Even I wasn't cruel enough to banish my mother to arch. She uses fedora on her desktop (because she liked gnome) and Linux mint on her laptop because I wanted her to make sure she still wanted to switch after trying it for about a month.
She wanted to jump head first but it would have been a pain to go through four installs if she didn't like it.
Indeed, besides most linux distributions are fairly equally lightweight and can be customized. I tried 4-5 distros this past January (Arch being one) when I got my new gaming laptop and they all booted in ~9.5 sec for example, and perform equally well in general, they had fairly similar RAM load with the same desktop environment.
Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.
One problem here is that new users install Endeavour/Garuda but don't know how to manage updates safely about pacnew/pacsave/etc. So the system might slowly "rot" without them knowing about it because new components use old configs, etc..
I also recommend Mint to new users. I don't use Mint, nor do I use Arch.
As a Gentoo user currently vacationing in Arch-land I'm not sure whether to feel insulted or affirmed. Imean, it is but some might say that to disparage it or its users 😅
For me: Gentoo is a meta distro, you are the distro maintainer then the power user of that specific distro you created for yourself which can definitely be fun. Arch is more like: let's give you one instance of a Gentoo distro when you are tired of being the distro maintainer.
Tbf I don't think many people know about pacdiff. The way I found out about it was by looking up a warning about pacnew/pacsave during an upgrade, because I was bored. Very random.
As a seasoned distrohopper, can confirm. When I try something new, I always ask myself: Would a noob be ok with the fact that in this distro you have to do things this way. In Fedora, Debian, Manjaro and so many other I always end up saying “no” more than a few times. With Mint, you just don’t bump into these situations very often. IMO, Mint is the best starter distro for most users. If you know your friend is very technical, you can recommend something else.
I finally tried out Linux Mint this year at work (we use Fedora for some of our different tasks). It arms like such a nice experience out of the box, and I’d put it on a family computer in a second.
Isn't archwiki one of the most comprehended wikis for Linux distros out there? If anything, the arch-wiki (to me) has often too many answers for the same problem than the other way around.
I switched like ten years ago because I wanted to learn the details, but in all honesty I still feel like I barely understand anything. Not sure how normal this is, maybe I'm unusually dumb, but I feel like what I've really learned is how to troubleshoot and solve issues by reading documentation and tinkering, rather than understanding what I'm actually doing. I've had a stable system for years but I kind of feel like if a typical arch forum poster looked my system configuration for five minutes they'd be like wtf are you doing.
It is most comprehended, but for newbie it is too comprehensive. Its overwhelming, I tried to troubleshoot why I boot to black screen even the installation said its successful and there's no error. I saw solutions that want me edit grub, edit xorg ... and some other file that I never understand.
I understand the wiki is very good and very important, its just not newbie friendly.
A lot of new users are coming to Linux not because they like tinkering with their setup but because they are tired of Microsoft tinkering with their setup. For these people Arch will probably never be the answer. That's ok, we should encourage all Linux adoption and the best way to do that is to start with the simple and familiar.
I mean, who doesn't love to have candy crush and facebook automatically bundled with their OS? I mean, I had a fantastic two years waiting for the never combine taskbar feature to be released. The never-ending prompt to make edge my default browser is also utterly refreshing. m$ is so ahead of the game, they even anticipated my needs by shoving onedrive prompts in my control panel. How about that Office 365? Have you tried it yet? No? Well you're missing out my man, in case you change your mind I'm going to put it right there in the front page of settings so you'll never miss it.
I switched a few weeks ago, it was because my computer is slower than a toaster and windows was tanking it down even more I installed xubuntu, well I must say it's ok, after I finished setting stuff up I realised I should've just gone for debian with xfce (I tried to install kubuntu-deskop on my xubuntu installation just to try how would kde run on my pc, it ran as well as windows did, but was just a tiny tiny bit faster, the way I installed it was probably bad and it could've been the way I installed it tho)
And yeah, I definitely love tinkering with stuff so this wasthe obvious choice
heres the thing: as a decade+ software dev, I never want to even think about my distro.
I just want Linux terminal style commands, and Linux style ssh shit to just work in the most middle of the road way as possible. I'm trying to get a job done, not build a personality.
I used Arch for AUR, but with flatpak getting more popular these last few years even the more niche stuff I had to rely on AUR for got a flatpak. So I've been trying out immutable distros like Fedora Kinoite.
I only ever have Mac stuff from employers, but it is nice hardware and linux-like enough for me to be happy.
Probably also helps Mac that every windows machines provided by an employer is some random HP buttbook that looks and preforms like it could be from 2021 or 2012, who knows
I interpreted "middle of the road" as doing nothing special, just normal tasks done a normal way and therefore hoping everything just works so you can focus on work
?? The arch wiki is one of the greatest Linux resources out there. Sure there may be situations where it doesn't have the answer for something, but for a new user? It has all bases covered.
It's actually really great.. if you know how to interpret and apply the information on it to your situation and adapt as needed. A good new user experience it does not make however.
On one hand, the archlinux bbs had the only exact reference to the issue I was having. On the other hand, no one could replicate it enough to figure anything out. :/
Ex arch btw user here. I noped out and wiped after thinking I had it all nailed down, then I tried to connect my Bluetooth headphones and I came to a grand awakening. I am too old for this shit.
I just installed Nextcloud on Arch and the official packages caused the most headaches I ever had within my 3 years of arch. In contrast I installed the official Jellyfin and Prometheus Server packages and they ran OOTB.
I ended up with not using the official packages but extracting the tar.bz2 into /var/www/nextcloud and slightly modifying the nginx config from their site. I had to move the inclusion of the MIME-Types file to a different block for nextcloud to deliver its CSS, SVGs and images. It wasn't exactly straight-forward too considering permissions. I found it a beast compared to many other server software.
I mean… I would consider anywhere that you might download software from sensitive. This isn’t really a smart move. And sure, the mirror’s page they link to uses https, but if the regular site doesn’t a man-in-the-middle could change the url and serve an official looking malicious version… I wouldn’t consider putting your users at an elevated risk when it’s relatively easy to set up TLS “a smart move”.
If it hasn’t I would just assume that Slackware isn’t a big enough target and that anybody in the position to man-in-the-middle a large number of people would have better targets. I mean, to be clear TLS is not a silver bullet either, but it goes a long way for ensuring the integrity of the data you receive over the internet in addition to hiding the contents.
Distros usually sign their ISOs with PGP as well (Slackware does this), so it’s a good idea to verify those signatures as it’s a second channel that you can use to double check the validity of the ISO (but I’m not sure many people actually do this). Of course, anybody can make PGP keys so you have to find out which key is actually supposed to be signing the iso, otherwise an attacker can just make a bogus key and tell you that that’s the Slackware signing key (on the official website too, because it doesn’t use tls!). The web of trust arguably helps some (though this can be faked as well unless you actually participate in key signing parties or something), and you can hope that the Slackware public key is mirrored in several places that you trust so you can compare them… but at the end of the day for most people all trust in the distribution comes from the domain name, and if you don’t have TLS certificates you’re kind of setting up a weak foundation of trust… Maybe it will be fine because you’re not a big enough target for somebody to bother, but in this day and age it’s pretty much trivial to set up TLS certificates and that gets you a far better foundation… why take the risk? Why is it smart to unnecessarily expose your users to more risk than necessary?
Its probably just one package. I guess for example pacman -S plasma-desktop plasma-meta flatpak fish plasma-wayland-session sddm sddm-kcm && systemctl enable --now sddm does the trick.
Archinstall with the entire plasma desktop is probably also nice, or just EndeavorOS which will be preconfigured
I actually did the whole KDE shebang with archinstall. I never really expected that Arch btw deigned it too opinionated to just provide an audio and Bluetooth interface. Instead I have to choose between pulse audio and pipewire and bluez and a bunch of others. I just didn’t have the patience nor time to look into what and why these options are presented, and this was after I already wasted days figuring how to get my pc to boot with my 12th gen Intel and Nvidia gpu combination.
Turns out there’s a bunch of kernel finagling you absolutely have to do first before it even decides to boot from the gpu and not the igpu. Oh well.
For a total newbie, probably Linux Mint or PopOS are the best options. But EndeavourOS is getting there. There shouldn't be any issues during the installation if one sticks to the defaults. Only thing is, it doesn't come with a graphical package manager out of the box. But once that is installed (I think anyone will be happy to write a single terminal command, at least), I don't see why it's any harder to use than any other distro.
Mint, with any DE, does come with a graphical package manager. It's as easy as any appstore. The only confusion is it suggests both it's original and flatpack versions to install.
Reading it in a linear fashion, you drop one distro after another without much distinction. I believe it'd be better if you serve EndOS it's own paragraph since it's so different.
I use Ubuntu. It generally tends to be boring stable, which is kinda what I want out of my OS these days. I can still customize it, and even break it if I really get bored, but it's nice to have things just work for the most part.
I had a friend who wanted to try linux but insisted on arch because it's what I used at the time even though I said they shouldn't and gave many suggestions for better distros. They gave up after about a day and went back to windows. I don't know what they expected, multiple people warned them not to use arch.
My IT Bros said the same back when I had to choose W10 or Linux, they haven't used arch and I had 0 Linux experience. I messed up every single step of the installation to a point where I knew from the problems I created what I did wrong. After many tries and a week later I had a working installation with dual boot. Never used windows and removed it a year later. It was rough but I learned how to recover from most errors a user can create.
If learning is the goal arch and arch-wiki is great.
I've been off windows for a long time, and when I was forced to use it, it was enterprise, locked down and stripped by knowledgeable IT teams.
