable and almost every tutorial will work for you. If you know your way around a terminal already, the choice is all yours. I personally like Fedora.
Not sure about forks, but I agree with what you said before.
Manjaro is great.
Clearly you’ve never used it for an extended period, or If you have you never installed packages from the AUR.
Wrong on both fronts!
I’ve been using Manjaro exclusively for at least 4 years and I have several AUR packages installed!
On the contrary, I’d still argue it’s a good distro for beginners, but not for newbies. people who are tech-sawy and not hesitant to learn new things.
I jumped straight into EndeavorOS when I switched to Linux, since arch was praised as the distro for developers, for reasons.
Sure, I had some issues to fight with, but it taught me about all the components (and their alternatives) that are involved in a distro.
So, once you have a problem and ask for help, the first questions are sorts of “what DE/WM do you use?.. is it X11 or wayland? are you using alsa or pipewire?”.
Windows refugees (like me) take so many things for granted, that I think this kind of approach really helps in understanding how things work under the hood. And the Arch-wiki is just a godsend for thst matter. And let’s be real, you rarely look into Arch-wiki for distros other than Arch itself, since they mostly work OOTB.
The Arch-wiki was my main reason for switching to arch. When I used an ubuntu based distro I felt like I had to rely on forum posts to figure out anything whereas with arch everything is documented incredibly well
a lot of it applies to other distros though. its a lot of help in a pinch.
True, between arch and gentoo wiki you can hardly find any other information that is worth your while.
What the fuck are you on about? Jesus christ, we get ragebait in here too now?
Know your usecases. Thats it. Linux isn’t hard if you do.
But no, let me recommend the jet engine service manual to my 6 year old that is learning to read. You’re going to have a bad time.
For the record, since this post and most comments irked me, arch is fine. I’m using arch on my workstation/personal rig for years. Fedora on the laptop because I need a stable work thing. Alpine VMs on the homelab because it needs light and stable.
USECASES!
Exercise is fascism
idk I’m kind of a fucking idiot and I started with Manjaro.
I didn’t start with manjaro, but it was the only one that seemed to play nice with my system and programs out of the five or so I tried. I’ve never had an issue with it after 2 years, so… eh?
people who unironically recommend anything arch-based (haha yes steamos is based on arch, yes you’re very very clever, i’m sure you can even figure out why it’s an obvious exception if you think about it for a minute) are just detached from reality and simply want to be part of a group.
The only time arch is suitable for beginners is installing it in a VM to learn linux via brute force, after you’ve gotten used to going through that process you’ll have a very solid base of knowledge for using a more suitable distro.
The package manager way of delivering distro management, updates and upgrades is an archaic and dumb idea. Doomed to fail since inception and the reason Linux never broke the 1% of users in forever. It’s a bad model.
Atomic and immutable distribution of an OS is the preferred and successful model for the average user who wants a PC to be a tool and not a hobby on itself. I don’t think the traditional package manager will ever go away. But there are alternatives now.
Wait, immutable distribution don’t have a packet manager? But you can still install flatpaks?
They still do. But projects like bluefin are striving to get rid of it entirely. Flatpak installation is not package management, they are containerized applications.
I would, however, recommend Arch if you’re a Linux novice looking to learn about Linux in a more accelerated pace.
I would argue Gentoo is better suited for that. It is just compilation that can take a long time.
Linux From Scratch or Slackware too.
Bit of a different beast. Not something I would daily drive though. Slackware perhaps. But gentoo other then the docs being top notch and the learning experience being fairly streamlined. It is also a good distro for daily use.
Gentoo’s my daily driver.
Or Void Linux.
are there any good tutorials or something for void. I’m very interested because the name is cool but haven’t found a good resource for learning.
Lol I love the honesty
I think their documentation is pretty solid, for everything else the reddit/internet searches can solve it. But as with EVERY DISTRO on this planet, the archwiki can be applied! You just need to know what are the differences from void to arch. (no systemd for example)
For novices Void is worse because it does not have the Arch wiki. The Void Docs are brief and you will inevitably end up reading the Arch wiki anyways, except you will run into Runit specific bs.
Runit specific bs? You mean being simple and sane? lol And yes reading documentation is true for both. Also be aware of context.
