Arch is aimed at people who know their shit so they can build their own distro based on how they imagine their distro to be. It is not a good distro for beginners and non power users, no matter how often you try to make your own repository, and how many GUI installers you make for it. There’s a good reason why there is no GUI installer in arch (aside from being able to load it into ram). That being that to use Arch, you need to have a basic understanding of the terminal. It is in no way hard to boot arch and type in archinstall. However, if you don’t even know how to do that, your experience in whatever distro, no matter how arch based it is or not, will only last until you have a dependency error or some utter and total Arch bullshit® happens on your system and you have to run to the forums because you don’t understand how a wiki works.
You want a bleeding edge distro? Use goddamn Opensuse Tumbleweed for all I care, it is on par with arch, and it has none of the arch stuff.
You have this one package that is only available on arch repos? Use goddamn flatpak and stop crying about flatpak being bloated, you probably don’t even know what bloat means if you can’t set up arch. And no, it dosent run worse. Those 0,0001 seconds don’t matter.
You really want arch so you can be cool? Read the goddamn 50 page install guide and set it up, then we’ll talk about those arch forks.
(Also, most arch forks that don’t use arch repos break the aur, so you don’t even have the one thing you want from arch)
Hey, you forget about Gentoo Linux!
The real distro for newbies… (Provided the newbies are expert cs graduated and crazy nerds…)
All depends on what a beginner is… Not all beginners are tech illiterates or people who only want to use office.
As someone who wanted to jump in with both feet on my journey to using more than just Windows & mobile OSes, I actually started from Arch. Well, sort of. If you have a beginner who wants to try Linux and actually wants to know the discomfort they’ll experience, give them Archbang.
It works on very basic hardware requirements, does very well as a live distro, and was honestly an important step in my personal journey that has ended me up in a place where I keep two systems - one with Windows 10, and a separate computer with Linux Mint.
Obviously, I’m not in the place many people are. But I just wanted to toss in my 2 cents. Arch itself is not for beginners. Archbang can be, especially if you have a user who’s open to a live distro and doesn’t want to try dual-booting yet (and only has one computer). I think that the project deserves more visibility and support than it gets.
I never see Fedora recommended enough, but it’s really good for beginners. And by that I mean people new to computers, not just Linux. GNOME is a good looking by default, intuitive to use, simple DE.
it wasn’t my choice but i recently installed Fedora for a beginner. (They made their research, read about different distros and chose Fedora.) It was surprising to see how intuitive everything is. A beginner can indeed start using Fedora with no previous Linux experience.
By “beginner” i mean somebody who used one or some of these: windows, macos, ios and android. It’s especially easy, i think, for tablet users.
GNOME is explicitly what kept me exclusively on Windows for about a decade - and what made me gunshy about Android & iOS. It’s totally impossible to drive anything important, doing anything of value required a DOS prompt and arcane commands that had no relation to their exact counterpart in Windows, and it’s just utterly revolting to me.
Cinnamon is the only DE that made me feel comfortable daily driving Linux.
That’s really interesting, because I’ve had a very different experience. Almost anything I wanted to do could be done through a GUI, which looks pretty.
I’m not sure how Android and iOS relate, they are mobile OSs, and both have their flaws, although some more than others.
To go in reverse order: iOS & Android are related because they’re Linux/UNIX. They’re not CP/M based. As a result, my level of trust and respect are always near-zero.
I’m glad you have a different experience with GNOME, someone ought to. I guess it wouldn’t be the standard if no one could use it.
Android technically uses the Linux kernel, but is not GNU+Linux, and has had all the good parts of Linux taken out. I didn’t know iOS was based on Linux, but it’s even worse than Android, locks you so much into Apple’s services and spending money. Freedom over your device is the point of Linux, and iOS fails at that even more than Android, at least with Android you can install custom ROMs.
I mean, you are right, and way more people should be using openSUSE :P
I will say Arch-derived distros are a good experience if you want to learn how the terminal and other systems work. They’re engineered to be configurable; the documentation is great. But if you just want to use your computer without opening too many hoods, it’s fundamentally not an optimal system.
Another thing is that many people just want their new laptop to work, and for it to game on linux. Sometimes it does not just work. If you start pulling in fixes and packages that are not supported on your distro, you can screw up any distro very quickly (and this includes the AUR, unofficial Fedora repos and such). If the community packages these, stages them, tests them against all official packages, and they work out-of-the-box… that’s one less hazard.
Mamma says you’re ornery bcz you have all them teeth and no toothbrush.
Any windows power user or dev on a mac can follow a wiki, read a bit and learn.
Good for beginners? I didn’t describe a beginner right here. Anybody with experience in computing will find arch straightforward and satisfying. Heck, a CS student would probably go through a first install process faster than I do after 5 years.
