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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Stable means not updated.
Oh no! I haven't got the latest push from 30 seconds ago. My operating system is so out of date and I'm so uncool!!11
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ahh its been so long since I used regular Debian in school I thought it had ppa since raspbian does
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less hard than running debian or redhat back in the 90s
Zoomers will never know the pain... and the joy and actually getting it installed!
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I started with mint more than 10 years ago because a friend of mine told me it was one, if not the best, distro for newbies (that was a fucking lie). Idk how mint is doing today but back then was kind of a mess and dealing with it wasnt easy, so i dont really know how or why i switched to debian for a while. With debian i had a lot of problems with some software, mostly proprietary drivers for esotic hardware i was running back then due to me buying the cheapest laptops available, so i started distro hopping for a while. Every distro but fedora was debian based so it felt a lot like a more of the same experience and I felt stuck in a loop where i was eventually gonna reinstall my whole system after breaking something i didnt even know existed.
Then one day i found arch. Installing it wasnt as easy as clicking install on the live system's guy, but just by following the wiki general instructions i didnt have any issues the first time. It felt good. Building the system block by block helped me understand how things work, the package manager was the best i had seen and the newbie corner basically had the solutions for all my screw-ups, even more than ask-ubuntu did. Everybody in the community was super helpful (even some of the devs). Then there was the AUR, with almost every piece of esotic or proprietary software i needed, much easier than adding some random guy's repositories to apt or enabling backports on debian. Also i found out that i prefer having a rolling release. With arch i learned how to use and maintain my system, and i just stuck with it.
That said, just how some use linux just to brag about it with their normie friends, many many people use arch to brag about it with other linux users, mostly beacause arch has the infamous reputation that it is hard to install, hard to maintain, easy to break. Which is actually not that bad considering that all these people are gonna end up posting in the newbie corner lol.
Truth is that arch is not harder than any other distro. It only comes down to your will to learn and RTFM
What i think worked for me was the transparency. Nobody said it was as easy to use as windows, but nobody in the wiki said "dont do this unless you are an experienced user". Arch is not another fork of ubuntu pretending to be "even more user friendly", it's just arch.I think the problem is about distros like antergos (rip), manjaro, garuda, endevour trying to oversimplify something that only needs you to RTFM only ending up breaking something they tried to automate and hide behind a curtain that wasnt meant to be automated and was meant to be learned to manage, by hand
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IMO every distro should have a rolling release option. Kind of like how OpenSUSE has the normal version and Tumbleweed. You have normal version for when you need the OS to work (you're new to Linux, it's your main personal/work computer, it's a server, etc) and then you have the rolling release option for when you're willing to give up stability for the newest versions of everything as soon as possible.
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EndeavorOS is not automatic but you can set it up with one terminal command.
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That what makes it so cringe that they want that with arch.
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Isn't the lack of dependency management a huge pain on Slackware? I think Gentoo is my forever distro, but I'm very curious about Slackware.
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If you're mindlessly pasting commands, sure... but you have zero idea what your fucking with if you think bash is simpler than HTML.
In the context of maintaining an Arch distro you will absolutely need to understand that executing CLI commands is in fact programming.
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Used to have Slackware as a daily driver in 2005ish, will arch be similar or more difficult?
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Everyone has a right to go their own way. Everyone has a right to have an opinion on how you go your own way.
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Arch's package manager, pacman, manages dependencies for you and is quite robust. Arch is much simpler to run and maintain than Slackware, I think.
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I dunno, I used ubuntu (or some flavor of it) for 15 years before Arch. I will say that the first time I installed Arch, I did it solely to prove to myself that I could. After that, I fell in love with it as a daily driver for a lot of reasons. The AUR is a big one, and the fact that it's so well documented also helps. But really, once it's installed, Arch isn't any more complicated than any other distro to keep running.
I did switch to EndeavourOS, though, because once one has installed Arch the "Arch way" a few times I don't reallly see any benefit in doing it again.
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I don't think this is a well-defined term, so not much point in arguing about its definition.