As a (currently) CachyOS user, I would like to point out that their custom mirrors don’t always reflect the newest version of packages, too. So if your package has a bug you may have to wait an extra day or two for it to reflect the fixed version after it drops. That or manually install the git.
Just make love with Timeshift and for the love of god don’t use topgrade if you don’t know what you’re doing. Thankfully, because of rule number one, Timeshift told me the topgrade nightmare was over and tucked me back into bed with a glass of warm milk and a bedtime story.
Very bad post. And Tumbleweed has OBS (Open Build Systems), although I dont even know if that is the right name for its AUR equivalent.
Veterans will always go back to Debian. It is inevitable.
Debian is just the carcinization of Linux.
I never liked debian or it’s derivatives, but since moving to Selfhosting most of my services and needing sane defaults on my server (I’m a noob with server stuff) I’ve circled back to LMDE after 20 years of using primarily bleeding edge and DIY distros.
I like it, it’s nice that it’s set and forget and doesn’t need constant attention like my bleeding edge stuff always did.
As a fellow Mint enjoyer who is too fucking old to be fixing their desktop all the time…yes
LMDE is great. I run it on my Thinkpad T14 G1. Runs like a champ, and after installing
tlp, it manages to eke out almost 7 hours of battery life with a questionable battery.I’ll be switching from Windows 10 to LMDE on my desktop gaming PC at some point soon this year. I have no intention of letting Microsoft dictate what I can and can’t do on my custom PC that I built with my own hands. W11 further reduces that capability.
Im like 2 grub breaks away from going back lol
Debian is the stable friend who might not have all the answers at the moment but can help you with whatever you need to do, and does it without ever asking for anything in return.
Debian is love, Debian is life.
It makes sense because if you are a veteran, you probably already have your workflow streamlined, so you don’t need new software in the repositories.
I’ve got 25 years of Linux usage under my belt at this point, and I’ve settled on Debian for all PCs, servers, and anything else. Stability is so much more important to me than bleeding edge software, but for those things that absolutely need the latest and greatest, there’s Backports and Flatpak.
Preach greybeard
I’d rather use windows 7 than ever go back to Debian … something with 7 being the last good version of anything ;)
I started with Arch
btw
Mint has been nice
I started with EndeavourOS, which is basically Arch, and had a great experience.
I did have someone knowledgeable help guide me a bit at first, but eventually I learned how to find solutions myself on google, and use the Arch wiki.
I must have broke my installation a dozen times, but used Timeshift to bring it back from the dead… And I learned so much about how Linux works in the process. Wouldn’t have done it any other way.
Thanks for reminding me to set up Timeshift on my EndeavourOS install, salute to you.
I’ll tell you, nothing bricks as hard or as irreparably as Windows. I have never had to actually reinstall Linux due to some problem (though it’s a good practice security-wise).
Even when you removed the french language pack?
I was not technically a newbie since I had previously used ubuntu in the distant past (as if ubuntu would truly prepare someone for a more advanced distro), and probably a few others I can’t remember, but I came back with EndeavourOS and I’m having a great time. I did have a few challenges though I am fairly tech savvy and I knew what I was getting into so I was definitely not a regular novice.
After a single serious oopsie that bricked my system but I was able to fix I’ve been running a very stable system. I’ve kept with it for nearly 2 years now on my initial install with practically no issues, at least none I wasn’t willing and able to solve. I troubleshot an issue I was having with a package installation the other day without finding any help online and that made me proud of myself.
I would have considered myself a decent power user on windows, and I feel like a sub average arch user, but hey I get to learn and improve more now.
Thanks! Found Garuda is from this thread! You’re a real one!
Petulant counterpoint: SteamOS 3.0 is based on Arch and is a good newbie distro
I’d just like to vent that these kind of discussions are one of the big turnoffs of the Linux community in general. People speak “in absolutes”.
You either do it this way or you’re a dumbass. You either use the distribution I like or you’re doing it WRONG. You shouldn’t use Arch because you’re not experienced enough, you should use Mint for an arbitrary amount of time before you graduate to the good stuff.
You friends get way too worked up over other people’s personal preferences and push your biased and subjective views as facts.
