Arch Linux – Best Tips for Beginners?
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My understanding is this:
It's just the principle of AUR wrappers. Yes they are very useful, but anyone and their uncle can put a package in AUR name it whatever they want as long as it's not taken. AUR wrapper makes it easier to install things without knowing much, but manually searching for something, finding it, and installing it involves conscious choices. Arch cannot be responsible for people installing malware from a software they recommended, that's why it's kept this way intensionally.
Imagine if yay/paru came with the os, or could be installed from pacman, then people would just recommend doing that to new users and then they might just install whatever and break the system a lot more.
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I 2nd this wholeheartedly! Been using endeavourOS for years at this point! Before endeavourOS I was distro hoping the classics. I tried Ubuntu, fedora, popOS, Debian and way more throughout my time on linux. When I tried endeavour the first time I just stuck with it. It just worked, the updates are seamless and I just like get along with it.
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Wayland and Cosmic are not there yet for beginners, more like beta, watch videos from Brodie Robertson, I'll wait half year at least to try that for newbies.
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funny you say that since I just did it (in virtualbox thankfully) and gave up until I heard about endavourOS a few minutes ago
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From the bottom of the installation guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations
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You boot into your installation media and type archinstall then pick the options you want. You can do it the manual way but Arch install works great.
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Check ArchLinux.org for news before you kick off an update. It's got an RSS feed and a mailing list if that helps.
Read the Wiki, and turn to it first for any issues you have.
This one may be a special "me" problem, but if you're manually interacting with wpa_supplicant, stop and go read the Networking page in the Wiki again.
Learn how to use journalctl (at least superficially) before something goes wrong.
Generally you want to restart after an update to the kernel or graphics drivers or things start degrading strangely.
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Use EndeavousOS instead because the initial install process is simpler.
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I'm surprised it isn't the norm to have a hook that checks it as part of pacman updating.
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I mean, its useful regardless of the OS. When my Windows install broke and a system image restore got botched it was useful having a laptop.
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Alright I'll try again and let you know, what DE do you recommend? I use cinnamon right now
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Don't cheap out and use the hand holding script to ez mode the install. At least not the first time. You will learn a few things along the way.
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don't use archinstall if it's the first time, the manual installation is not that hard
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Be aware that some apps will install fine from the arch repo but some others will be better installed from flatpack (e.g. inkscape) or directly as an executable (e.g. Godot).
On steam you may need to specify your video card if you run an AMD card using the DRI prime command. Some games will require -vulkan to use vulkan rather than game settings.
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I learned so much from just going wiki-diving at every step of the installation and post-installation
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Read thoroughly. Can't agree more.
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i don't think i went wiki diving really, i just followed what it said but it gave me a nice overview of what does what in an arch system that i could expand on later
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ditch it and go straight to NIxOS
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I installed Arch like that. When I had to do a new install, I forgot everything, then I used archinstall with Xfce option and it worked fine.
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What was your experience with Inkscape and Godot? I have those both installed from repo.
I've never felt the need to use flatpak at all on arch.