Yesterday, I had my first exposure to Win 11 S mode. What a piece of crap. Not just the way its locked down, but the incessant Onedrive ads, broken settings app with missing features, AI buzzword addons, sloppy UI and general lack of control over your own computer.
Recommending my friend install Linux ASAP with my support. Nobody should have to endure that much cruft and garbage on their owned computer. They can't even install software outside of the MS store? Gross.
Oh yeah no I was not at all saying windows was better, I was just saying arch was definitely not a good distribution for beginners and it was weird how one just insisted on using it. I use arch on my laptop and opensuse tumbleweed on my desktop and have not used windows for anything serious in years because it is so unbearable.
I understood you weren't advocating for Windows (as an Arch user? The very idea!), but your mention of your friend returning to Windows got me thinking about my friends laptop and how icky it felt.
Glad there are fewer and fewer barriers to using Linux full time these days.
I'm switching from manjaro to endeavour atm, and i am liking endeavour a lot. I kept having issues with manjaro boot after every kernel update, but otherwise didnt mind it. Probably whatever manjaros build chain for boot is just wasn't working with my hardware, but also the attitude on the forum is that you are stupid if you have to roll the kernel back.
Endeavour really just provides you arch with some maintenance utilities and otherwise lets you do your thing.
No more firefox home page getting constantly reset to the manajro home page so they can market you their laptop partnerships either 😉
I love Arch but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. In my eyes, the only way one should choose Arch is despite all warnings against it, because they feel confident enough to deal with all the problems they encounter.
Honestly I've had so little trouble with arch compared to other things, so I would definitely recommend it to experienced linux users, just definitely not unexperienced users. The aur is amazing and rolling release means you don't have to deal with the horrors of major updates breaking packages. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is also a great candidate though for people who don't want to set as many things up themself, I'm currently using both arch and tumbleweed on different computers
Yup! Same here. Once I've got everything set up, it has been running smoothly and without any issues for more than 5 years in my case. It's literally the most reliable system I've ever set up, but I understand that the entry hurdle is pretty high.
Many distros do their own packaging on their repos, adding dependencies and custom-builds with custom configurations, and this often breaks my OS. On arch, this doesn't happen to me. What's your experience?
25 years into the future and my biggest issue regarding sound is having to tell pipewire to stop going into standby since I do not enjoy the white noise coming from my speakers if it does.
Bruh, if you're going to insist on someone installing arch, at least sit by their side and walk them through it.
Having installed arch multiple times before, I can get a base system with networking and desktop environment up in half a day to a day depending on which DE.
I'm not saying it's particularly fast, but having someone who knows what they are doing drastically reduces the time.
I could probably make it quicker if I set up a bunch of scripts for initial installation.
That said the whole point of arch is DIY, lightweight - people forget the kinda of people arch is for, then complain about how long it takes to install. If you complain about install times, then the distro is not for you. (For more about the point of arch, see the arch way https://principles.design/examples/the-arch-way)
But it can be a great platform for learning about the inner workings of your typical Linux system, and that's why it's great. If you're willing to learn and look things up it can be the best option.
If you want it here and now with no fuss ,it's the third worst system to use- followed by Gentoo and lastly, LFS.
And heck once it's installed you can be as pedantic or as lazy as you want - my main system has had the same install of arch for multiple years - it's a mess and I havent really maintained it well, I just fix it when it breaks and use it like a regular system. It's just the set up process that takes the most effort.
Or, just use Endeavor OS and be done with it. It uses the Upstream repositories, the only thing in their customer repositories are some desktop wallpapers and a theme so you can safely remove it without breaking anything. It's a great way to get a base system in a known good configuration up quickly and from there the arch Wiki can help you tweak things to your desire it's a much better way to learn than just throwing someone into the deep end of the pool
A Debian blend like SpiralLinux might be better for less technical people. Debian is one of my favorite distros but it's pretty bare bones and requires some configuration to become an everday usage desktop.
Then you're on your own. What the duck 🦆 do you expect to happen if you can't even invest the 10sec to skim over a message (in the few events that there even is one) to see if it affects you and any manual intervention is required.
A fully functional system, just like any other normal OS?
You hit update - boom - you get one, seamlessly, with no breakages and no other user interaction. And that's how it works pretty much everywhere - except, you know, Arch.
If you're fine with it - that's fine, go ahead and tinker all you like. But don't expect others to have the same priorities.
Man that's news from 2016, like, it's a bit rare occasion, y'know. You're way more likely to get borked by Arch even after reading all the instructions, and it did happen numerous times.
Touching grass is what I do when you take steps to intervene in your system to make an update work.
I see you are an Arch maximalist, but that goes beyond reason. Even Arch proponents are normally not as aggressive on the topic, and admit Arch is too complicated in that regard.
The only problem here is that snapshots (and btrfs for that matter) are not the default behaviour. I would really appreciate Endeavour having this as the default setup. It is very likely what you'd want.
Yes, Garuda does, even with bootable snapshots, but it's otherwise not as clean as Endeavour. As far as I can tell, mkinitcpio/GRUB2 or their setup thereof causes more problems than it solves. My system was bricked multiple times until I switched to a dracut/systemd-boot setup, which works flawlessly since quite a while.
As for the user experience, there are 0 distros you should perform a (major) upgrade on without taking a snapshot first. I had broken systems after apt upgrade. From my point of view rolling vs versioned release are basically occasional mild vs scheduled huge headaches.
I don't get the hate arch gets - it's the perfect distro if you want to choose what programs you want to use, it's not meant to be an out of the box experience. Been using it for 3 years, and sure it might take me a couple of hours to set up initially, but after that I don't really have to do anything.
I fully agree that it's bad for users who aren't that tech-savvy, but I meant it in a more general sense - during my time on Lemmy I've seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a "good for nothing distro", with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
It's like arch except it doesn't break all the time. And it has a great hardware and kernel utility, and still has access to the AUR. And I like pacman a lot better than apt.
From my experience (2 years Manjaro, 3 years Arch) it's the other way round. Manjaro presented me with a terminal way to often after Nvidia updates. Never had that on Arch. Especially the Nvidia updates are very reliable. I don't know what people do with their Arch installations. Mines rock-solid for the 3 years now. Possibly the most stable distro I ever used.
But I understand that you just can't advise newbies to install Arch, even when archinstall is relatively easy to use. Maybe EndeavourOS which brings a lot of convenience features and a graphical installer to the table. A fellow linux newb is running it without problems for a year now.
I've been on Manjaro for about 10 years now, and these days (last few years) nvidia-dependency-conflicts-caused-by-eol-kernel is the only real issue you can run into unprompted. Even that kind of requires you to have at least a couple year old installation (for the kernel to go EOL), which means newbie shouldn't ever be running into it. Not sure what Arch is doing these days, but when I was running it there was certain expectation of vigilance (reading Arch Linux News before updating) and readiness to fix issues caused by updates yourself. On Manjaro such major breaking updates are never sent to users on the stock stable branch, meaning you can practically run "pacman -Syu --noconfirm" willynilly.
I still wouldn't recommend it as the first distro as it doesn't hide the underlying complexity as well as something super mainstream like Ubuntu, but Arch/EndeavourOS is obviously much worse in that regard.
It's been nearly 4 years since I last used Manjaro and I had that error quite often around ever ½-¼ a year in my 2 years of Manjaro. iirc to resolve it I had to uninstall the current nvidia driver > restart without driver > install supported kernel > install driver. Don't know what I did wrong tho.
Manjaro did otherwise a good job to keep the sys together.
What bugged me a bit was the painfully long retention of the big KDE updates. At that time KDE was making big QOL leaps and quite a few distros had those updates already. But I could also live with that.
In the last month of my time with Manjaro a few Proton games dropped frames heavily and that's the end of the story. Made the switch to Arch and never had probs with nvidia again, apart from when new Steam UI came out.
Manjaro can be a real pain depending on your hardware setup. They make a lot of choices that are difficult to work around when you need to (for better or worse) which kinda defeats the whole point of arch (to not be opinionated)
I have the same setup of packages on a few computers. 0 issues on one, plagued with boot issues on another. And unfortunately, the attitude of the devs and forum is that if you have boot issues its obviously your fault.
It was definitely a good first arch distro for me, but pacman, aur, and everything else work just as great on Endeavour and all my devices are far more stable than when they were on Manjaro.
I think even if you’re tech-savvy you can have issues with Arch tbh. I don’t think the distro is without merit — a minimal rolling release binary distribution is clearly something people want… But I’m not sure Arch does a great job of being that (for me, at least), and I’ve personally found pacman and the official packages to be kind of lacking (keyring update issue that they’ve maybe finally fixed, installing specific versions of packages / pinning specific versions / downgrading packages are either not supported or not well supported, immediately removing kernel modules on upgrade, even if the currently running kernel may need them, etc…). It just doesn’t feel very polished in my experience and for my use cases (clearly it works for some people!), and that’s what has driven me away from Arch personally. I think a lot of this stems from Arch’s philosophy of being aggressively minimal, which is maybe fair enough… but I don’t think it’s for everybody.
I've seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a "good for nothing distro", with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
All distros have their little hate-clubs. Try being an Ubuntu user! Or Debian ("why are all the packages so old!"), or Fedora ("ew, Red Hat"), or Gentoo ("is that a laptop or a space heater?") or...er, openSUSE (now I come to think of it, does anybody actually hate SUSE?). You get the idea, anyway. People get super weird and fanboyish about distros.
I don't think arch has it any worse than the rest.