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Once it's installed Arch is just as easy to use as any other distro. It's "unstable" because it's rolling release, sometimes issues crop up with bleeding-edge updates, just keep an eye on the forums before updating.
I've only had to deal with a broken system a couple of times, both were 100% my fault, and both were fixable without reinstalling. Even when something breaks it's pretty forgiving, as long as one is paying attention and not afraid of reading documentation.
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The only thing I don't like about stable distros is being 3-4 versions behind on software. Back when I was using Ubuntu I used to get frustrated because I wanted to use the latest version of things like LibreOffice, but couldn't without bypassing the repos, which can cause issues down the road.
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For what it's worth, I have switched three machines of mine from Win10 to Mint in the last year, and in each case it was much easier and faster to install than Windows. And of course, daily use is much faster and smoother than Windows, but that is true of all distros. It's just worth mentioning because mint is made to be the full featured user friendly experience (some might even call it bloated) out of the box, yet it's still a rocket in comparison.
One was a typical work-issued Dell laptop w/ port replicator + M365, one was an old PC at home I built several years ago, and the last was an even older PC I built like 14 years ago.
Just yesterday at work I installed Win10 in VirtualBox so I could test a Windows app that gets built alongside our main embedded Linux software (used the VM since a certain popup window secondary to the main app wasn't immediately working in Wine). Holy crap was it painful after being used to the Mint installer.
Then when I got home I decided to turn on that 14 year old system that's been off for a month (when I installed the latest point release 22.1) to let it update. Even using the GUI updater, and even though it had to update the updater itself before updating however many dozen packages AND the kernel, I timed the entire process at five minutes flat. On the computer from 2011, with a pretty old & small SATA SSD system drive. And you can use the PC like normal until it's done, when it shows a banner suggesting you reboot when you can because of the kernel update.
Again, nothing special in the Linux world where software is actually created with users put first. But still noteworthy for being the "easy" distro that looks a lot like Windows when you first boot it up.
I'm not posting this to say anything negative about Arch, either. That kind of distro is very important to begin with, and Arch in particular seems it's good enough that it might be the new Debian. Especially with SteamOS switching to it.
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Compared to garbage proprietary software documentation? At least if it’s FOSS garbage there are usually other helpful users on random forums.
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I think mint is crazy better these days compared to 10 years ago, and it probably just came down to "we want to be user friendly to those who need their hands held" crashing into "actual users who need their hand held are trying it out." 10 years ago, I think there simply wasn't enough interested in Linux outside of Linux circles to properly test and figure things out, not to mention the strides the software itself has made in supporting more hardware more seamlessly.
The thing about RTFM is that users don't, and the users that stuff like Mint is geared towards is those who when asked to read a wiki page, will simply give up. Windows has a cottage industry of people who do various things to make it easier for that kind of user. For example, just installing Windows on a device for you (albeit with bloatware usually) complete with all the drivers for your hardware. For most of the hardware on a laptop (audio, internet, HIDs, USB), that'll have you set for life without having to touch anything and for the graphics that'll at least have you set for several years without having to touch anything. And it's not like Linux doesn't have this level of support, it's just that Windows has this level of support for consumers and Linux typically has it relegated to the enterprise sphere.
That being said, it's insane how easy it is now to just install Mint, or PopOS, or even Ubuntu and have a working system. But most users don't even install their Windows, much less a completely foreign OS.
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We, long-time users of Linux, all have our opinions based on various preferences. The thing is that a lot of these preferences are pretty technical, like Ubuntu having snaps, Fedora and Mints' flat pak policies, etc...
For the average user, they will not know what this is or even see a difference between the systems at first. The linux community would do better if we could have a unified front on distro recommendations. People will switch distros as they learn and their curiosity grows.
I think, we should ask people to pick based on their DE preference. If they want something like windows, let them have Mint or Kubuntu, if they want something closer to mac, let them have Ubuntu. I say this as someone who likes Fedora Plasma spin.
Everything else, is just information overload and will give users decision paralysis.
Our goal should be conversion of users. Once our numbers start growing, then things will pickup. Just imagine if we had office and adobe products here. How many people would be able to switch. I still use windows on my work computer as there is a single app holding me back.
