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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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.
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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.
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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
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. -
Counterpoint: if you have the ability and willingness to learn how Linux works, un-fucking a broken Arch installation will teach you more about the system than spending months with a stable distro. I know because my first serious daily driver was Manjaro.
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.
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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.
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.
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Do you use a modern kernel? And, do you use a multi touch trackpad?
That only works on wayland well.I personally see the difference in for example window movement Xorg VS wayland. And I have more artefacts from window manager if use Xorg BS when O use wayland.
yes, yes, and it works without tearing in xorg
no problem. multitouch is not xorgs nor wayland's responsibility. -
Your main issue with Linux is that it doesn't help you pirate proprietary software made for another OS?
They have linux versions?
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Your main issue with Linux is that it doesn't help you pirate proprietary software made for another OS?
I said its easy to pirate on other os not that they arent available on linux?