Is Arch Linux the right fit for a newbie to Linux? The right answer is “it depends”, not “never”. Would I recommend Arch to my mom? No. Would I recommend it to my programmer colleague who already lives in the Powershell? Sure, why not.
Yup, i had a lot of people tell me that arch wasn’t a good beginner distribution, and had some friends try to talk me out of it. But i was planning to move to Linux for over a year and had set up Linux servers in the past. Just hadn’t used one for my main PC. I’ve been on arch for over a month and it’s been fine. I still wouldn’t recommend it to every beginner but I’m not going to say it’s never appropriate.
I know someone who was fed up with Windows recently, and they decided it’s finally time to switch to Linux. Me and another person recommended Linux Mint, but they got many other recommendations for Arch. They went with Arch, and it hasn’t gone boom yet, but I’m not sure if it’s a matter of time or what.
I have heard Arch is more “stable” these days than it used to be, but I’m not sure.
I use Ubuntu myself except for on my ThinkPad where I use Mint, and I’m gonna switch to Mint on my desktop eventually.
Once it’s installed Arch is just as easy to use as any other distro. It’s “unstable” because it’s rolling release, sometimes issues crop up with bleeding-edge updates, just keep an eye on the forums before updating.
I’ve only had to deal with a broken system a couple of times, both were 100% my fault, and both were fixable without reinstalling. Even when something breaks it’s pretty forgiving, as long as one is paying attention and not afraid of reading documentation.
So to me, that sounds not ideal for someone new to Linux.
Depends on the person. Someone who just wants a stable desktop that works? No. Someone who wants to learn how Linux works, and likes to tinker? Yes.
I think the difficulty with Arch is not about using the command line, but about knowing the Linux ecosystem.
People coming from OS X or Windows probably don’t know the difference between a WM, or a DE or what Display server they should use.
They don’t know if they need to install a network manager or setup sudo on a new system.
These things come from experience of using a Limix system even a mainstream one like Ubuntu.
Different people deal with things in different ways. Some (most?) people feel like learning linux is undesirable or a chore, while others embrace the sense of discovery and exploring a new and exciting thing. After using Windows for decades I don’t want the same experience, I want something completely different.
Before I installed Linux I played a bunch on a virtual machine. I installed several distributions, desktop environments, hardware compatibility. I ended up landing on EndeavourOS more than a year ago. Never borked my setup, never had update problems, never had a problem I couldn’t solve (more like Arch Wiki solving it for me).
I like to learn things by doing things, I like to fail fast and learn from the mistakes. EndeavourOS provided the exact experience I was looking for and would recommend it to someone with a similar mentality. I wouldn’t recommend Arch (or arch based distros) to people who aren’t tech savy, but people make it seem more complicated and brittle than it actually is.
This is the dumbest conceit of the arch community. I learned Linux using Fedora back when regular usage required more know how than installing arch does and it was enormously helpful to have something you could click and install and THEN learn in a functional environment. Also following the guide isn’t THAT hard its just a waste of effort for a million people to do so.
i think it’s also incorrect: the basic premise of arch is minimally configured, do whatever you like… no installer is going to allow a user to do everything they want, so that’s kinda not “the arch way”… it’s not some gatekeeping BS, it’s just not what arch is about, and that’s fine… that’s why there are spinoff distros that disagree and make their own - this is FOSS after all
Everyone has a right to go their own way. Everyone has a right to have an opinion on how you go your own way.
I remember installing Debian before Ubuntu was born using an ncurses type interface and spending five minutes selecting the packages I want to install, (only for it to tell me that one package was incompatible with another and the installation couldn’t proceed!) but being able to do it somewhat graphically made it so much easier than simply by text.
An OS stays out of your way and lets you do what you need to do. Having to essentially create the basics is unproductive and a waste of the user’s time.
SteamOS
Yep, as long as Valve keeps it up to date and as long as newbie users don’t figure out what Sudo does it will be fine for them.
Flatpaks that aren’t official products of the source project sometimes have interesting issues pertaining to their permissions, are harder to set as the handler for files, harder to enable usage of system tools, don’t follow system themes, are harder to start or use from the command line, and yes start slower than native apps.
