Hate saying it, but Ubuntu just works for me. I’d rather focus my computer configuration and maintenance efforts on clients rather than my own laptop. If I have to reinstall for whatever reason, its pretty easy because I’m already very familiar with the (shitty) installer, and I don’t do much customizing because I’d rather not have to go through that every time I reinstall.
Granted I’ve never even bothered to run Arch, or any really other desktop distro for that matter. Ubuntu + Gnome looks nice, seems to just work, all I need to do is apt install nvidia drivers and firefox post-install and I’m up and running. I don’t want to do work on my laptop, I want my laptop to enable me to do work.
I think you can install nvidia driver by clicking on “third party driver and codecs” check box during install? It should even register the secureboot key automatically.
Ubuntu installer is pretty good IMO, at least much better than the current fedora installer.
I haven’t used ubuntu for a while, maybe these are outdated impressions.
I dont really fuck around with the GUI stuff tbh…I’ve always just done ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
I guess my issues with the installer have mostly stemmed around the software raid and manual partitioning. Simply installing on a single drive isnt bad.
I don’t hate saying it. I have used Linux professionally and personally for 20 years now, and Ubuntu is just a solid choice for productivity. It has wide hardware support and even better user support. People hating on Ubuntu are Linux hipsters and their opinions can typically be dismissed.
There are many ideological reasons to hate ubuntu but I agree it was a solid choice and still is for people just wanting to get shit done without caring too much for the stuff underneath
Ideologically Ubuntu makes me cringe, but I also use Google and a host of other technologies that fuck my privacy, so I guess I have accepted the world we live in.
In the same way that I think it’s noble when people try to live waste free, I think it’s noble to use things like GrapheneOS, or selfhost all your services, or de-Google your tech. But it’s unrealistic for all of the world to live waste-free or customize their tech so as to be private. In the end, the government needs to step in and force these giant-ass companies to behave better, because they are the primary forces pushing forward the destruction of the environment and personal privacy.
Arch is not hard… at all. Everyone says it is hard but no one can cite why. There is always the option of using a traditional linux installer wizard and it installs just as easy as any other distro. Then the only difference is you have a different command for your package manager. It runs the same software. I’m tired of hearing that there are meaningful differences between these distros when the only major difference is “command install packagename” vs “different_command install packagename”. Woah there. I think this is going to be too complicated for new users.
The only other major difference is arch ships the configs that the developers recommend as a default while ubuntu tries to be as aggressive with some of the software as they can be. My experience is sometimes this breaks thing (at least did back in the day) depending on updates and your hardware. This leaves you trouble shooting the most low level stuff. I’ve had to do more high level tech support for myself every year I’ve run Ubuntu than I have in 6 years of running Arch.
Maybe Arch users shout Arch because we know it’s the easiest distro we’ve used and we want to save new users the headache that comes from accepting the BS marketing on Ubuntu as real. The more a distro tries to accomplish the more they are going to fail the more it is you who will hold the bag for fixing it. So the distro that does the least is actually the easiest one. If you pick manjaro or artix you get the install wizard and its as easy to install as Ubuntu but with less broken stuff once it is running.
Next time something breaks in your ubuntu just know that if you were running arch it would have never happened.
Arch is hard not just because of the installation, it’s because of everything after. There are so many small things you expect your OS to have set up automatically that you might not even know exist that Arch expects you to do by hand. Arch doesn’t enable TRIM on your SSDs by default, it has no firewall. It doesn’t install microcode, leaving you open to many security exploits. It NEVER cleans old downloaded packages from it’s cache, something you will only find out about after you start looking for where 300GB of your disk space went to. It requires specific arcane syntax commands to install and update packages. You seriously expect someone coming over from Windows and MacOS to do those things or even know they need to do them? I haven’t used Ubuntu in a long time and wouldn’t use it now but it’s still an easy recommendation just because I know it has the least abrasions for a new user to encounter. After they learn how Linux works and feel comfortable, they themselves can branch out and try other distros.
I switched to Arch some months ago because I get better performance in games on Arch compared to Debian. But I wasn’t aware microcode wasn’t installed automatically. Thanks for pointing that out, I’ve installed it now.
