stolen from linux memes at Deltachat
Arch user here.
My recommendation to noobies is always Linux Mint even though I don’t use it.
I use Arch, btw.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
True
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 still have an old laptop running v16 Ubuntu iirc. Basically using it as a sort of media centre.
I switched to Debian Stable after using Ubuntu LTS for 6 years, and recommend Ubuntu for beginners. It is stable, best community support, boring and good ol’ reliable, which is perfect to learn Linux and get accustomed to it. Even corporate support and game developers target Ubuntu first. Considering it runs smoothly on a 6 year old midrange Intel laptop chip, nobody is getting that 200% performance boost with other obscure fancy distros.
Yep, games being designed to support Ubuntu first is a big reason why I’m so far into Ubuntu. I could easily switch if I needed to since I’m both a programmer and very comfortable with Linux but for me, it does everything I need an OS to do.
Debian Stable is really, really close for gaming, since Ubuntu LTS itself is based on Debian Unstable branch, if you choose to upgrade with more Linux knowledge in future. Nobara is dedicated to gaming.
Honestly speaking, I keep W10 on SSD for games if any works in a wonky manner on Linux. Takes like 30 seconds to log off Debian, boot into Windows, fire up a game, get back to Linux when not playing.
I don’t have any issue with Arch, everything works. But when I try other distros, they are mostly messed up.
deleted by creator
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?
Arch also does its own packaging on its repos.
However you are right that Arch tries to stay as close as possible to the source. This is fondamentally different than the debian (and thus all debian-derived distros) way of packaging where they aim for a fully integrated OS at the expense of applying their own patches to many packages.
The patches can sometimes bring issues since they can bring unexpected behaviour if you come from Arch and sometimes will help the end user tremendously since they won’t have to configure every piece of software to work on their computer.
This is really two way of looking at the issue: Arch is make your own OS and Debian has a more hands off approach.
Yeah.
Arch also does its own packaging on its repos.
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…
Custom configs is for people who might not want to tinker as much so maybe it’s not for you if you prefer Arch.
To answer the question you asked previously, yes I had issues with custom configs from Debian. One I remember is mupdf being launched by a bash script and thus not understanding why did I have two PIDs (one for bash, one for the mupdf binary) when starting.
For context this was important because I needed to know the PID of mupdf to send a SIGHUP to update the view.
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.
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.
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.
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
I will always recommend Debian or Debian based distros to anyone new to Linux. They’ll find their way to arch eventually
Arch btw
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.
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?
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:
- You setup auto-snapshots (almost trivial)
- You update
- Evaluate
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.
“Wiki do not have answer” that’s why the wiki is also used by non-arch users ?
Start with Debian stable (rock solid, well integrated packaging).
When you feel comfortable and have achieved some experience, switch to Debian sid (rolling release, updates very often, be a bit cautious).
This
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.
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.
Nvidia?
More like:
Nie-wieder!
AMD beste.
Guter
archinstall
Well there is always Scientific Linux if arch doesn’t quite cut it
Basically, most of the points there fall into some of 3 categories:
- Your hardware is crap:
- WiFi not working;
- Nvidia failed;
- You ability to read/follow simple instructions is crap:
- WiFi not working;
- Messed up installation;
- Nvidia failed;
- No answer in the wiki;
- Lies/outdated:
- Updater broke system;
- Troubleshoot everything;
- No answer in the wiki;
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).
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.