I like the idea that even stable distros can have latest stuff easily or distros which don’t package a given project. I use a few myself. It is certainly annoying that it ends up teaching people about what dirs they need to share with flatseal, flatseal, desktop files, and the command line for something which is supposed to simplify things.
Kinda feels like less work to use rolling release with a more comprehensive set of packages.
That depends on what the beginner’s goal is. Arch could very well be a nice beginner distro, as could Gentoo or Slackware or any other “hard” distro if you’re determined to learn. My baptism of fire was on Slackware in the 90s (which I’m still on), long before “beginner distros”. Trying and failing was a big part of the fun. If you’re determined to learn, I don’t see any issue with starting with a distro that doesn’t hold your hand.
Isn’t the lack of dependency management a huge pain on Slackware? I think Gentoo is my forever distro, but I’m very curious about Slackware.
Good to hear that you’re slack-curious! :D Gentoo is a fantastic distro, so great choice! I run Gentoo on my second computer. I’ve always loved it, but Slackware was my first linux experience, so it has special meaning to me. Maybe try Slackware in a VM? You’ll be compiling a lot from source on Slackware too if you need stuff that’s not included in the base system, but without portage for deps management it’s a lot more cumbersome. You can of course use sboui, slpkg or some other tool that can manage deps, or use flatpaks, appimages, distrobox or whatever to keep your base system clean.
That does sound like a bit much for my daily driver; I’ll have to check it out in a VM sometime. It warms my heart that a distro community can have such longevity, and I think the simplicity has to be a big part of that.
2 requirements for arch:
that’s it. That’s also not MOST PC users. Just suggest popos or mint or that one “gaming” distro and let them enjoy it.
If they want to nerd out after they’re used to Linux they will learn the CLI. If they want to, they’ll find Arch or whatever DIY/rolling whatever distro.
I mean, I’m just one reference point, but here we go. I started with Kubuntu – I liked KDE, and Ubuntu is a stable, LTS distro. What could go wrong?
But my PC is Intel/Nvidia, so I’m constantly facing driver issues, and not to mention, snap is completely fucked. Ubuntu is supposed to be LTS but I’ve somehow still got 2-4 GB of updates every day or two. I’ve also got random bugs here and there and no real idea of how to troubleshoot them because the support is disparate or doesn’t address my specific issue.
Meanwhile, on my Chrultrabook, I decided to go with Arch, which of course presented its own set of issues. The archinstall script was straightforward, and debugging it was also fairly easy since the Arch wiki and forums were a trove of information. But debugging and tinkering, even when I accidentally bricked my laptop and had to do a clean slate (don’t ever interrupt pacman, I’ve learned!), has been a great learning experience. It’s made me feel like I actually understand a little more of what goes on under the hood. Ubuntu could do that as well, but it isn’t meant to be design.
Neither is good nor bad on its own, but different people enjoy different things. I didn’t think I would be the type to enjoy Arch, but it gave me valuable experience and a fun project (even if I did end up staying up until 3 or 4 AM on work nights). I’ve got EndeavourOS on my laptop now and still Kubuntu on my PC, but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just switch over. Arch/eOS being a rolling release feels nice too, as I’m doing all these updates on Ubuntu anyway, but I’m slightly more worried about fucking something up.
I wonder if there is something like a graph or diagram that shows the different parts that comform a distro.
Like a visual aid where you can see what combination of parts or components you are choosing on a distro.
Does something like this exist?
It’s a really simple system meant to ‘just work’ and provides an idiot sheet you can copy and paste from for those who don’t ever want to RTFM
as long as the system isn’t doing anything important Arch is great for noobs fucking around, it’s high grade spoonfeeding and doing what you are told.
Power users use RHEL, Ubuntu, Gentoo. Governments, armies, tech giants and that kinda stuff, Arch is more for newbies karma farming on r/unixporn for lolz
I’m pretty sure “Power users” don’t use Ubuntu.
I dunno, I used ubuntu (or some flavor of it) for 15 years before Arch. I will say that the first time I installed Arch, I did it solely to prove to myself that I could. After that, I fell in love with it as a daily driver for a lot of reasons. The AUR is a big one, and the fact that it’s so well documented also helps. But really, once it’s installed, Arch isn’t any more complicated than any other distro to keep running.