I think Arch kind of deserves the hate it gets. I love barebones distros and have been a gentoo user (now on NixOS), and I’ve used arch a fair bit too… I just don’t feel like Arch is a well maintained distribution. There’s all sorts of little things that they can’t seem to get right that other distros do, like that silly issue where they won’t update the arch keyring first, so if you haven’t updated in a while it breaks. In my experience there’s a million little paper cuts like this and I’ve just been kind of unimpressed. If it works for you that’s great! I’ve just been disappointed with it. I get the niche that it fills as the binary “from scratch” rolling release distro, but I think the experience with it is a little rough. I’ve found gentoo more user friendly, which probably sounds bizarre if you haven’t used gentoo, but ignoring compiling stuff, gentoo does an excellent job of not breaking things on updates, and it’s much easier to pin and install specific versions of packages and stuff.
@Chobbes
Looks like you haven't been using Arch for quite some time now. That used to be the case, nowdays it's way better experience. I've been using Arch for about 11 yrs now and I can see that improvement is noticable. Still not THE BEST, but waaaay better.
This was still an issue maybe a year ago, but I think they fixed the keyring issue finally in the past few months. This is not my only complaint with arch, but it’s frustrating that something this simple went unresolved for so many years. I honestly don’t understand why people love pacman. Downgrading packages is a pain, and there’s no way to install and pin a specific version of a package. I guess they want to keep it really minimal, but I find that this really gets in the way. All in all it was a death by a thousand papercuts for me! I won’t be going back to it. If other people like it that’s fine by me, I can understand the appeal, but I just find it frustrating personally.
Downgrading seemed really easy to me with the mentioned downgrade script. With the IgnorePkg option in pacman.conf it won't get updated. I did it with nvidia drivers when Steam pushed their new UI and nvidia drivers weren't ready for that.
What's dissapointing about the fix? Does its job or not?
@Chobbes
I have an old i3 2nd gen @ my village which I visit very rarely and I'm the only one that uses that PC.
I never had major problems upgrading it (keyring once), downgrading any package or holding some package at desired version.
I have not used it for a long time but it's really easy to fuck the install and potentially your entire system, depending on the fuckup(s).
As a matter of fact, that is exactly why I used it the first time : since it's a nice lightweight distro and it has some interesting gotchas regarding installation, our sysadmin teacher had us all install it and set it up before we could actually use our distro of choice
It's a great distro to learn a lot about Linux. I challenged myself to install it on my Surface Go 2, and make it usable as a tablet, as well as make it boot with secure boot and more. Now it's happily running Arch with KDE, using the linux-surface kernel signed with my own secure boot key and a pacman hook that signs that kernel after every update.
I learned all of this acompanied by a lot of fuckups and reinstalls, until I was able to fix things after breaking them instead of starting from scratch.
Moved from Fedora > Arch > Manjaro > Fedora > Debian.
I consider Arch for learning purposes. For troubleshooting / recoveries , that knowledge will be a great help.
Arch is great, but I'm too lazy to learn how to set it up. Once it's running I think Arch is amazing. I just use Garuda Linux and love it. The Arch wiki is an amazing ressource.
15 minutes from booting the ISO to a Plasma installation is probably average. There are probably people who've done speed runs in 5 minutes. archinstall has gotten so good.
Trying to install a lot of shit, primarily. I figured out that a lot of programs that I wanted were only available (to my knowledge) in .deb format which I couldn't get working in the distro, That and I'm still not used to using the terminal to install anything. Literally the only thing I miss from Windows is using wizards to install things. I understand a lot of this is purely skill issue though.
I found installing pamac and the enabling the arch user repository gives you most things that are debs, that of course involves using the cli to install pamac though
Just using endeavour's bundled yay, you can install most packages including deb ones that users have written a "how to install" for. https://aur.chaotic.cx/ would also be nice.
But installing via terminal is so much more convenient compared to those stupid windows installer. Not to mention you don't have to download all those stupid installers again each time you want to update, unless the devs provide their own update mention in the software itself.
It spits out all the packages with SEARCHTERM in its name or description. The packages are listed like "REPO/PACKAGE" , where REPO tells you if it's from the official repos (core/extra/multilib) or from the AUR.
Then pick the number of the package from the list and that's it.
If you want to update all your packages, even the AUR ones just enter yay and press enter on the follow-up questions. If you update with pacman -Syu then AUR packages won't get updated.
Also Octopi is a nice frontend for yay and pacman. Not as fancy as Discover or Pamac but it does its job well.
I Arched for like 4 years or so, and now I NixOS. Got somewhat tired of modifying configs in 100500 places and eventually forgetting what exactly I've changed 😅
Nevertheless, I still think arch is great, and, as a side note, it does provide a good understanding of Linux on the upper-low level (not like LFS or even gentoo, but still very much viable).
About 3, idk what's going on with my system, but sometimes after a big yay update, the kde login fails (something about the plasma environment failing to boot or idk I have not debugged it correctly yet), then after a reboot systemd-boot fails to load it and the efi entry dissapears. I'm forced to arch-chroot and reinstall the bootctl. After doing so, sometimes I have to do it again and other times it logs correctly.
Again, not debugged it correctly but it's not like I did any kind of weird change to any config, just installed some flatpaks, some steam games, and lutris for League, which in the end is basically wine, and a yay update provoking this behaviour is pretty bad.
I've personally encountered mentioned behavior with kde on both arch and kde neon, so I'm inclined to think it's their f-up. As for sd-boot, I'm not sure: I've used it on arch for a short while only, and then just ditched bootloaders altogether for efistub
Yeah, it's not that big of a deal for me, but damn if this would not be a deal breaker for a regular user, and I ensure you that a regular user would install league and steam or something of the sort xD
Like, I'm a software engineer and arch-chrooting once in a while to launch some commands is nbd, but a regular office worker that hardly runs some commands once in a while in terminals, copied from (safe) random places? Yeah good luck I bet they would just either distro hop or format and reinstall windows.
I could say inability to edit a config file is worth reevaluating of what is a failed piece of garbage here... But it won't be fair. If you don't want to deal with configs, go ahead and use chromeos or something :P
I've kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.
Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.
I'm wondering why "I use Funtoo btw" didn't become a meme, and arch did. Gentoo is objectively better at letting the user customise everything compared to arch
I'm pretty sure it's because less people use it. They make fun of Gentoo taking longer to compile stuff on install/update, but that's pretty fast nowadays. What really takes up time is making all the choices. I remember hours of selecting obscure kernel options and choosing use flags "what is ncurses? Do i need ncurses? What is sdl? Do i need sdl? ..." I mostly use Ubuntu now, because I got no more time for that.
I honestly had no idea how to do use flags and just gave up on gentoo since a lot of things I wanted to install needed me to tinker with them somehow, but I might try again later on.
There are binary versions of heavy stuff at least. Although, yeah, it kinda becomes tedious once you get into more or less obscure options... Mine was compiling everything with musl (for some reason)
I've got two Linux boxes that I got new, different, wifi cards for recently. Turns out both those cards have the same Intel AX200 chip which has had a variety of problems causing frequent dropouts that the community has slowly nutted out since I've had them, including requiring a kernel patch.
The two big ones are a faulty default power saving mode, and problems talking to a Wireless n router when in WiFi 5 mode.
My Ideapad Gaming 3 with a 3060 didn't have Wifi working out of the box.
For awhile I had to install a kernel module everytime I updated Linux to get Wifi working. Thankfully I found what I needed on Github the day I got the laptop.
Once you learn about Linux, you go faster than any other noob. And that is very useful for programming/hacking jobs, faster than all those noobs with 0 knowledge about what is what.
Yeah, I just wanted to say that if anyone says "this distro is a bit older but it's really stable and good for use" it's scaring away people without them even needing it updated since they're used to getting told by Microsoft that "you have to to update to the newest"
The point about updating apps is also useless to them, as long as it works they will use it, my dad used windows xp with office 2003 until 2021 when the computer finally died, I told him countless times to update to a newer os but he refused every single time
That may be true for some users but there are those in decent quality looking for a more technical experience. Development comes to mind; you probably should use the latest versions in some cases.
Yeah, but developers probably already know what is Linux, either from them learning about it at school or just by other developers
But developers probably already know something about their os, they don't just use what they get on a computer or a laptop, most of us probably messed with some deep settings of whatever system we use, i. e. something that a regular user won't do
My brother is a Linux first-timer, and he specifically asked me to install Debian after I explained that it's stability-focused, but as such sacrifices functional updates and is only globally updated once every two years.
Some people need latest and greatest (i.e. here's your Arch), some need stability over everything (i.e. here's your Debian), some don't need extremes and strike a balance somewhere in between (i.e. everything else).
I use Manjaro (Arch-based) on main PC and Debian on a work laptop. Main PC should better enjoy all the benefits of all things new (while standing a week or two behind bleeding-edge to not cut itself, which is Manjaro's selling point) while work laptop is mission critical and can work perfectly fine with what Debian has to offer, so, Debian it is.
I'm on like day 2 of Garuda. Ran into corrupted packages during the install which wasn't fun, but it's up and running now. I'm hoping that maintaining it isn't as much of a time suck as it sounds like pure Arch is.
Archintstall sometimes produces problems(at least I had problems with it). Make sure that you have the current iso version of arch on your stick and try again.
The problem I was facing was manually creating partitions. Should I use Gparted to make them first and then use archinstall, or does it not work with manual partitions?
It should work with both ways. First time I did them with archinstall(but didn't like that it created a separate partition for my home directory). Second time I manually partitioned my drive and then let archintstall use that.
So if someone starts using EndeavorOS daily, can they claim to be an arch user?
Edit: I'm now wiping my laptop clean and using it as my daily driver from now on. This is probably my first experience with Plasma, and I am loving it way more than gnome so far.
