Can we please, PLEASE for gods sake just all agree that arch is not and will never be a good beginner distro no matter how many times you fork it?
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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!
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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)
LINUX IS AN EXPERIENCE NOT SOMETHING TO ENDLESSLY DEBATE ABOUT.
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I want linux to be as welcoming as possible to everyone and the newbie qiestion 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.
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less hard than running debian or redhat back in the 90s
Zoomers will never know the pain... and the joy and actually getting it installed!
Remember the first time you got a printer working in Linux? Better than sex....
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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.
I started off as a Redhat person (this is before RHEL and Fedora existed, so the distro was just "Redhat"), then after Redhat started their shenanigans, I spent a decade or so distro hopping. I even became an OpenBSD user for a couple of years. But now, I'm all Debian. Sane defaults, stable, quick setup. I can get on with my day. I understand the Arch obsession, but I feel like I'm long past that level of interest in tinkering at this point.
Preach greybeard
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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)
But but but SteamOS!
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I want linux to be as welcoming as possible to everyone and the newbie qiestion 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.
::: spoiler spoiler
"Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit."
::: -
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)
It was my second distro after mint. It's very fun to learn as long as you got time to kill.
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it’s a good beginner distro because getting thrown into deep water is how one learns to swim
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.
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it's a good beginner distro because getting thrown into deep water is how one learns 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.
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::: spoiler 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.
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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)
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
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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
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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
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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.
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Veterans will always go back to Debian. It is inevitable.
I'd rather use windows 7 than ever go back to Debian ... something with 7 being the last good version of anything
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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
True, between arch and gentoo wiki you can hardly find any other information that is worth your while.
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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)
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.
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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
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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.
Good point, I only a had a few AUR packages installed, so that probably made things more stable.