I did switch to EndeavourOS, though, because once one has installed Arch the “Arch way” a few times I don’t reallly see any benefit in doing it again.
I started with mint more than 10 years ago because a friend of mine told me it was one, if not the best, distro for newbies (that was a fucking lie). Idk how mint is doing today but back then was kind of a mess and dealing with it wasnt easy, so i dont really know how or why i switched to debian for a while. With debian i had a lot of problems with some software, mostly proprietary drivers for esotic hardware i was running back then due to me buying the cheapest laptops available, so i started distro hopping for a while. Every distro but fedora was debian based so it felt a lot like a more of the same experience and I felt stuck in a loop where i was eventually gonna reinstall my whole system after breaking something i didnt even know existed.
Then one day i found arch. Installing it wasnt as easy as clicking install on the live system’s guy, but just by following the wiki general instructions i didnt have any issues the first time. It felt good. Building the system block by block helped me understand how things work, the package manager was the best i had seen and the newbie corner basically had the solutions for all my screw-ups, even more than ask-ubuntu did. Everybody in the community was super helpful (even some of the devs). Then there was the AUR, with almost every piece of esotic or proprietary software i needed, much easier than adding some random guy’s repositories to apt or enabling backports on debian. Also i found out that i prefer having a rolling release. With arch i learned how to use and maintain my system, and i just stuck with it.
That said, just how some use linux just to brag about it with their normie friends, many many people use arch to brag about it with other linux users (like my friend did), mostly beacause arch has the infamous reputation that it is hard to install, hard to maintain, easy to break. Which is actually not that bad considering that all these people are gonna end up posting in the newbie corner lol.
Truth is that arch is not harder than any other distro. It only comes down to your will to learn and RTFM What i think worked for me was the transparency. Nobody said it was as easy to use as windows, but nobody in the wiki said “dont do this unless you are an experienced user”. Arch is not another fork of ubuntu pretending to be “even more user friendly”, it’s just arch.
I think the problem is about distros like antergos (rip), manjaro, garuda, endevour trying to oversimplify something that only needs you to RTFM only ending up breaking something they tried to automate and hide behind a curtain that wasnt meant to be automated and was meant to be learned to manage, by hand
EDIT: spelling. I’m a non-english speaker, if you find any more errors just tell me and i will correct them (or clarify something better)
For what it’s worth, I have switched three machines of mine from Win10 to Mint in the last year, and in each case it was much easier and faster to install than Windows. And of course, daily use is much faster and smoother than Windows, but that is true of all distros. It’s just worth mentioning because mint is made to be the full featured user friendly experience (some might even call it bloated) out of the box, yet it’s still a rocket in comparison.
One was a typical work-issued Dell laptop w/ port replicator + M365, one was an old PC at home I built several years ago, and the last was an even older PC I built like 14 years ago.
Just yesterday at work I installed Win10 in VirtualBox so I could test a Windows app that gets built alongside our main embedded Linux software (used the VM since a certain popup window secondary to the main app wasn’t immediately working in Wine). Holy crap was it painful after being used to the Mint installer.
Then when I got home I decided to turn on that 14 year old system that’s been off for a month (when I installed the latest point release 22.1) to let it update. Even using the GUI updater, and even though it had to update the updater itself before updating however many dozen packages AND the kernel, I timed the entire process at five minutes flat. On the computer from 2011, with a pretty old & small SATA SSD system drive. And you can use the PC like normal until it’s done, when it shows a banner suggesting you reboot when you can because of the kernel update.
Again, nothing special in the Linux world where software is actually created with users put first. But still noteworthy for being the “easy” distro that looks a lot like Windows when you first boot it up.
I’m not posting this to say anything negative about Arch, either. That kind of distro is very important to begin with, and Arch in particular seems it’s good enough that it might be the new Debian. Especially with SteamOS switching to it.
I think mint is crazy better these days compared to 10 years ago, and it probably just came down to “we want to be user friendly to those who need their hands held” crashing into “actual users who need their hand held are trying it out.” 10 years ago, I think there simply wasn’t enough interested in Linux outside of Linux circles to properly test and figure things out, not to mention the strides the software itself has made in supporting more hardware more seamlessly.
