Sorry, but installing arch linux doesn't mean you are some computer master. You are just following instruction on a wiki. Anyone could install arch linux if felt like, and wanted to put some time into it.

Some people make arch linux their personality especially the forum.

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      For me, Arch was a teaching distribution that forced me to learn how the linux installation works. It was empowering to learn that GUIs are unnecessary for most things. Now I spend my days memorizing command line options from the GNU man pages and writing BASH scripts. I haven't touched grass in years and I've never felt better! :quagsire-pog:

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I’d mostly learned that already before I installed arch

          I never got me one of them fancy CS degrees. :(

          ultimately useless

          I just think it's neat. :marge:

    • silent_water [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      isn't it a one-shot script now? I haven't installed it in a long time cause I got sick of configuring everything by hand every time I wanted to set up a computer. nixos has been a dream come true. the support for the fully manual install is important sometimes -- like sometimes I'm doing something weird with my filesystems from a btrfs or zfs partition with subvolumes getting carefully mounted -- and the automatic installers invariably have no clue what I'm trying to do. and if you want a sense of what all the moving parts are that make up your system, configuring them all by hand is a decent way to work that out. but dam it is not fun to do that over and over again. it's so tedious.

        • silent_water [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I will say that I’ve never had an issue with weird partitioning or filesystems on ubuntu or similar distros either, even if I wanted to get really exotic there is usually still an option to drop to a shell and do that part by hand.

          oh yeah, there's always a way to work around it, but with Ubuntu et al, you're perpetually working around the system. it was genuinely pleasant to switch to Arch and just have the flexibility to do what I liked without having to figure out what odd customizations got piled on top in nonstandard ways. for most people this doesn't matter but as someone who hasn't used anything but a linux system in decades, Arch was a breath of fresh air.

          I kinda like the idea of Nix (honestly I don’t know what to think about it but it seems neat), but I don’t have the free time to jump into it and I don’t think I could get the buy in to use it at work unfortunately

          if you have a specific way you want your systems set up, Nix is nice. the configuration language will take some time to get used to though. it's just plain weird and there's no shortcut for it.

        • zan [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          It comes down to audience. Arch is niche and caters to a specific crowd, as does Ubuntu, Debian, etc. The problem in Linux spaces is some internet tough guys actually think lesser of you for not being in the target audience of Arch, despite the fact everyone should have their computing needs catered to.

    • rafflesia [she/her, doe/deer]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah I installed arch once just for fun because I'm a sicko who loves this stuff and if I ever decide to switch back to it i'm 100% picking one of the distros that just has an installer and shit. Fuck all the elitism.

    • zan [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I use Arch on everything at this point just because I have now learned its packaging system deeply enough to be able to write my own and do what I want with it.

      That being said, there are Arch direct installers but ultimately Arch comes down to pacstrap. Thats like, the whole installer. Sure, it doesn't setup your bootloader or give you a root password, and without a locale a lot of stuff will break, but...

      At this point I could easily write a shell script to do all the mechanical steps the way I always do, but in practice none of the steps are "hard" enough that there is a meaningful difference between reading a one liner in the install manual and doing something like ln -s your locale to /etc/locale.conf or picking it from a dropdown. And the stuff that is more complicated - partitioning, filesystems, bootloader, etc - there are way more choices in those than any installer currently presents. I get frustrated with a lot of distros over how hard it is to drop Grub for systemd-boot, for example.

      If you don't want that absolutely use another distro or an Arch derivative, but there is a consistent trend line that the most widely tread path is the most well illuminated - if upstream Arch moved to an installer the manual process would decay over time to be much harder or impossible in the same way trying to manually install Ubuntu from a flash drive by copying files and manually writing configs would be a massive undertaking. Its a niche that exists because some of us wanted to know how it worked, wanted customization we couldn't get in installers, and just got used to it.

      There is a reason unlike pretty much any other distro you can use any wifi management software that exists. Because nothing is assumed. Installers beget assumptions other distros make and untangling those for anyone trying to switch is often way harder than it is on Arch because it doesn't make those assumptions.

        • zan [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          People also just get excited about it. Arch is a great way to learn how the pieces of desktop Linux go together. It's a learn by doing thing. People come out the other side really satisfied and can easily catch themselves up in a common fervor evangelizing the experience. It's in the same part of the brain religion works from.

      • copyleft [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Trying to bootstrap the system without an Ethernet port sucks ass though, have to admit. pacstrap not even including mandb :haram: