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Luffy @lemmy.ml

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?

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)

355 comments

  • What kind of beginning you mean? If you start to learn linux than use Arch or Archman specifically. If you just want to use Linux as desktop go other alternatives.

  • I went from Windows to Mint, to Pop-OS, to EndeavourOS and haven't left EOS.

    My time with Mint and Pop were about a week each. I switch from Windows to Linux 2 years ago.

    For my experience, jumping into Arch feet first has been a great learning experience. My desktop PC is a gaming PC first, so having the most up to date packages has been great. It's helped 'de-mystify' Linux for me. I've had to troubleshoot issues, but thanks to Arch's excellent and extensive documentation, with some light reading I've manages to make it work.

    I'm now moving on to setting up my own Homelab/Server, which will NOT be Arch based (...unless...?), because the experience with learning how to navigate Linux with Arch has given me the confidence to tackle something I have absolutely no experience in (NETWORKING).

  • Literally never had EndeavourOS break in any way.

    Last time might have been the GRUB issue that affected all of Arch. If you use GRUB that is, since it's not the default on EndeavourOS. Next time might be old package repos being shut off, but only if your install is older, plus there's already the second announcement with simple instructions regarding that on Arch News. Also, it will just block updates.

    I've put two people without any prior knowledge on EndeavourOS, didn't hear any complains either. I myself had no prior knowledge in Linux and hopped from Kubuntu to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to Garuda Linux in short succession. I only switched to EndeavourOS after Garuda repeatedly broke. Been on it for 2 years without an issue I think.

    I know this is not a representative study and as a computer scientist, I do grasp things quickly, but I strongly oppose the notion that EndeavourOS is not beginner friendly.

  • I want linux to be as welcoming as possible to everyone and the newbie question of what distro to use will come up a lot. I dont think it's helpful in any way to bicker about why my choice in linux is better. We should be giving them the tools to make the best decision for themselves

    What if we built a beginners linux community (Linux, Where Do I Start -> LWDIS) and point to all the distros communities, and on those distro specific communities they had beginner friendly install, setup, rice, maintenance instructions and advice along with a difficulty rating. I don't know if stickies are a thing here but could be helpful in keeping relevant info on top. This could be a place for fanboys to shine on there favorite distro while keeping the basic inclusive LWDIS community free of bickering about distros that might cause confusion and turn people off.

    • https://xkcd.com/927/

      • Fair enough!

        I very much appreciated the xkcd, gave a good chuckle.

    • The LWDIS page should have a basic overview of the different distro family's and maybe a breakdown of their specialty's or focus. Probably have a breakdown for windows and mac specific easy ways to burn an ISO in the stickie.

      Then people could field questions and guide people to the distro that might suit OP's needs best instead of sponsoring their favorite distro.

      From there they can go to the individual distros for more complete information and questions. If that distro and their community feels like a fit for their needs I think we could have a better retention rate than what we have been doing.

      The other day I saw one of these which distro posts and most replies were not very helpful and mostly fanboy sponsorships which i don't think would be very helpful to the OP. But their was one person there patiently and thoroughly answering OPs questions with the best info he could provide. It was tip top! That's how we grow together!

      I get it, the fanboy thing, I've got it bad for arch, endeavour and garuda. Im also the geekiest twat in my town. I don't really recommend them to people I dont intend to be their IT guy when shit goes wrong. For the most part I recomend distros that have great communities people can draw from. If a newbie goes to the arch forum and hasn't at least read the docs and researched their problem, provide logs or terminal output they arent getting helped. At least not how they might need. But on the mint, ubuntu, fedora forum's they can plow through just about any problem with a little hand holding if that's what they need, and that's not a bad thing.

      Friendliness, inclusion, understanding of the users personal needs, computer usage and goals is the way to keep people and expand our linux community IMO.

  • It was my second distro after mint. It's very fun to learn as long as you got time to kill.

  • I'd just like to vent that these kind of discussions are one of the big turnoffs of the Linux community in general. People speak "in absolutes".

    You either do it this way or you're a dumbass. You either use the distribution I like or you're doing it WRONG. You shouldn't use Arch because you're not experienced enough, you should use Mint for an arbitrary amount of time before you graduate to the good stuff.

    You friends get way too worked up over other people's personal preferences and push your biased and subjective views as facts.