I’d use Arch if only my GPU wouldn’t just die in the middle of a game and I’d have to restart the whole system. So unfortunately im forced to game on Windows
GPU is an RX590 and i can’t for the life of me get it to work on Linux as a whole rn.
Because debian is a vanilla distro that does as little as possible, so it isn’t extra work to use it. Do you know what other distro tries to be as vanilla as possible. Arch. So if you just use the install wizard Debian and Arch are equal difficulty. AKA the easiest. Don’t buy the Ubuntu marketing hype. Just because someone labels themselves the easiest doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because another distro is labeled hard doesn’t mean it’s true.
Absolutely not. Arch always releases updates, as soon as they are available. This means, that there isn’t that much testing before the release. This can cause lots of problems for the end user. Debian tries to be the most stable Distribution in existence. They Accomplish this by testing a lot. This causes update to come not very often. Debian’s strategy works.
This means, that there isn’t that much testing before the release. This can cause lots of problems for the end user.
Lol you’re buying into the FUD. ubuntu doesn’t test every possible combination of packages, nor do they test how updates actually impact the user. Generally updates are always good for users. They fix bugs. 99% of the time someone comes to a linux forum asking about an issue, the answer is “this was fixed in the latest kernel, try updating”. But because they’re using distros that use ancient, 3 year old kernels, they can’t.
Unless you have a staging computer where you stage your updates, you’re living in an illusion about “stability”, and using ancient tools with ancient bugs for no reason
Yeah, but that’s still not as long,as Debian’s testing phase. You can’t deny it. Updates frequently cause problems. I had this multiple times and literally every Arch User will tell you the same.
I probably would have liked fedora if it didn’t brick it’s self after a fresh install on my system. I just can’t figure out what was making it not boot, I suspect it has something to do with selinux.
Arch isn’t a bad choice for a new Linux user who was a power user on Windows. You get to actually know what’s installed on your system which can really help during the inevitable troubleshooting, though it’s definitely a trial by fire when it comes to manual install and setting up the environment.
Recommending Gentoo to a new user though is a war crime.
Why not recommend Manjaro then? The benefits of Arch without all the drawbacks.
For beginners it’s probably best to give them an OS they can actually use and then have them find out stuff. Starting off with a troubleshooting experience before being able to use the OS is rather demotivating.
Manjaro is a potential time bomb, delayed repos and AUR don’t always interact well. EndeavourOS is the better Arch fork, especially for beginners that need a smooth introduction.
Last time I installed EndeavourOS I had to connect to the wifi through the terminal. That’s a surefire way to get a beginner to stop installing right there so I would not recommend it.
My very first distro was Manjaro actually - I tried it twice but there would always be some graphics related issue I would encounter that I couldn’t troubleshoot as a beginner (even though I’d spend a week looking for a solution on forums), and I’d move back to Windows. Finally getting the courage to try out Arch which was considered the “big scary meme distro” was what made me stay with Linux.
The biggest thing for me was that I actually knew what was installed on my system and what the function most of the major programs served (things like xorg, multilib graphics drivers, pipewire/pulseaudio, desktop environments/window managers), so whenever I encountered an issue or wanted to customize something, I would sort of know where to start looking.
Of course, all this depends on the person - not all power users are the same. For me, arch worked best but someone else might gravitate towards fedora, debian or whatever else and their way of doing things.
The “I use Arch BTW” crowd is the loud but friggin’ annoying minority. Sometimes I resort to just blocking anybody serious about Arch and making that joke.
Among other things? They have a restrictive licensing, they’re a for-profit company, and though it’s now disabled by default (maybe, see for profit company bit,) they got into cahoots with Amazon for Spyware
They’ve always skeeved me out with their MS-like approach to UI.
RH doesn’t allow sharing of the spec files which generate the RHEL rpm packages. The program’s code is still under whatever license it is licensed under.
Besides all the RHEL code is public and upstream in CentOS, which makes more sense anyway.
That’s not quite true from my understanding. You can exercise your rights under the licenses but in the Red Hat terms of service it says they will terminate your service contract if you do. Also the downstream source code isn’t in a public git repo.
For profit companies are solely motivated by profit.
Inevitably they will choose profit over what’s right. In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong per se, but, for example, I don’t trust Canonical to not try and slip unity-lens or whatever it was back in all quiet like.
Or, duck duck go to not quietly expand what it tracks and sells on you. (Mobile browser app caved for Google money,)
It was a bit weasel-y of debian, but like, I understand branding issues being “important”; the issue with Ubuntu and branding is you can’t do that. You have to get approval to repackage/brand Ubuntu.
Just an interesting thing in the community, how everything canonical does is immediately hate mongered by all relevant Linux media and Red Hat is given free reign
So. Fun story. My dad is a Unix SysOps guy. I grew up on Red Hat. he went out to REHL’s HQ in Raleigh, NC, to get pitched their enterprise services for his org. (they were soliciting bids from several places,). In any case, he came back with, for him, a new hostility towards red hat. (“I regret setting you up with red hat…” lots of other comments that could be described as “fuck them”, he’s far less crude than I am.)
the most hilarious part is the some of the swag was this nasty-ass 1 pound chocolate bar that they made a big deal out of. he put it out at his office and not even the office grazers that would eat 3-week old pizza left in the fridge would touch it.
I want to disagree. Like I get that installing arch maybe difficult for someone not familiar with the Linux environment, once you install it up and make it sweet looking, for daily use, it’s generally cool. A non tech savvy person is anyways going to be using the browser and office suite mostly, so I install Firefox with uBlock and install Libre office. I also install flatpak and packagekit and they can wasily install software from there, I recommend them to use flathub mostly and I have had only one of my friends machine borked because they read a little bit stuff online and installed stuff from the aur. And the aur borking a system is rare too.
The only prerequisite to giving new users an arch install is that you are there for support.
I will happily recommend Arch to a new user… If they’re interested in learning Linux, and not dependent on it working reliably, while warning them of the risks and telling them about the advantages.
I wouldn’t recommend it to somebody who wants something that just works, but for tech-inclined people looking for a system they are in control (and responsibility) of, willing to learn how to set it up, I think a manual installation is a good experience.
What would be a good source of info on this, for someone who only knows windows but isn’t afraid to learn a lot of new stuff if that means doing it right.
I feel like i should move away from windows with their shenanigans. I use my pc for gaming and messing around with my 3d printer(and everything that comes with that), photography, design work.
As others mentioned, archwiki is the information source if you want to use Arch, and a great source of information even if using other distributions.
For other distros, I’ve seen people mention Linux Journey.
All that said, you might not be able to drop Windows entirely - if we’re talking CAD software, the Adobe suite, that kind of stuff, you might not be able to find suitable alternatives for Linux. That said, you can always dual boot, or you might even be able to work with a VM.
If you do want to try a dual boot, I strongly recommend setting up the Linux boot partition on a separate physical drive, to minimize the risk of Windows overwriting it… As well as you accidentally messing up your windows install. I’d also recommend using rEFInd as the bootloader, since it’s very easy to set up and will automatically show a boot option for Windows.
Feel free to ask questions, I’m no expert, but I’ll try to answer when I have time.
I love REFind. I spent ages faffing around with a fedora/arch dual boot when I was trying to learn how it all worked; when I got sick of learning things the hard way, REFind had my back and gave me a straightforward solution
The Arch Linux wiki is considered, by several Linux users including myself, as the best reference for troubleshooting and learning more about Linux, even when you’re not using Arch Linux. For a gamer (which I’m not,btw) have a look at bazzite.gg and nobaraproject.org and there’s Lemmy communities for linux_gaming
The arch wiki is the gold standard for Linux, not just arch. But it definitely talks specifically about arch.
So, there are built in install scripts now. There’s no GUI installer, but it’s 1 command to get a full arch setup installed with a desktop environment. Arch is a 100% reasonable choice for a new user.
That’s why I use endeavourOS: behaves like arch(or is arch) but easy to install and with easy grafic driver management. You can use ArchWiki so well with it
I recommend arch to a first time user…once. because he said he wanted to have Linux as a new hobby of sorts. Everyone else I recommend Pop! Or Fedora most of the time.
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