Yup my best Plasma experience was on Manjaro, Arch based KDE is just good. But actually modern KDE at all is just good, so no Kubuntu or damn MXLinux XD
Oh my God the more I use it the more amazing it is already. The customization in the Plasma appearance settings is exactly what I've missed this whole time. I feel like I've wasted all these years now. Better late than never I s'pose.
Hahahaha. I tried out Mint once, crashed randomly so no Mint. Then Manjaro and it was great but said to be shady. So MX Linux which was also great but software was outdated. Then KDENeon and Kubuntu, broke both, then Fedora KDE, broke that too.
Now I am on Fedora Kinoite, KDE is all user folders so everything is still customizable.
You may want to disable file indexing as its really weird and crashy. For security also CUPS and bluetooth, no GUI switches poorly
I've done a lot of bluetooth work and know how terrible it is as a protocol, but do you see any issues with only using it for a speaker/earphone, assuming no other devices even within a valid proximity of the transceiver? If nothing can hijack or manipulate or listen to the session, is it that insecure? I disable it and use wired earbuds when I'm mobile for that reason.
I'm a ham radio guy, so I'm licensed by the FCC to transmit 1500 watts in the ham bands. Talk about a flashlight glowing. It's on my todo list to make a good antenna for directional finding of signals.
I often use Arch in a container, when I need a fhs distro. EndeavourOS is great for desktop use if you don't want to go through the Arch install process.
DeltaChat is an awesome messenger. It's federated, quick and simple to use.
Also, I didn't realize DC was on the fediverse for so many years.
The first part is about the meme. Arch has it's (dis-)advantages depending on the use case.
I wrote the second part because OP mentioned they've found the meme "at deltachat", which is a email-based messenger I use. It's a topic adjacent to linux as it's open source software with linux support.
My first ever distro was EndeavourOS. I installed it when I was 13 or 14 years old because someone on reddit said it's customizable. I never felt like I need to switch to anything else.
Arch Linux with NVIDIA is definitely not great for newbies, especially for people who can't keep up with the distro. If left unupdated for too long, your system may break. Even if you update every day, you could break something. You just never win with a rolling release distro like this. My only saving grace is that I run with an AMD gpu and so far, that thing has just worked.
My tip for anyone switching to Linux is to switch to AMD. Even if NVIDIA is better overall for performance and features, even if the last time you tried AMD on your windows system it was slow and a bit buggy, on Linux, AMD just works, without extra steps.
My point is less that leaving Arch alone breaks things and more that updating after a really long time can break something. It also kinda defeats the point of using a rolling release distro. I can see how you thought i was spreading misinformation though. My bad for poor wording.
That reminds me, some time ago I tried installing Garuda on a Ryzen 5800H based mini PC but there where so many issues (namely worrisome graphical artefacting, which has never occurred with other distros on the same mini PC) I had to abort and abandon trying it until maybe the next or a future release.
I simply wanted to check out Garuda (arch based, if I recall well). I used the Cinnamon iso with Ventoy (not sure where the issue arose from).
That's weird. I have had zero issues with it so far (talking about distro specific issues) and I am running this with an AMD APU, Nvidia GPU, prime offloading on wayland. Works like an absolute charm. Though granted, this isn't quite out of the box, you may not need to be a wizard to figure it out, but I would not recommended this to a noob.
People try to use Manjaro as Arch when it isn't Arch. Manjaro has it's own repositories that may not match Arch version. You install an AUR package that depends on an up to date Arch package to work and it fails.
Arch user here.
My recommendation to noobies is always Linux Mint even though I don't use it.
I use Arch, btw.
Yeah I think Arch is fine, but I'd never recommend it to a new Linux user.
Most Arch users (myself included) don't recommend Arch to n00bs or even light seasoned Linux users if they already are happy with their setup.
But the meme is the meme and I like bullying Arch elitists.
Even I wasn't cruel enough to banish my mother to arch. She uses fedora on her desktop (because she liked gnome) and Linux mint on her laptop because I wanted her to make sure she still wanted to switch after trying it for about a month.
She wanted to jump head first but it would have been a pain to go through four installs if she didn't like it.
Indeed, besides most linux distributions are fairly equally lightweight and can be customized. I tried 4-5 distros this past January (Arch being one) when I got my new gaming laptop and they all booted in ~9.5 sec for example, and perform equally well in general, they had fairly similar RAM load with the same desktop environment.
Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.
One problem here is that new users install Endeavour/Garuda but don't know how to manage updates safely about pacnew/pacsave/etc. So the system might slowly "rot" without them knowing about it because new components use old configs, etc..
I also recommend Mint to new users. I don't use Mint, nor do I use Arch.
You're thinking of Gentoo.
As a Gentoo user currently vacationing in Arch-land I'm not sure whether to feel insulted or affirmed. Imean, it is but some might say that to disparage it or its users 😅
No disparaging intended, it just isn't my thing.
For me: Gentoo is a meta distro, you are the distro maintainer then the power user of that specific distro you created for yourself which can definitely be fun. Arch is more like: let's give you one instance of a Gentoo distro when you are tired of being the distro maintainer.
Tbf I don't think many people know about pacdiff. The way I found out about it was by looking up a warning about pacnew/pacsave during an upgrade, because I was bored. Very random.
Only the installation takes more time, maintenance is no longer than the noob friendly ones.
Hey, you're on the wrong Lemmy instance. :P
I so want to join that one :D Brilliant name.
... Then go back to Gentoo and stay anyway >:P
I remember when this was the joke with Slackware.
I think I’m remembering right.
I’ve never used arch. If I get another laptop one day I’ll give it a go.
I use both, but Mint is strictly better if you want a no-fuss system that just works and will continue to do so
As a seasoned distrohopper, can confirm. When I try something new, I always ask myself: Would a noob be ok with the fact that in this distro you have to do things this way. In Fedora, Debian, Manjaro and so many other I always end up saying “no” more than a few times. With Mint, you just don’t bump into these situations very often. IMO, Mint is the best starter distro for most users. If you know your friend is very technical, you can recommend something else.
I finally tried out Linux Mint this year at work (we use Fedora for some of our different tasks). It arms like such a nice experience out of the box, and I’d put it on a family computer in a second.
Isn't archwiki one of the most comprehended wikis for Linux distros out there? If anything, the arch-wiki (to me) has often too many answers for the same problem than the other way around.
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I switched like ten years ago because I wanted to learn the details, but in all honesty I still feel like I barely understand anything. Not sure how normal this is, maybe I'm unusually dumb, but I feel like what I've really learned is how to troubleshoot and solve issues by reading documentation and tinkering, rather than understanding what I'm actually doing. I've had a stable system for years but I kind of feel like if a typical arch forum poster looked my system configuration for five minutes they'd be like wtf are you doing.
If you know where to look and where to tinker, then I think you have at least some understanding of what you're doing.
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Is actually great since it forces you to learn which saves you much more time in the long run.
But most people can't see past their nose.
Edit
Can't believe somebody got offended by this...
couldve stopped at the first sentence, but had to keep with the stereotype i guess ;)
??
It is great when you have time to learn, but when you are trying to troubleshoot while understand basically nothing of the wiki ... it is not good.
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Can’t believe you got so offended someone was offended you edited your comment…
I'm not in just tired to deal with whiny bitches
to be fair, i wasnt offened :) just wanted to point out the irony
oh nooo, you weren’t offended at all (:
I run Debian and I regularly look at the Arch wiki.
It is most comprehended, but for newbie it is too comprehensive. Its overwhelming, I tried to troubleshoot why I boot to black screen even the installation said its successful and there's no error. I saw solutions that want me edit grub, edit xorg ... and some other file that I never understand.
I understand the wiki is very good and very important, its just not newbie friendly.
That's the issue. Arch and it's wiki are labyrinths for beginners.
For anyone not interested in tinkering all-day long they're better off using fedora, debian or suse.
True
A lot of new users are coming to Linux not because they like tinkering with their setup but because they are tired of Microsoft tinkering with their setup. For these people Arch will probably never be the answer. That's ok, we should encourage all Linux adoption and the best way to do that is to start with the simple and familiar.
I mean, who doesn't love to have candy crush and facebook automatically bundled with their OS? I mean, I had a fantastic two years waiting for the never combine taskbar feature to be released. The never-ending prompt to make edge my default browser is also utterly refreshing. m$ is so ahead of the game, they even anticipated my needs by shoving onedrive prompts in my control panel. How about that Office 365? Have you tried it yet? No? Well you're missing out my man, in case you change your mind I'm going to put it right there in the front page of settings so you'll never miss it.
I switched a few weeks ago, it was because my computer is slower than a toaster and windows was tanking it down even more I installed xubuntu, well I must say it's ok, after I finished setting stuff up I realised I should've just gone for debian with xfce (I tried to install kubuntu-deskop on my xubuntu installation just to try how would kde run on my pc, it ran as well as windows did, but was just a tiny tiny bit faster, the way I installed it was probably bad and it could've been the way I installed it tho)
And yeah, I definitely love tinkering with stuff so this wasthe obvious choice
Weird shot at the Arch wiki, which is truly great. I turn to it regularly despite not using Arch.
heres the thing: as a decade+ software dev, I never want to even think about my distro.
I just want Linux terminal style commands, and Linux style ssh shit to just work in the most middle of the road way as possible. I'm trying to get a job done, not build a personality.
This is me too and why I no longer use Arch btw.
I used Arch for AUR, but with flatpak getting more popular these last few years even the more niche stuff I had to rely on AUR for got a flatpak. So I've been trying out immutable distros like Fedora Kinoite.
@Zikeji @Kushia immutable distro like a Fedorraaaa with flatpak...
