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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
NixOS is theoretically great but fucking hell they need better docs.
-
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.
-
I really need to set it up, not because I have issues but because having backups feels so nice.
-
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.
-
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/
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In 9+ years of literally never reading the changelog the ONLY time ive had arxh break was when grub did that unbelievably retarded update where it broke compatibility with itself and they did not put a goddamn hook to automatically update the install on bootloader.
That was solved in about 10min with a liveusb and replacing grub with systemdboot, which honestly I should have done a long time ago anyway it has a nice, easy, clean, simple configuration file instead of whatever the fuck they call that absolute monstrosity grub uses
-
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".
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
Counter-counterpoint: Newcomers have enough things to learn and worry about without having to worry about unfucking a broken Arch installation.
-
every one of the Linux users that wants to be elitist about their distro runs arch based on how hard it is.
Which always makes me laugh because I use Arch mainly because I'm a lazy ass and want something easy to maintain.
-
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.