The thing about RTFM is that users don’t, and the users that stuff like Mint is geared towards is those who when asked to read a wiki page, will simply give up. Windows has a cottage industry of people who do various things to make it easier for that kind of user. For example, just installing Windows on a device for you (albeit with bloatware usually) complete with all the drivers for your hardware. For most of the hardware on a laptop (audio, internet, HIDs, USB), that’ll have you set for life without having to touch anything and for the graphics that’ll at least have you set for several years without having to touch anything. And it’s not like Linux doesn’t have this level of support, it’s just that Windows has this level of support for consumers and Linux typically has it relegated to the enterprise sphere.
That being said, it’s insane how easy it is now to just install Mint, or PopOS, or even Ubuntu and have a working system. But most users don’t even install their Windows, much less a completely foreign OS.
IMO every distro should have a rolling release option. Kind of like how OpenSUSE has the normal version and Tumbleweed. You have normal version for when you need the OS to work (you’re new to Linux, it’s your main personal/work computer, it’s a server, etc) and then you have the rolling release option for when you’re willing to give up stability for the newest versions of everything as soon as possible.
The only thing I don’t like about stable distros is being 3-4 versions behind on software. Back when I was using Ubuntu I used to get frustrated because I wanted to use the latest version of things like LibreOffice, but couldn’t without bypassing the repos, which can cause issues down the road.
Used to have Slackware as a daily driver in 2005ish, will arch be similar or more difficult?
Arch’s package manager, pacman, manages dependencies for you and is quite robust. Arch is much simpler to run and maintain than Slackware, I think.
I’d say they are similar, but they have somewhat different philosophies. Slackware maintains a KISS philosophy and comes as a full system. It has its ncurses interface for installation. Some might find that helpful. Arch is purely CLI, so you need to know the commands (or write them down) to set the keyboard layout, set up a network connection, time/date, and so on. You build your Arch system from the ground up, but Pacman handles dependencies for you. Slackware comes as a full or minimal installation (or you can choose individual packages at the risk of breaking dependencies). Slackpkg does not handle dependencies for you. Both will require you to have some sense of what’s going on under the hood. You’ll need to edit config files and be a sysadmin of your own system.
We, long-time users of Linux, all have our opinions based on various preferences. The thing is that a lot of these preferences are pretty technical, like Ubuntu having snaps, Fedora and Mints’ flat pak policies, etc…
For the average user, they will not know what this is or even see a difference between the systems at first. The linux community would do better if we could have a unified front on distro recommendations. People will switch distros as they learn and their curiosity grows.
I think, we should ask people to pick based on their DE preference. If they want something like windows, let them have Mint or Kubuntu, if they want something closer to mac, let them have Ubuntu. I say this as someone who likes Fedora Plasma spin.
Everything else, is just information overload and will give users decision paralysis.
Our goal should be conversion of users. Once our numbers start growing, then things will pickup. Just imagine if we had office and adobe products here. How many people would be able to switch. I still use windows on my work computer as there is a single app holding me back.
Please, do not bring adobe and office pack there for god sake…
Why? A lot of people specifically do not use Linux for this reason. Like it or not, those apps are ingrained in the business world.
People are not going to sacrifice their income to use Linux. That is why I have a second computer just for windows for work.
If it weren’t for that, I could just use one computer with 2 user accounts.
I started with real arch and loved it. Different strokes different folks
Once you learn pacman is hard to go to anything substandard and slow, so you are hooked.
I use Debian ftw.
Literally never had EndeavourOS break in any way.
Last time might have been the GRUB issue that affected all of Arch. If you use GRUB that is, since it’s not the default on EndeavourOS. Next time might be old package repos being shut off, but only if your install is older, plus there’s already the second announcement with simple instructions regarding that on Arch News. Also, it will just block updates.
I’ve put two people without any prior knowledge on EndeavourOS, didn’t hear any complains either. I myself had no prior knowledge in Linux and hopped from Kubuntu to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to Garuda Linux in short succession. I only switched to EndeavourOS after Garuda repeatedly broke. Been on it for 2 years without an issue I think.
I know this is not a representative study and as a computer scientist, I do grasp things quickly, but I strongly oppose the notion that EndeavourOS is not beginner friendly.