    Is Arch Linux the right fit for a newbie to Linux? The right answer is "it depends", not "never". Would I recommend Arch to my mom? No. Would I recommend it to my programmer colleague who already lives in the Powershell? Sure, why not.

  • 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 (like my friend did), 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

    EDIT: spelling. I'm a non-english speaker, if you find any more errors just tell me and i will correct them (or clarify something better)

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • I mean, I'm just one reference point, but here we go. I started with Kubuntu -- I liked KDE, and Ubuntu is a stable, LTS distro. What could go wrong?

    But my PC is Intel/Nvidia, so I'm constantly facing driver issues, and not to mention, snap is completely fucked. Ubuntu is supposed to be LTS but I've somehow still got 2-4 GB of updates every day or two. I've also got random bugs here and there and no real idea of how to troubleshoot them because the support is disparate or doesn't address my specific issue.

    Meanwhile, on my Chrultrabook, I decided to go with Arch, which of course presented its own set of issues. The archinstall script was straightforward, and debugging it was also fairly easy since the Arch wiki and forums were a trove of information. But debugging and tinkering, even when I accidentally bricked my laptop and had to do a clean slate (don't ever interrupt pacman, I've learned!), has been a great learning experience. It's made me feel like I actually understand a little more of what goes on under the hood. Ubuntu could do that as well, but it isn't meant to be design.

    Neither is good nor bad on its own, but different people enjoy different things. I didn't think I would be the type to enjoy Arch, but it gave me valuable experience and a fun project (even if I did end up staying up until 3 or 4 AM on work nights). I've got EndeavourOS on my laptop now and still Kubuntu on my PC, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't just switch over. Arch/eOS being a rolling release feels nice too, as I'm doing all these updates on Ubuntu anyway, but I'm slightly more worried about fucking something up.

  • I was not technically a newbie since I had previously used ubuntu in the distant past (as if ubuntu would truly prepare someone for a more advanced distro), and probably a few others I can't remember, but I came back with EndeavourOS and I'm having a great time. I did have a few challenges though I am fairly tech savvy and I knew what I was getting into so I was definitely not a regular novice.

    After a single serious oopsie that bricked my system but I was able to fix I've been running a very stable system. I've kept with it for nearly 2 years now on my initial install with practically no issues, at least none I wasn't willing and able to solve. I troubleshot an issue I was having with a package installation the other day without finding any help online and that made me proud of myself.

    I would have considered myself a decent power user on windows, and I feel like a sub average arch user, but hey I get to learn and improve more now.

  • 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

      • How so? I see plenty of posts by folks who recently switched from Windows, and I imagine the ones who are willing to take that leap in the first place lean towards the more tech-literate side.

        "Willing to learn" is more subjective, perhaps, but I do not think my case is that uncommon.

  • As a (currently) CachyOS user, I would like to point out that their custom mirrors don't always reflect the newest version of packages, too. So if your package has a bug you may have to wait an extra day or two for it to reflect the fixed version after it drops. That or manually install the git.

    Just make love with Timeshift and for the love of god don't use topgrade if you don't know what you're doing. Thankfully, because of rule number one, Timeshift told me the topgrade nightmare was over and tucked me back into bed with a glass of warm milk and a bedtime story.

  • Is there really enough of an epidemic of newbies being recommended Arch to warrant this amount of ire? All I ever hear is how Arch is the “hardcore” distro and beginners should all use Linux Mint.

    I’m someone who has only ever poked around with Linux Mint on a thumb drive a few times to see what it’s like and thinking, “Yep. This is a working operating system.” and then going back to Windows because there was never any compelling reason to switch.

    But I recently decided to have a dedicated PC with Linux on it and I chose CachyOS because I want to play games. (Yes, I know you can game on other distros.) And I’m… fine. I’m computer literate, I did my research, and I knew that using an Arch-based distros was “being thrown into the deep end.” But I followed the instructions, as well as some advice, and the setup completed without any issues.

    I’m using my PC and things “just work.” Apparently I’m just an update away from everything collapsing into smoldering wreckage. If that happens, I’ll try to fix it, and maybe I’ll learn something in the process. If not, I’ll try to keep my files backed up so I can restore things. Or maybe I’ll decide that I hate it and try something else, but… so far so good.

  • Hey, you forget about Gentoo Linux!

    The real distro for newbies... (Provided the newbies are expert cs graduated and crazy nerds...)

    All depends on what a beginner is... Not all beginners are tech illiterates or people who only want to use office.

355 comments