What are the concept involved? Partitioning, networking, booting… These are all familiar fields to tons of very normal computer users.
The first Linux I used wasn’t part of any distro. A few years later I compiled Slackware to run bind and Sendmail.
Last year I tried Arch in a VM. I got to where it expected me to know what partitions to create for root and swap and noped out. It’s not 1996. I don’t have time for those details any more. No one should. Sane defaults have been in other distros for decades.
one of the main points of arch is for people wanting to learn these details. its not for everyone.
if you want a distro to just work, i second the suggestion from the other dude. get a debian based one.
Debian welcomes you 💫
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Only gets better if we make it better.
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You’re focusing too much on the installation process, if installing Arch was the whole of the problem things like Endeavor would be a good recommendation for newbies, but they’re not. Arch has one giant flaw when it comes to being beginner friendly, and it’s part of what makes it desirable for lots of us, and that is the bleeding edge rolling release model. As a newcomer you probably want something that works and is stable. Arch is not, and will never be, that, because the core philosophy is to be bleeding edge rolling release. If you’re a newcomer who WANTS to have that and doesn’t mind the learning curve then go ahead, but Linux has enough of a learning curve already, so it’s better to get people started with something they can rely on and afterwards they can move to other stuff that might have different advantages/disadvantages.
We’re talking about the general case here, I’ve recommend Arch to a newcomer in the past, he was very keen on learning and was happy with reading wikis to get there stuff sorted, but realistically most people who’re learning a whole new OS don’t want to ask questions and be told RTFM, and RTFM is core to the Arch philosophy.
Arch was my first distro after going back to Linux. I really liked learning the inner workings of a computer and an OS.
I know plenty of people who just want a plug&play experience with the only input for the install being name, password and date. For them, I would never recommend Arch, simply mint or pop_os would do just fine as the only thing the computer has to do is open up the browser.
I just want more Linux users, not specific distros. In the end if you know your way around Linux, the distro choice doesn’t matter, you just choose a package repo
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Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss
It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.
Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.
One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.
just because a given person could make it work, doesnt mean they want to. i personally can fix a lot of these issues, but i dont wanna have to bother. i just want to accomplish the inane bullshit i turned my computer on for.
i just think an arch recommendation should always come with that disclaimer. newbies have to know what to expect else they will associate that experience with linux in general.
this guy is so damn right i cant argue. arch isnt hard to use, whats hard is experiencing different things and learning
idk I’m kind of a fucking idiot and I started with Manjaro.
Larger downstream distros like manjaro (and steamOS for that matter) can be stable. I wouldn’t call manjaro a beginners distro though, like mint would be (No Linus, there’s no apt in manjaro) but it’s very daily-driveable.
Although, if you’re most people, just stay away from rolling release distros. There’s so little benefit unless you’re running bleeding edge hardware…
If it‘s your first time trying linux, go with mint. It’s stable and almost every tutorial will work for you. If you know your way around a terminal already, the choice is all yours. I personally like Fedora.
To me, every distro that seriously requires you to read through all changelogs before updating is BS, and it doesn’t solve a basic problem. No one but in their sane mind will do this, and the system will break.
That’s why, while I respect the upstream Arch, I’d say you should be insane for running it and trying to make things stable, and mocking people for not reading the changelogs is missing the point entirely. Even the best of us failed.
Arch is entirely about “move fast and break stuff”.
Arch doesn’t require you to “read through all changelogs”. It only requires that you check the news. News posts are rare, their text is short, and not all news posts are about you needing to do something to upgrade the system. Additionally, pacman wrappers like
parucheck the news automatically and print them to the terminal before upgrading the system. So it’s not like you have to even remember it and open a browser to do it.Arch is entirely about “move fast and break stuff”.
No, it’s not. None of the things that make Arch hard for newbies have to do anything with the bleeding edge aspect of Arch. Arch does not assume your use case and will leave it up to you to do stuff like edit the default configuration and enable a service. In case of errors or potential breakage you get an error or a warning and you deal with it as you see fit. These design choices have nothing to do with “moving fast”. It’s all about simplicity and a diy approach to setting up a system.
Is there anyone here remember Gentoo and the merge/split
/usrperiod?Gentoo developers are kind and super helpful that they put out any important notice after you pull upgrades to your system. Run
eselect news readto know what the breaking change is going to be, and carefully perform the required actions one by one. It’s a great distro made by great fellas.I don’t mind there is breaking change at all. I do mind that you don’t tell me about it.
Yeah, Gentoo puts serious emphasis on that, I have to give them a credit. I liked it.
But yeah, I’d rather not have breaking changes in the first place.