Exactly. That's why i use Mint. I don't want to think about my operating system, I want to get stuff done.
Same here fam
This is why I got a MacBook (unpopular opinion here)
I only ever have Mac stuff from employers, but it is nice hardware and linux-like enough for me to be happy.
Probably also helps Mac that every windows machines provided by an employer is some random HP buttbook that looks and preforms like it could be from 2021 or 2012, who knows
Macs are not really what I think of when reading "middle of the road linux"
I interpreted "middle of the road" as doing nothing special, just normal tasks done a normal way and therefore hoping everything just works so you can focus on work
?? The arch wiki is one of the greatest Linux resources out there. Sure there may be situations where it doesn't have the answer for something, but for a new user? It has all bases covered.
It's actually really great.. if you know how to interpret and apply the information on it to your situation and adapt as needed. A good new user experience it does not make however.
On one hand, the archlinux bbs had the only exact reference to the issue I was having. On the other hand, no one could replicate it enough to figure anything out. :/
im pretty sure the OP never took a look at Arch and just follow the hate movement
Ex arch btw user here. I noped out and wiped after thinking I had it all nailed down, then I tried to connect my Bluetooth headphones and I came to a grand awakening. I am too old for this shit.
Installed Tumbleweed and been happy ever since.
Tumbleweed is boring, and that's why it's wonderful.
You don't even have to be old; just wise.
Tumbleweed is great, but I prefer EndeavorOS myself.
Starbucks coffee is great, but I prefer vicious, unrelenting cock and ball torture myself.
Hahaha this had me chuckling. Take my upvote you rascal.
I just installed Nextcloud on Arch and the official packages caused the most headaches I ever had within my 3 years of arch. In contrast I installed the official Jellyfin and Prometheus Server packages and they ran OOTB.
I ended up with not using the official packages but extracting the tar.bz2 into /var/www/nextcloud and slightly modifying the nginx config from their site. I had to move the inclusion of the MIME-Types file to a different block for nextcloud to deliver its CSS, SVGs and images. It wasn't exactly straight-forward too considering permissions. I found it a beast compared to many other server software.
ngl, I love how "I don't give a fuck" the slackware authors are, they didn't even bother with https on their official website.
lmao this is exactly the image that would pop into my head if I imagine a Slackware user in 2023.
You don't need SSL if you're not exchanging sensitive information.
If they aren't exchanging sensitive information, then it's less not giving a fuck and more not using technologies 'just because' everyone else is.
It's a smart move.
I mean… I would consider anywhere that you might download software from sensitive. This isn’t really a smart move. And sure, the mirror’s page they link to uses https, but if the regular site doesn’t a man-in-the-middle could change the url and serve an official looking malicious version… I wouldn’t consider putting your users at an elevated risk when it’s relatively easy to set up TLS “a smart move”.
What do you think is stopping someone from doing this?
Who says it hasn’t happened? :P
If it hasn’t I would just assume that Slackware isn’t a big enough target and that anybody in the position to man-in-the-middle a large number of people would have better targets. I mean, to be clear TLS is not a silver bullet either, but it goes a long way for ensuring the integrity of the data you receive over the internet in addition to hiding the contents.
Distros usually sign their ISOs with PGP as well (Slackware does this), so it’s a good idea to verify those signatures as it’s a second channel that you can use to double check the validity of the ISO (but I’m not sure many people actually do this). Of course, anybody can make PGP keys so you have to find out which key is actually supposed to be signing the iso, otherwise an attacker can just make a bogus key and tell you that that’s the Slackware signing key (on the official website too, because it doesn’t use tls!). The web of trust arguably helps some (though this can be faked as well unless you actually participate in key signing parties or something), and you can hope that the Slackware public key is mirrored in several places that you trust so you can compare them… but at the end of the day for most people all trust in the distribution comes from the domain name, and if you don’t have TLS certificates you’re kind of setting up a weak foundation of trust… Maybe it will be fine because you’re not a big enough target for somebody to bother, but in this day and age it’s pretty much trivial to set up TLS certificates and that gets you a far better foundation… why take the risk? Why is it smart to unnecessarily expose your users to more risk than necessary?
Its probably just one package. I guess for example
pacman -S plasma-desktop plasma-meta flatpak fish plasma-wayland-session sddm sddm-kcm && systemctl enable --now sddmdoes the trick.Archinstall with the entire plasma desktop is probably also nice, or just EndeavorOS which will be preconfigured
I actually did the whole KDE shebang with archinstall. I never really expected that Arch btw deigned it too opinionated to just provide an audio and Bluetooth interface. Instead I have to choose between pulse audio and pipewire and bluez and a bunch of others. I just didn’t have the patience nor time to look into what and why these options are presented, and this was after I already wasted days figuring how to get my pc to boot with my 12th gen Intel and Nvidia gpu combination.
Turns out there’s a bunch of kernel finagling you absolutely have to do first before it even decides to boot from the gpu and not the igpu. Oh well.
For a total newbie, probably Linux Mint or PopOS are the best options. But EndeavourOS is getting there. There shouldn't be any issues during the installation if one sticks to the defaults. Only thing is, it doesn't come with a graphical package manager out of the box. But once that is installed (I think anyone will be happy to write a single terminal command, at least), I don't see why it's any harder to use than any other distro.
Mint, with any DE, does come with a graphical package manager. It's as easy as any appstore. The only confusion is it suggests both it's original and flatpack versions to install.
I think you are talking about EndevourOS there.
Yeah, I'm talking about EndeavourOS. I don't see what got you confused.
Reading it in a linear fashion, you drop one distro after another without much distinction. I believe it'd be better if you serve EndOS it's own paragraph since it's so different.
Bruh
What 'bruh'?
It isn't hard to drop a before one starts explaining a completely different OS.
I use Ubuntu. It generally tends to be boring stable, which is kinda what I want out of my OS these days. I can still customize it, and even break it if I really get bored, but it's nice to have things just work for the most part.
I will always recommend Debian or Debian based distros to anyone new to Linux. They'll find their way to arch eventually
Arch btw
I will not stand slander of the arch wiki.
Also start with Linux Mint XFCE (unless they've fixed the stability problems with cinnamon)
When I started using LM I had a lot of problems, but switching to XFCE fixed most of them
I had a friend who wanted to try linux but insisted on arch because it's what I used at the time even though I said they shouldn't and gave many suggestions for better distros. They gave up after about a day and went back to windows. I don't know what they expected, multiple people warned them not to use arch.
My IT Bros said the same back when I had to choose W10 or Linux, they haven't used arch and I had 0 Linux experience. I messed up every single step of the installation to a point where I knew from the problems I created what I did wrong. After many tries and a week later I had a working installation with dual boot. Never used windows and removed it a year later. It was rough but I learned how to recover from most errors a user can create.
If learning is the goal arch and arch-wiki is great.
That's right. It's a great recommendation for learning about Linux.
For anyone who needs something that just works, there's a lot better options.
Probably. I haven't tried that, but I should.
The learning curve there might be too challenging if not familiar with certain concepts beforehand...
It's not that hard to achieve a working system with Arch, so not bad as a Linux 101.
I've been off windows for a long time, and when I was forced to use it, it was enterprise, locked down and stripped by knowledgeable IT teams.
Yesterday, I had my first exposure to Win 11 S mode. What a piece of crap. Not just the way its locked down, but the incessant Onedrive ads, broken settings app with missing features, AI buzzword addons, sloppy UI and general lack of control over your own computer.
Recommending my friend install Linux ASAP with my support. Nobody should have to endure that much cruft and garbage on their owned computer. They can't even install software outside of the MS store? Gross.
Oh yeah no I was not at all saying windows was better, I was just saying arch was definitely not a good distribution for beginners and it was weird how one just insisted on using it. I use arch on my laptop and opensuse tumbleweed on my desktop and have not used windows for anything serious in years because it is so unbearable.
I understood you weren't advocating for Windows (as an Arch user? The very idea!), but your mention of your friend returning to Windows got me thinking about my friends laptop and how icky it felt.
Glad there are fewer and fewer barriers to using Linux full time these days.
What do you mean you can't install things outside of the MS store? Lol
I mean that Windows in S mode only allows apps through the app store. From their FAQ:
Is this like some kind of display or safe mode?
Should've recommended Arch-based distro like Manjaro. It's Arch, and you don't need to use TTY for installation. And they can claim they use Arch btw.
I actually recommended endeavor as an option if I remember correctly but they wouldn't try it
Manjaro has some issues, endeavourOS is better
Ive been using Manjaro for 5 years now, I'll try Endevour when I upgrade my laptop. Thanks for the tip!
I'm switching from manjaro to endeavour atm, and i am liking endeavour a lot. I kept having issues with manjaro boot after every kernel update, but otherwise didnt mind it. Probably whatever manjaros build chain for boot is just wasn't working with my hardware, but also the attitude on the forum is that you are stupid if you have to roll the kernel back.
Endeavour really just provides you arch with some maintenance utilities and otherwise lets you do your thing.
No more firefox home page getting constantly reset to the manajro home page so they can market you their laptop partnerships either 😉
I love Arch but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. In my eyes, the only way one should choose Arch is despite all warnings against it, because they feel confident enough to deal with all the problems they encounter.
Honestly I've had so little trouble with arch compared to other things, so I would definitely recommend it to experienced linux users, just definitely not unexperienced users. The aur is amazing and rolling release means you don't have to deal with the horrors of major updates breaking packages. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is also a great candidate though for people who don't want to set as many things up themself, I'm currently using both arch and tumbleweed on different computers
Yup! Same here. Once I've got everything set up, it has been running smoothly and without any issues for more than 5 years in my case. It's literally the most reliable system I've ever set up, but I understand that the entry hurdle is pretty high.
