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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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.
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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.
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this guy is so damn right i cant argue. arch isnt hard to use, whats hard is experiencing different things and learning
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I'm sure someone first distro was Gentoo and they had no issues.
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"I didnt read the changelogs"
I have never read the changelogs and I have never broken my EOS install ever.
Weak bait.
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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.
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What do you define as breaking? I ran arch and cachy and never once had a breaking issue.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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NixOS is theoretically great but fucking hell they need better docs.
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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.
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I really need to set it up, not because I have issues but because having backups feels so nice.
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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.
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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 https://xkcd.com/2501/
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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 -
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.
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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.
