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.
I use Gentoo mainly so I can lord over the Archlords.
If you wish to make Linux from scratch, you must first create the universe. :very-intelligent:
:rat-salute:
I did LFS once, but in practical terms you absolutely need a package manager and update system.
switch to nixos. it's gentoo but you don't have to figure out how to configure every package cause you can copy paste into a single master config file for the whole system. you can override specific packages to make them build from source instead of pulling from the binary cache, but only when you really need it.
I tried NixOS for a couple months both on my desktop and on a cloud machine. The thing about being stateless is REALLY COOL, but in practice I found it to be under-documented, and changing too rapidly. The biggest pain point with NixOS was having to cross-reference upstream docs for a package with the limited NixOS docs, and diving into the code frequently in order to fill in the gaps. I had to run unstable versions of a lot of components, spend hours trying to figure out how to make them work in Nix, just to see hundreds of lines of script made useless by significant changes. To make matters worse, a lot of the problems you bump into tend to be really niche things that aren't as easy to find threads about on various forums.
I would love to see the idea behind NixOS (and Guix, which I haven't tried yet) developed further, but from my limited experience, it was no utopia.
yea that's fair. I lean on the arch docs for most things and I can usually map those to the appropriate nix module configurations by searching their options. but ymmv
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
please don't recommend manjaro, it's not nearly as well run as plain arch or endeavouros.
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.
Trying to bootstrap the system without an Ethernet port sucks ass though, have to admit. pacstrap not even including mandb :haram:
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.
There's such pervasive toxicity as you get into more "elite" circles of software users.
"Anyone who doesn't know how to do [X] is useless and should be fired from their job!"
:kitty-cri: "Okay, I'm sorry I asked."
The initial install isn't usually too bad for the most part, it's extensively covered through both the arch wiki and the myriad youtube install tutorials. I believe there's actually a pretty robust install script for arch now as well, which helps to make it a bit more accessible.
It's after you've installed arch and begin to configure the system yourself such that you come across some issues that are a bit more off the beaten track that you realise how unfriendly and elitist the arch community can be. As you mentioned, the forum is usually especially bad and every thread begins with the op having to try and explain to a gang of ravenous arch nerds that they have in fact read through the relevant wiki page, and that the wiki page does not in fact solve any of their problems.
I think if it weren't for the fact that I've already got my arch system set up nicely, and for the godsend that is the arch user repository, I would've switched to another distro a long time ago.
Honestly if people want to flex they should post how long they've had it installed continuously on a machine.
Stopped using Arch because rolling updates are terrible and rolling back is a chore. I now run NixOS, which is the best OS I've ever used when it comes to rollbacks and updates, but the lack of documentation and the non standard file structure gets tiring sometimes.
I use EndeavorOS, which is basically Arch made easy for newbs. I love it so far, and my (pretty limited) interaction with the community has been positive.
Im gonna say the m word, manja-
:stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:
I started using arch thinking it would help me learn things. It did, somewhat - but now i just turn it on and open a web browser.
I never visit any forums lol. I just look up what I need to install and never talk to those people
oh arch makes people egotistical and mean? please go on :anarchy:
You can just ask questions here, people actually gave me tips to configure/manage Nvidia PRIME on Arch before it was officially supported on the proprietary blobs on the megathread, of all places :)
People here are cool. If I know something I answer and if I ask someone answers helpfully. Comrades helping comrades.
It's fast, highly customizable, and relatively lightweight. Also you get to tell people that you use Arch
hold on, doesn't this also apply to debian? In fact, is there a Linux flavour you couldn't say this about?
Specifically, Arch's software packages are much more up-to-date than Debian's. Debian has a much stronger focus on stability.
I do debian stable for stability + security but I use a series of debootstrap chroots in testing or even sid specifically for gaming and the like. I find it the best of both worlds.
You could argue that Debian is more lightweight since it doesn't roll development libraries and binaries into the same package. It's really a question of lightweight in what sense? Disk utilization? IO? RAM? Computation?
People usually mean lightweight as in small package count. I dunno how many packages Debian installs by default, especially if you choose the minimal distro, but the arch install I used at school had like 700 packages and I did most of my schoolwork on it. It's meaningful in the sense that the less packages you have installed, the less likely the system will break after an update and the less upkeep you need. Resource wise, Arch is as lightweight as whatever DE you're rocking. Obviously a WM setup with no window compositing is going to be super light on resources but you can have one of those on Debian no problem.
You could, I guess the emphasis would go on the lightweight part. The Arch ISO is very minimalist so you have much more control over what packages are on your install.
It's a highly customizable rolling release distro, but mostly the Arch User Repository!
I think there have been significant improvements on the installation too, pacstrap already does a bunch of heavy lifting for you AND their own install script now works sometimes!
The reason I keep using it is that pretty much everything I want to use is packaged to work with the minimal amount of system wide disruption. Since nothing is installed by default, everything only does the bare minimum to work, which means I can add functionality as needed but don't end up with a complexity nightmare because of assumptions made about what should be "batteries included".
In addition to the other stuff mentioned, it's a rolling release which means you don't have to worry about upgrades/reinstalls of the OS as much. You also get access to the AUR which is probably the most complete repository of software on Linux.
I stopped using arch when my system broke itself when updating every two months or so. For such elite hotness they sure did suck at updates.