It is not as overwhelming as you make it sounds, you don’t need to read the whole changelog every time you update just check Arch news page and they state any manual action an update might need. I run arch since like 1 y and I almost never had to do such manual actions. You can see on archlinux.org news it’s not that bad although I can totally see why it is not suitable for most people
I subscribe to the arch news letter, and they email me about potentially breaking changes like 4 times a year. Usually I don’t have to do anything about them but it’s good to be aware of, just in case.
To half the users in this thread, normal people use computers as a means to an end.
“If you’re not prepared to get your hands dirty this OS is not for you” you’ve already lost me, this is unhinged behaviour. You have one life and you choose to spend it fixing your computer so it will do the same things except slightly differently.
But I know this is an unpopular opinion for Linux users.
It’s about as unhinged as someone assembling their own bicycle really. Most people (well, in a reasonably bikeable place, i.e. not in the US) just use their bikes for commuting or whatever, and don’t want to assemble a bike (I sure don’t). Some people like tinkering with their bikes though. That’s totally fine.
If you’re not prepared to get your hands dirty, don’t buy bike parts you have to assemble yourself. And don’t install Arch. You are correct in the assessment that Arch isn’t for you (or me).
There are bicycle repair shops, but there are no Arch repair shops. You have to be able to fix it yourself. OP is correct: Don’t recommend Arch to people who can’t do that. Recommend something that doesn’t push bleeding edge untested updates on its users, because it will break and the user will have to fix it themself.
tl;dr: Arch existing is fine, in the same way any tinker hobby is fine. What is not fine is telling people to use it that just want to get work done or won’t know how to fix it.
“I didnt read the changelogs”
I have never read the changelogs and I have never broken my EOS install ever.
Weak bait.
- Arch users everywhere: You MUST read the Arch news files before updating.
- Also Arch users when updating: Oops, I forgot to read the news file.
- pacman when updating: I have pre install hooks but I don’t print the news files updates by default because that’s probably bloat or something.
Make it make sense
while you do have a point, i’m still having issues with taskwarrior printing it’s update notifications, even after opening an issue and the maintainers patching it.
The thing is, i use arch on 3 different devices, and i don’t need to see every news entry 3 times, so yes in my case having it as default in pacman would indeed be bloat.
That said, there is PLENTY of places where I think arch could have saner defaults. but the beauty of arch is that it is made to be configured exactly the way you like it, so you really can’t fault arch as much in this case, compared to other distros that try to take all decisionmaking away from the user.
You can never be 100% certain the news file didn’t update between the three invocations. If you aren’t refreshing that page between invocations then you aren’t actually using Arch the way it was designed.
well you can never be 100% certain your laptop won’t spontaneously die either.
for any new arch user, i do recommend keeping an archiso live USB around in case something really does happen - since every arch user should know the basics of how it works, it should be easy enough to recover as well.
knowing that, i really only check the news out of curiosity, since i’m not a grub user i haven’t had arch be unbootable since i started using it years ago. even if it did i’m confident enough it’d be a quick fix.
Then I never want to see you telling someone they should’ve checked the news file before updating!
In 9+ years of literally never reading the changelog the ONLY time ive had arxh break was when grub did that unbelievably retarded update where it broke compatibility with itself and they did not put a goddamn hook to automatically update the install on bootloader.
That was solved in about 10min with a liveusb and replacing grub with systemdboot, which honestly I should have done a long time ago anyway it has a nice, easy, clean, simple configuration file instead of whatever the fuck they call that absolute monstrosity grub uses
Granted that for most newbies doing archchroot from a live USB is complicated enough to reinstall. In any case, as you said, systemd-boot works fine and it’s the default now in EOS so who cares.
For example a friend of mine decided to reinstall bazzite because he changed his GPU from nvidia to amd, when and uses the default drivers… Yes a simple search in bazzite’s download page shows the three coands that have to be executed to rebase the system to the non nvidia one if you like having extra space but… A full reinstall is crazy.
I stopped using grub after that pain in the ass
That was solved in about 10min with a liveusb and replacing grub with systemdboot
Try explaining that to a newbie
I am not a newbie and wouldn’t even know how to do it without using a manual (archwiki)
Arch is for control freaks, which means it takes a lot of work and patient to get it to work for your specific needs. If you don’t have the time and patient for that (which is more then understandable) then you shouldn’t use it.
Nah that’s gentoo
Nah, maybe 10 years ago or so. Now you install it with a script and it just works.
Installing packages on Arch is way, way easier than doing it on Ubuntu, the OS that for some reason people keep recommending for newcommers.
And since installing packages is about the only thing that you do with your OS as a beginner, that’s a big deal
Everyday I see people saying they are having issue with Linux and its always because they went straight to arch and used archinstall. They have no idea how any of their system works and when they run into an issue thry do a full system reinstall.
Tbh I think endeavor os is a pretty nice beginner way to get into arch–it was my introduction to arch and the aur.