I don't have any issue with Arch, everything works. But when I try other distros, they are mostly messed up.
Many distros do their own packaging on their repos, adding dependencies and custom-builds with custom configurations, and this often breaks my OS. On arch, this doesn't happen to me. What's your experience?
Yeah.
I know, I said "custom-builds with custom configurations", I mean the custom configurations many distros add.
I also feel like Debian is very clean, but I still miss the big community under Arch, their wiki and AUR...
If the arch wiki doesn't have the answer, I just give up
The most unrealistic part of this
It does have the answer, you just can't find it
"Wiki do not have answer" that's why the wiki is also used by non-arch users ?
Ay this is a funny meme and all but insulting the best linux documentation available was unnecessary
yep
Red hat, 25 years ago learned to recompile the kernel to make my sound card/modem work.
25 years into the future and my biggest issue regarding sound is having to tell pipewire to stop going into standby since I do not enjoy the white noise coming from my speakers if it does.
Bruh, if you're going to insist on someone installing arch, at least sit by their side and walk them through it.
Having installed arch multiple times before, I can get a base system with networking and desktop environment up in half a day to a day depending on which DE.
Is that... fast? Haha but yes of course it helps
I'm not saying it's particularly fast, but having someone who knows what they are doing drastically reduces the time.
I could probably make it quicker if I set up a bunch of scripts for initial installation.
That said the whole point of arch is DIY, lightweight - people forget the kinda of people arch is for, then complain about how long it takes to install. If you complain about install times, then the distro is not for you. (For more about the point of arch, see the arch way https://principles.design/examples/the-arch-way)
But it can be a great platform for learning about the inner workings of your typical Linux system, and that's why it's great. If you're willing to learn and look things up it can be the best option.
If you want it here and now with no fuss ,it's the third worst system to use- followed by Gentoo and lastly, LFS.
And heck once it's installed you can be as pedantic or as lazy as you want - my main system has had the same install of arch for multiple years - it's a mess and I havent really maintained it well, I just fix it when it breaks and use it like a regular system. It's just the set up process that takes the most effort.
Or, just use Endeavor OS and be done with it. It uses the Upstream repositories, the only thing in their customer repositories are some desktop wallpapers and a theme so you can safely remove it without breaking anything. It's a great way to get a base system in a known good configuration up quickly and from there the arch Wiki can help you tweak things to your desire it's a much better way to learn than just throwing someone into the deep end of the pool
A Debian blend like SpiralLinux might be better for less technical people. Debian is one of my favorite distros but it's pretty bare bones and requires some configuration to become an everday usage desktop.
In what way?
This
Arch is easy to install; it's a headache to manage.
If you want a stable Arch, you need to check the updates and take very granular control over packages and versioning.
While some nerds may like tinkering with their system in all those ways, for regular user Arch is simply too much effort to maintain.
Informant
Useful, but still it kinda makes you read through all the update news, which is...why?
I'd like to just hit update and not bother.
Then you're on your own. What the duck 🦆 do you expect to happen if you can't even invest the 10sec to skim over a message (in the few events that there even is one) to see if it affects you and any manual intervention is required.
A fully functional system, just like any other normal OS?
You hit update - boom - you get one, seamlessly, with no breakages and no other user interaction. And that's how it works pretty much everywhere - except, you know, Arch.
If you're fine with it - that's fine, go ahead and tinker all you like. But don't expect others to have the same priorities.
Yeah just like the FORCED Microsoft updates that broke like hundreds of businesses?
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-reimburses-travel-agency-for-forced-Windows-10-update-damages.168378.0.html
Dude go touch some grass
Man that's news from 2016, like, it's a bit rare occasion, y'know. You're way more likely to get borked by Arch even after reading all the instructions, and it did happen numerous times.
Touching grass is what I do when you take steps to intervene in your system to make an update work.
I see you are an Arch maximalist, but that goes beyond reason. Even Arch proponents are normally not as aggressive on the topic, and admit Arch is too complicated in that regard.
You're just going to shift goalposts every time I'll post something.
Not recent enough. Not enough cases. That's different.
And lastly you'll just claim I do it because I'm an arch maximalist, despite not knowing anything about me :)
It is actually very easy:
3.1) Repeat goto 2
3.2) Rollback goto 2
The only problem here is that snapshots (and btrfs for that matter) are not the default behaviour. I would really appreciate Endeavour having this as the default setup. It is very likely what you'd want.
True, but if snapshots turn from first line of catastrophe response to a regular tool, this is not a good experience.
Also I believe Garuda has enabled snapshots and btrfs by default.
Yes, Garuda does, even with bootable snapshots, but it's otherwise not as clean as Endeavour. As far as I can tell, mkinitcpio/GRUB2 or their setup thereof causes more problems than it solves. My system was bricked multiple times until I switched to a dracut/systemd-boot setup, which works flawlessly since quite a while.
As for the user experience, there are 0 distros you should perform a (major) upgrade on without taking a snapshot first. I had broken systems after
apt upgrade. From my point of view rolling vs versioned release are basically occasional mild vs scheduled huge headaches.I don't get the hate arch gets - it's the perfect distro if you want to choose what programs you want to use, it's not meant to be an out of the box experience. Been using it for 3 years, and sure it might take me a couple of hours to set up initially, but after that I don't really have to do anything.
It's awful for most new users, though. They don't even know what the options are, how can they choose anything?
Not every new user is the same but if they are absolute newbies they should start with a user friendly distro, which Arch definitely isn't.
I fully agree that it's bad for users who aren't that tech-savvy, but I meant it in a more general sense - during my time on Lemmy I've seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a "good for nothing distro", with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
I love Manjaro :'(
It's like arch except it doesn't break all the time. And it has a great hardware and kernel utility, and still has access to the AUR. And I like pacman a lot better than apt.
From my experience (2 years Manjaro, 3 years Arch) it's the other way round. Manjaro presented me with a terminal way to often after Nvidia updates. Never had that on Arch. Especially the Nvidia updates are very reliable. I don't know what people do with their Arch installations. Mines rock-solid for the 3 years now. Possibly the most stable distro I ever used.
But I understand that you just can't advise newbies to install Arch, even when archinstall is relatively easy to use. Maybe EndeavourOS which brings a lot of convenience features and a graphical installer to the table. A fellow linux newb is running it without problems for a year now.
I've been on Manjaro for about 10 years now, and these days (last few years) nvidia-dependency-conflicts-caused-by-eol-kernel is the only real issue you can run into unprompted. Even that kind of requires you to have at least a couple year old installation (for the kernel to go EOL), which means newbie shouldn't ever be running into it. Not sure what Arch is doing these days, but when I was running it there was certain expectation of vigilance (reading Arch Linux News before updating) and readiness to fix issues caused by updates yourself. On Manjaro such major breaking updates are never sent to users on the stock stable branch, meaning you can practically run "pacman -Syu --noconfirm" willynilly.
I still wouldn't recommend it as the first distro as it doesn't hide the underlying complexity as well as something super mainstream like Ubuntu, but Arch/EndeavourOS is obviously much worse in that regard.
It's been nearly 4 years since I last used Manjaro and I had that error quite often around ever ½-¼ a year in my 2 years of Manjaro. iirc to resolve it I had to uninstall the current nvidia driver > restart without driver > install supported kernel > install driver. Don't know what I did wrong tho.
Manjaro did otherwise a good job to keep the sys together.
What bugged me a bit was the painfully long retention of the big KDE updates. At that time KDE was making big QOL leaps and quite a few distros had those updates already. But I could also live with that.
In the last month of my time with Manjaro a few Proton games dropped frames heavily and that's the end of the story. Made the switch to Arch and never had probs with nvidia again, apart from when new Steam UI came out.
Manjaro can be a real pain depending on your hardware setup. They make a lot of choices that are difficult to work around when you need to (for better or worse) which kinda defeats the whole point of arch (to not be opinionated)
I have the same setup of packages on a few computers. 0 issues on one, plagued with boot issues on another. And unfortunately, the attitude of the devs and forum is that if you have boot issues its obviously your fault.
It was definitely a good first arch distro for me, but pacman, aur, and everything else work just as great on Endeavour and all my devices are far more stable than when they were on Manjaro.
I think even if you’re tech-savvy you can have issues with Arch tbh. I don’t think the distro is without merit — a minimal rolling release binary distribution is clearly something people want… But I’m not sure Arch does a great job of being that (for me, at least), and I’ve personally found pacman and the official packages to be kind of lacking (keyring update issue that they’ve maybe finally fixed, installing specific versions of packages / pinning specific versions / downgrading packages are either not supported or not well supported, immediately removing kernel modules on upgrade, even if the currently running kernel may need them, etc…). It just doesn’t feel very polished in my experience and for my use cases (clearly it works for some people!), and that’s what has driven me away from Arch personally. I think a lot of this stems from Arch’s philosophy of being aggressively minimal, which is maybe fair enough… but I don’t think it’s for everybody.
All distros have their little hate-clubs. Try being an Ubuntu user! Or Debian ("why are all the packages so old!"), or Fedora ("ew, Red Hat"), or Gentoo ("is that a laptop or a space heater?") or...er, openSUSE (now I come to think of it, does anybody actually hate SUSE?). You get the idea, anyway. People get super weird and fanboyish about distros.
I don't think arch has it any worse than the rest.
Manjaro takes away the only reason i use arch. Almost no pre installed software except what you need to get things running.
