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?
-
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.
-
Admittedly, the installation for Arch Linux is not that difficult.
It's the General Recommendations that become bullshit.
-
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.
-
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
-
Android looks at SteamOS from the distance
-
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.
-
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!
-
idk I'm kind of a fucking idiot and I started with Manjaro.
-
Exercise is fascism
-
Clearly you've never used it for an extended period, or If you have you never installed packages from the AUR.
-
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?
-
Nah that's gentoo
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Yeah, Gentoo puts serious emphasis on that, I have to give them a credit. I liked it.
But yeah, I'd rather not have breaking changes in the first place.
-
I'm not completely up to speed with the core principles of Arch, but I think it revolves around KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!).
Meaning that Arch doesn't hold your hand with nice GUIs. Instead, it tries to make the command line interface as easy to understand and use as possible.
So if you run into a problem, you're more likely to understand how to fix it, or at least what the root cause is. Which is not a given when you're used to distros with more abstraction like Ubuntu.
Then again, this design concept is not for everyone. -
Counter-counter point: people don’t get a Mac or windows laptop to learn about osx or windows. They generally want to run software or at least browser to do what they need to do.
-
Again, stable doesn't mean what you think it means. An unstable system is not one that breaks, but one that doesn't keep a stable base. For example, Debian will not update a major version of almost anything, since that could potentially break dependencies, so it is stable even if it released patches as fast as Arch. On the other hand Arch is unstable, even if upgrading your system never broke anything because it can at any point change the version of any library you have installed.