I want linux to be as welcoming as possible to everyone and the newbie question of what distro to use will come up a lot. I dont think it’s helpful in any way to bicker about why my choice in linux is better. We should be giving them the tools to make the best decision for themselves
What if we built a beginners linux community (Linux, Where Do I Start -> LWDIS) and point to all the distros communities, and on those distro specific communities they had beginner friendly install, setup, rice, maintenance instructions and advice along with a difficulty rating. I don’t know if stickies are a thing here but could be helpful in keeping relevant info on top. This could be a place for fanboys to shine on there favorite distro while keeping the basic inclusive LWDIS community free of bickering about distros that might cause confusion and turn people off.
The LWDIS page should have a basic overview of the different distro family’s and maybe a breakdown of their specialty’s or focus. Probably have a breakdown for windows and mac specific easy ways to burn an ISO in the stickie.
Then people could field questions and guide people to the distro that might suit OP’s needs best instead of sponsoring their favorite distro.
From there they can go to the individual distros for more complete information and questions. If that distro and their community feels like a fit for their needs I think we could have a better retention rate than what we have been doing.
The other day I saw one of these which distro posts and most replies were not very helpful and mostly fanboy sponsorships which i don’t think would be very helpful to the OP. But their was one person there patiently and thoroughly answering OPs questions with the best info he could provide. It was tip top! That’s how we grow together!
I get it, the fanboy thing, I’ve got it bad for arch, endeavour and garuda. Im also the geekiest twat in my town. I don’t really recommend them to people I dont intend to be their IT guy when shit goes wrong. For the most part I recomend distros that have great communities people can draw from. If a newbie goes to the arch forum and hasn’t at least read the docs and researched their problem, provide logs or terminal output they arent getting helped. At least not how they might need. But on the mint, ubuntu, fedora forum’s they can plow through just about any problem with a little hand holding if that’s what they need, and that’s not a bad thing.
Friendliness, inclusion, understanding of the users personal needs, computer usage and goals is the way to keep people and expand our linux community IMO.
xkcd.com/927/
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f7e92785-9e40-4327-b8d4-f110f3aa2573.png">
spoiler
“Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we’ve all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.”
Fair enough!
I very much appreciated the xkcd, gave a good chuckle.
I’m in the void.
quick, quick, explain in one sentence whether the newb should go with musl of gliMBc … hurry … the screen is about to turn black and the installer will be gone
go musl with no hassle wink wink
It’s a good beginner distro if you want to stumble, fall, and learn things. It’s not a distro where everything is all good right out the box. For that, maybe try something like Linux Mint Debian Edition or Bazziteos
I went from Windows to Mint, to Pop-OS, to EndeavourOS and haven’t left EOS.
My time with Mint and Pop were about a week each. I switch from Windows to Linux 2 years ago.
For my experience, jumping into Arch feet first has been a great learning experience. My desktop PC is a gaming PC first, so having the most up to date packages has been great. It’s helped ‘de-mystify’ Linux for me. I’ve had to troubleshoot issues, but thanks to Arch’s excellent and extensive documentation, with some light reading I’ve manages to make it work.
I’m now moving on to setting up my own Homelab/Server, which will NOT be Arch based (…unless…?), because the experience with learning how to navigate Linux with Arch has given me the confidence to tackle something I have absolutely no experience in (NETWORKING).
LINUX IS AN EXPERIENCE NOT SOMETHING TO ENDLESSLY DEBATE ABOUT.
But but but SteamOS!
It was my second distro after mint. It’s very fun to learn as long as you got time to kill.
A beginner to what, to pacman, to arch, to rolling distro, to linux, to unix, to a PC, to using man-made tools …
I made an installation to an old pc once, I though it would last a while, and since the users could barely understand what an on/off button does, they just wanted google and facebook, so it was a wm with two browsers, daughter already knew what chrome was, and in the login shell I wrote a script that each new day it booted it attempted pacman -Suy --noconfirm then once a week the cache was emptied and the logs trimmed.
That was before covid, a couple months ago I met her, she said it has been working fine every since.
So there is your dinner
PS Actually it wasn’t arch it was artix with runit but that is about the same
What kind of beginning you mean? If you start to learn linux than use Arch or Archman specifically. If you just want to use Linux as desktop go other alternatives.