I think Arch kind of deserves the hate it gets. I love barebones distros and have been a gentoo user (now on NixOS), and I’ve used arch a fair bit too… I just don’t feel like Arch is a well maintained distribution. There’s all sorts of little things that they can’t seem to get right that other distros do, like that silly issue where they won’t update the arch keyring first, so if you haven’t updated in a while it breaks. In my experience there’s a million little paper cuts like this and I’ve just been kind of unimpressed. If it works for you that’s great! I’ve just been disappointed with it. I get the niche that it fills as the binary “from scratch” rolling release distro, but I think the experience with it is a little rough. I’ve found gentoo more user friendly, which probably sounds bizarre if you haven’t used gentoo, but ignoring compiling stuff, gentoo does an excellent job of not breaking things on updates, and it’s much easier to pin and install specific versions of packages and stuff.
@Chobbes
Looks like you haven't been using Arch for quite some time now. That used to be the case, nowdays it's way better experience. I've been using Arch for about 11 yrs now and I can see that improvement is noticable. Still not THE BEST, but waaaay better.
This was still an issue maybe a year ago, but I think they fixed the keyring issue finally in the past few months. This is not my only complaint with arch, but it’s frustrating that something this simple went unresolved for so many years. I honestly don’t understand why people love pacman. Downgrading packages is a pain, and there’s no way to install and pin a specific version of a package. I guess they want to keep it really minimal, but I find that this really gets in the way. All in all it was a death by a thousand papercuts for me! I won’t be going back to it. If other people like it that’s fine by me, I can understand the appeal, but I just find it frustrating personally.
Edit: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archlinux-keyring/-/commit/ad8698e96c423dfc68405b547f310f2e1075a95d this fix is kind of disappointing too to be honest…
Downgrading seemed really easy to me with the mentioned downgrade script. With the IgnorePkg option in pacman.conf it won't get updated. I did it with nvidia drivers when Steam pushed their new UI and nvidia drivers weren't ready for that.
What's dissapointing about the fix? Does its job or not?
@Chobbes
I have an old i3 2nd gen @ my village which I visit very rarely and I'm the only one that uses that PC.
I never had major problems upgrading it (keyring once), downgrading any package or holding some package at desired version.
I have not used it for a long time but it's really easy to fuck the install and potentially your entire system, depending on the fuckup(s).
As a matter of fact, that is exactly why I used it the first time : since it's a nice lightweight distro and it has some interesting gotchas regarding installation, our sysadmin teacher had us all install it and set it up before we could actually use our distro of choice
It's a great distro to learn a lot about Linux. I challenged myself to install it on my Surface Go 2, and make it usable as a tablet, as well as make it boot with secure boot and more. Now it's happily running Arch with KDE, using the linux-surface kernel signed with my own secure boot key and a pacman hook that signs that kernel after every update. I learned all of this acompanied by a lot of fuckups and reinstalls, until I was able to fix things after breaking them instead of starting from scratch.
More Endeavour recommendations
I always say Ubuntu, to make the haters snap
groaaaan...
Its not a very good OS. Very opinionated, weird modded GNOME, nonstandard Snap doing weird stuff. But its probably okayish and pretty stable
Moved from Fedora > Arch > Manjaro > Fedora > Debian. I consider Arch for learning purposes. For troubleshooting / recoveries , that knowledge will be a great help.
My lifecycle was roughly Gentoo, Mandrake, SUSE, Debian (sid), Arch, Vector, Arch, Debian (testing), Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Arch, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora, and finally Debian (stable).
I used to like to mess around with the newest shiniest software but now I just want it to not be broken.
Funny how it is all relative...
Red hat for a few months -> Gentoo for 10 years-> Arch for another 10 years
For me this is the opposite: Every time I am forced to use Ubuntu I feel like I am in a torture chamber especially with 3rd party packages.
My path have been Slackware > Mint > Kubuntu > Arch > Kubuntu > Arch.
I forsee myself switching between a "care free" distro and Arch many times in the future.
Nvidia?
More like:
Nie-wieder!
ha! german...
AMD beste.
Guter
Arch is great, but I'm too lazy to learn how to set it up. Once it's running I think Arch is amazing. I just use Garuda Linux and love it. The Arch wiki is an amazing ressource.
Arch wasn't my first distro but it was my first daily driver. Found it easier than both mint and Ubuntu personally.
Lol.
archinstall
15 minutes from booting the ISO to a Plasma installation is probably average. There are probably people who've done speed runs in 5 minutes. archinstall has gotten so good.
This is more or less my experience with it. My noob-ass just can't handle even EndeavorOS.
What problems did you run into?
Trying to install a lot of shit, primarily. I figured out that a lot of programs that I wanted were only available (to my knowledge) in .deb format which I couldn't get working in the distro, That and I'm still not used to using the terminal to install anything. Literally the only thing I miss from Windows is using wizards to install things. I understand a lot of this is purely skill issue though.
I found installing pamac and the enabling the arch user repository gives you most things that are debs, that of course involves using the cli to install pamac though
Manjaro has Pamac installed by default.
I wouldn't use manjaro with aur though, as it can fall a bit behind what most people posting aurs are building with
I haven't had any issues and I've been using it for 3 years.
Just using endeavour's bundled yay, you can install most packages including deb ones that users have written a "how to install" for. https://aur.chaotic.cx/ would also be nice.
But installing via terminal is so much more convenient compared to those stupid windows installer. Not to mention you don't have to download all those stupid installers again each time you want to update, unless the devs provide their own update mention in the software itself.
I'm sure it is, but it's a matter of remembering/knowing how the commands work vs literally clicking labelled buttons.
Also I'm sure if this was on Reddit, I'd be getting downvoted like crazy, so I appreciate y'all being helpful instead of doing that.
yay SEARCHTERMIt spits out all the packages with SEARCHTERM in its name or description. The packages are listed like "REPO/PACKAGE" , where REPO tells you if it's from the official repos (core/extra/multilib) or from the AUR.
Then pick the number of the package from the list and that's it.
If you want to update all your packages, even the AUR ones just enter
yayand press enter on the follow-up questions. If you update with pacman -Syu then AUR packages won't get updated.Also Octopi is a nice frontend for yay and pacman. Not as fancy as Discover or Pamac but it does its job well.
Try Manjaro if you haven't already.
It's more popular than endeavor, but has way fewer shills.
I might consider it next time I have time to kill and the motivation to mess with anything arch-related.
Since Endeavour is just Arch with a graphical installer and a few extra tools, I‘d say it’s way more popular.
Can't wait for the manjaro bot network to DDOS the AUR again...
That was Pamac right? 😂
Use endeavour if you're new
Basically, most of the points there fall into some of 3 categories:
This guy Arches
I use Arch and I lol'd.
I Arched for like 4 years or so, and now I NixOS. Got somewhat tired of modifying configs in 100500 places and eventually forgetting what exactly I've changed 😅
Nevertheless, I still think arch is great, and, as a side note, it does provide a good understanding of Linux on the upper-low level (not like LFS or even gentoo, but still very much viable).
About 3, idk what's going on with my system, but sometimes after a big yay update, the kde login fails (something about the plasma environment failing to boot or idk I have not debugged it correctly yet), then after a reboot systemd-boot fails to load it and the efi entry dissapears. I'm forced to arch-chroot and reinstall the bootctl. After doing so, sometimes I have to do it again and other times it logs correctly.
Again, not debugged it correctly but it's not like I did any kind of weird change to any config, just installed some flatpaks, some steam games, and lutris for League, which in the end is basically wine, and a yay update provoking this behaviour is pretty bad.
I've personally encountered mentioned behavior with kde on both arch and kde neon, so I'm inclined to think it's their f-up. As for sd-boot, I'm not sure: I've used it on arch for a short while only, and then just ditched bootloaders altogether for efistub
Yeah, it's not that big of a deal for me, but damn if this would not be a deal breaker for a regular user, and I ensure you that a regular user would install league and steam or something of the sort xD
Like, I'm a software engineer and arch-chrooting once in a while to launch some commands is nbd, but a regular office worker that hardly runs some commands once in a while in terminals, copied from (safe) random places? Yeah good luck I bet they would just either distro hop or format and reinstall windows.
If I have to edit a config file, this means the OS is a failed piece of garbage
I could say inability to edit a config file is worth reevaluating of what is a failed piece of garbage here... But it won't be fair. If you don't want to deal with configs, go ahead and use chromeos or something :P
Jokes aside, pop-os is great ootb.
I've kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.
Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.
Too many options to learn a new language.
The one and only time I said "oh hell naw" to a distro install. Mid install.
Smart man.
I'm wondering why "I use Funtoo btw" didn't become a meme, and arch did. Gentoo is objectively better at letting the user customise everything compared to arch
I'm pretty sure it's because less people use it. They make fun of Gentoo taking longer to compile stuff on install/update, but that's pretty fast nowadays. What really takes up time is making all the choices. I remember hours of selecting obscure kernel options and choosing use flags "what is ncurses? Do i need ncurses? What is sdl? Do i need sdl? ..." I mostly use Ubuntu now, because I got no more time for that.
I honestly had no idea how to do use flags and just gave up on gentoo since a lot of things I wanted to install needed me to tinker with them somehow, but I might try again later on.
There are binary versions of heavy stuff at least. Although, yeah, it kinda becomes tedious once you get into more or less obscure options... Mine was compiling everything with musl (for some reason)
Gentoo had their own meme: Gentoo is for ricers.
That's a classic.
Currently on second day of troubleshooting installation. (Hopefully) 5 days to go till I finally get to boot
I've used Ubuntu for many years, it is a good start for beginners. Although my new recommendations is Mint.
