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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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.
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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
That was solved in about 10min with a liveusb and replacing grub with systemdboot
Try explaining that to a newbie
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Debian is the best distro for newbies, it may require setup and reading some documentation but afterwards you get a stable distro.
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.
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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)
Not sure about forks, but I agree with what you said before.
Manjaro is great.
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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)
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.
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The install guide is not 50 pages-long, common!
Admittedly, the installation for Arch Linux is not that difficult.
It's the General Recommendations that become bullshit.
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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 had my first ever “breakage” on Arch recently. Actually two just recently (both on an old Mac):
- the driver for my Broadcom hardware was broken for a day
- with the upgrade to kernel 6.13, the FaceTimeHD camera is not working
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 in the past.
I can also say that the only breakage I have had was mitigated by having an LTS kernel to reboot into.
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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.I came in as a modestly computer-literate Windows refugee willing to learn
That's like 2% of the people who want to switch to Linux
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Meanwhile random people just using SteamOS and being happy.
Android looks at SteamOS from the distance
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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
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.
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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 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!
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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)
idk I'm kind of a fucking idiot and I started with Manjaro.
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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
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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.
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I had my first ever “breakage” on Arch recently. Actually two just recently (both on an old Mac):
- the driver for my Broadcom hardware was broken for a day
- with the upgrade to kernel 6.13, the FaceTimeHD camera is not working
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 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?
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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
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i wouldn't wish apt on my enemies. terrible habits with all the ppas and piping curl to bash in every forum post
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.
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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)
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.
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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.
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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 but 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".
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.
