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 had this happen. I never did figure it out, personally. I distro hopped a bit and eventually ended up back on Arch and it didn’t happen again, so I guess it was a bugged install?
Yeah, I’ve taken the routine of logging into tty3 before kde to pipe the journal tal output into a file to debug only the error if it happens. Yeah I know I can fine tune then output to get only the last execution and so on and I have done it, but it was not that clear and this happened after a work day and I wanted to fuck off and chill so the next time it happens I’ll be more through.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Mint was my first used, was straightforward and easy to get going. Still use mint.
I’ve always read it doesn’t really matter what distro you choose, just to pick one you like. That’s confusing to a noob because they don’t know why they should or shouldn’t like a specific one.
Mint is very simple to setup and works very much like a windows PC by default. Can even set it up to work like a Mac if you want to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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