Don't know what people have? The last time wifi didnt work out of the box for me was like 2010
Broadcom, it's always broadcom's fault
I've got two Linux boxes that I got new, different, wifi cards for recently. Turns out both those cards have the same Intel AX200 chip which has had a variety of problems causing frequent dropouts that the community has slowly nutted out since I've had them, including requiring a kernel patch.
The two big ones are a faulty default power saving mode, and problems talking to a Wireless n router when in WiFi 5 mode.
My Ideapad Gaming 3 with a 3060 didn't have Wifi working out of the box.
For awhile I had to install a kernel module everytime I updated Linux to get Wifi working. Thankfully I found what I needed on Github the day I got the laptop.
PS.
You could use the eggplant emoji if you flip it both ways.
Well there is always Scientific Linux if arch doesn't quite cut it
This is so ooooold. :D
Sometimes people need reminders because they forget how much work they put in.
Only people with time to lose use Arch.
i disagree, aur save big time
Once you have distrobox set up with an arch container, you have access to the aur no matter what distro ypu're running.
Normally I have the valet bring the PC around but I let him go early today 'cause it's his birthday.
Once you learn about Linux, you go faster than any other noob. And that is very useful for programming/hacking jobs, faster than all those noobs with 0 knowledge about what is what.
Install Debian. Everything is based on it.
It's a hard sell explaining to new people that they will have software up to a couple years out of date.
Yet they scream when their 6 months old un-updated windows install wants then to update
The problem isn't the OS being out of date I wouldn't think, it's the applications they actually use. Flatpaks are kind of a solution but not really.
Yeah, I just wanted to say that if anyone says "this distro is a bit older but it's really stable and good for use" it's scaring away people without them even needing it updated since they're used to getting told by Microsoft that "you have to to update to the newest"
The point about updating apps is also useless to them, as long as it works they will use it, my dad used windows xp with office 2003 until 2021 when the computer finally died, I told him countless times to update to a newer os but he refused every single time
That may be true for some users but there are those in decent quality looking for a more technical experience. Development comes to mind; you probably should use the latest versions in some cases.
Yeah, but developers probably already know what is Linux, either from them learning about it at school or just by other developers
But developers probably already know something about their os, they don't just use what they get on a computer or a laptop, most of us probably messed with some deep settings of whatever system we use, i. e. something that a regular user won't do
My brother is a Linux first-timer, and he specifically asked me to install Debian after I explained that it's stability-focused, but as such sacrifices functional updates and is only globally updated once every two years.
Some people need latest and greatest (i.e. here's your Arch), some need stability over everything (i.e. here's your Debian), some don't need extremes and strike a balance somewhere in between (i.e. everything else).
I use Manjaro (Arch-based) on main PC and Debian on a work laptop. Main PC should better enjoy all the benefits of all things new (while standing a week or two behind bleeding-edge to not cut itself, which is Manjaro's selling point) while work laptop is mission critical and can work perfectly fine with what Debian has to offer, so, Debian it is.
Derpian
Endeavor or Garuda?
I'm on like day 2 of Garuda. Ran into corrupted packages during the install which wasn't fun, but it's up and running now. I'm hoping that maintaining it isn't as much of a time suck as it sounds like pure Arch is.
Is there an easier way to install Arch? I know there's Archinstall but my dumbass messed that up somehow.
EndeavourOS is it. It's basically a better version of archinstall, especially if you're planning to install a DE.
I used endeavourOS and it was super straightforward
When you boot up the arch iso, you can use a script called
arch-installArchintstall sometimes produces problems(at least I had problems with it). Make sure that you have the current iso version of arch on your stick and try again.
The problem I was facing was manually creating partitions. Should I use Gparted to make them first and then use archinstall, or does it not work with manual partitions?
It should work with both ways. First time I did them with archinstall(but didn't like that it created a separate partition for my home directory). Second time I manually partitioned my drive and then let archintstall use that.
EndeavorOS or other. Artix maybe? But never used any of those
If you use EndeavourOS, know that you shouldn't ask for support on the Arch forums, its a policy they have.
I'd just recommend Fedora.
I use Fedora BTW.
Oh you mean the IBM Enterprise Linux upstream? Is that ok to use on a desktop computer?
(I'm just kidding, Fedora's great.)
Same. Kinoite-main from ublue, works out of the box
So if someone starts using EndeavorOS daily, can they claim to be an arch user? Edit: I'm now wiping my laptop clean and using it as my daily driver from now on. This is probably my first experience with Plasma, and I am loving it way more than gnome so far.
Yeah, but don't tell other arch users you are using EndavorOS... jk!
Yup my best Plasma experience was on Manjaro, Arch based KDE is just good. But actually modern KDE at all is just good, so no Kubuntu or damn MXLinux XD
Oh my God the more I use it the more amazing it is already. The customization in the Plasma appearance settings is exactly what I've missed this whole time. I feel like I've wasted all these years now. Better late than never I s'pose.
Hahahaha. I tried out Mint once, crashed randomly so no Mint. Then Manjaro and it was great but said to be shady. So MX Linux which was also great but software was outdated. Then KDENeon and Kubuntu, broke both, then Fedora KDE, broke that too.
Now I am on Fedora Kinoite, KDE is all user folders so everything is still customizable.
You may want to disable file indexing as its really weird and crashy. For security also CUPS and bluetooth, no GUI switches poorly
I've done a lot of bluetooth work and know how terrible it is as a protocol, but do you see any issues with only using it for a speaker/earphone, assuming no other devices even within a valid proximity of the transceiver? If nothing can hijack or manipulate or listen to the session, is it that insecure? I disable it and use wired earbuds when I'm mobile for that reason.
You can be tracked as you glow like a flashlight in the dark. But its not insecure I guess, but dont use it for keyboard to be sure.
I'm a ham radio guy, so I'm licensed by the FCC to transmit 1500 watts in the ham bands. Talk about a flashlight glowing. It's on my todo list to make a good antenna for directional finding of signals.
Me : New to Ubuntu . wanted to know what's the deal with arch. Switch to arch. 😵. Welp
Virt-manager is a thing XD
This is why I recommend Chrome OS /s
I often use Arch in a container, when I need a fhs distro. EndeavourOS is great for desktop use if you don't want to go through the Arch install process.
DeltaChat is an awesome messenger. It's federated, quick and simple to use. Also, I didn't realize DC was on the fediverse for so many years.
What do you mean Delta chat is on the fediverse?
I meant that Delta Chat has a mastodon account for at least 5 years: https://chaos.social/@delta
The first part is about the meme. Arch has it's (dis-)advantages depending on the use case.
I wrote the second part because OP mentioned they've found the meme "at deltachat", which is a email-based messenger I use. It's a topic adjacent to linux as it's open source software with linux support.
https://delta.chat/
My first ever distro was EndeavourOS. I installed it when I was 13 or 14 years old because someone on reddit said it's customizable. I never felt like I need to switch to anything else.
I don't see the problem
I really like Debian I was using Arch before, but Debian looks better to me
Yeah, arch isn’t the most welcoming to new users, or so I’ve heard lol.
God I love lemmy, I would have probably never known about EndeavorOS otherwise. Time to fire up a vbox VM and give this thing a whirl.
Been my daily driver for months. I love it. And with proton everything just works on steam for the most part
Arch Linux with NVIDIA is definitely not great for newbies, especially for people who can't keep up with the distro. If left unupdated for too long, your system may break. Even if you update every day, you could break something. You just never win with a rolling release distro like this. My only saving grace is that I run with an AMD gpu and so far, that thing has just worked.
My tip for anyone switching to Linux is to switch to AMD. Even if NVIDIA is better overall for performance and features, even if the last time you tried AMD on your windows system it was slow and a bit buggy, on Linux, AMD just works, without extra steps.
How can a system that wasn't broken, without any changes/updates/upgrades ever break?
Its browser maybe will not be able to display some webpages correctly.
This myth/fear that arch breaks is based on ignorance and people who don't read output during an upgrade, it otherwise never happens.
AMD gpu vs Nvidia .. 1-0
Intel gpu boots without linux-firmware pkgs.
Nvidia, old and new, you get what you deserve.
@KrispeeIguana @Pantherina
My point is less that leaving Arch alone breaks things and more that updating after a really long time can break something. It also kinda defeats the point of using a rolling release distro. I can see how you thought i was spreading misinformation though. My bad for poor wording.
For nvidia use ublue. Its immutable so it will always work. If not, roll back
I've only ever had two problems with Arch based systems....
For nvidia I cant recommend anything but ubluw
Gentoo
I'm trying not to spit my drink at this family gathering at this image
OpenRC and Gentoo installation CD:
Arch version:
More Arch:
KDE:
Debian:
The "arch btw" with the thing taped over their tattoo is just comedy gold, thanks for sharing!
There is also Nixos: https://derpibooru.org/tags/oc-colon-nixos
That reminds me, some time ago I tried installing Garuda on a Ryzen 5800H based mini PC but there where so many issues (namely worrisome graphical artefacting, which has never occurred with other distros on the same mini PC) I had to abort and abandon trying it until maybe the next or a future release.
I simply wanted to check out Garuda (arch based, if I recall well). I used the Cinnamon iso with Ventoy (not sure where the issue arose from).
That's weird. I have had zero issues with it so far (talking about distro specific issues) and I am running this with an AMD APU, Nvidia GPU, prime offloading on wayland. Works like an absolute charm. Though granted, this isn't quite out of the box, you may not need to be a wizard to figure it out, but I would not recommended this to a noob.
Because manjaro does weird stuff with own repos etc
People try to use Manjaro as Arch when it isn't Arch. Manjaro has it's own repositories that may not match Arch version. You install an AUR package that depends on an up to date Arch package to work and it fails.