I’m a little bit underwhelmed, I thought that based off the fact so many people seem to make using this distro their personality I expected… well, more I guess?
Once the basic stuff is set-up, like wifi, a few basic packages, a desktop environment/window manager, and a bit of desktop environment and terminal customisation, then that’s it. Nothing special, just a Linux distribution with less default programs and occasionally having to look up how to install a hardware driver or something if you need to use bluetooth for the first time or something like that.
Am I missing something? How can I make using Arch Linux my personality when once it’s set up it’s just like any other computer?
What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?
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You’re forgetting the finest feature - you have to tell everyone in the real world and online that you use arch btw.
I like to do this to irritate people because I have a steam deck.
“I got a steam deck for Christmas. It runs arch, btw”
That must be fun, when you’re not busy doing crossfit or planning your vegan meals.
oh, he didnt forget
It’s like owning a screw driver, a really nice professional grade, well forged screw driver, with a molded grip handle.
Does it do anything that the $1 cheap knock off screw drivers can do? No, its just a screw driver.
If you use it every day, you may grow to like all the tiny features and comforts and customizations, or maybe not.
ArchLinux is a tool just like embedded linux systems, does basically the same thing as every other OS, its not life changing, but if you may grow to like its little details just like a custom screwdriver.
Does it do anything that the $1 cheap knock off screw drivers can do? No, its just a screw driver.
I got a chuckle out of that
Didn’t bother going through the hoops and installed EndeavourOS which is arch-based with some additional default applications.
For me, the best thing of Arch isn’t the distribution but the Arch wiki. An impressive piece of documentation.
Yes, wiki and community are top notch!
The Arch build system is just as impressive IMO. I’ve written Debian and redhat packages for at least two decades and Arch packaging is just so much easier to handle. The associated tooling for creating and managing build chroots is excellent as well.
That’s the main reason my software is in the AUR but nowhere else. I tried to make a deb package and failed so many times so I just gave up.
And the Arch User Repository is really handy when you need some more users.
That’s not a typo but a jest to the security implications, isn’t it?
It was a joke on the dual meaning of “user repository” which I didn’t think about that deeply but that would have been smart.
EndeavorOS is essentially Arch with a gui installer and a few optional pre-installed packages.
Arch wiki is superb, couldn’t have installed or configured Arch without it.
Which btw is the reason many people ended up with Archlinux… after the x-th time looking up some configuration issues on another distro and landing there.
That’s like seeing the Otaku gang, deciding to give this Anime a go, watching Dragon Ball and asking “what’s so special about this?”.
Some people make some random thing their personality, others enjoy the same thing without making a big fuzz about it. Arch is great because of the wiki and the AUR, other distros have their own pros and cons.
OP forgot the socks. Classic mistake.
there’s arch socks?
Oh yeah that’s better.
I think they’re referring to the socks you’re supposed to wear when programming :3
o shit I was expecting merch lol
You have reached the pinnacle of Linux, every other distro you try from now on will seem bland. 🧗🏼
now start using it for a while and you will notice the difference!
you will see you have all of the latest versions of programs, that other distros wont have for 6 months!
you will learn that the AUR has every package you could ever want!
you will see that the Wiki has extremely comprehensive answers to every question!
Fresh packages all the time without any hassle or snaps/flatpak/appimages, and theoretically never needs to be reinstalled. What’s not to love.
OP was pretty fucking snarky though, ngl. Some of us enjoy using arch based distros without being walking memes, and far more people complain about people talking about arch than actually talk about arch these days.
I tried it and was underwhelmed, but also overwhelmed.
I love the idea of choosing everything I want, but Arch also meant the pain of learning to install everything I actually need first.
Is there a minimalistic distro that installs all just the essentials (drivers, services like DHCP, a package manager, desktop GUI), and then I choose from there?
Debian Netinstall.
What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?
Welcome to the crowd! Eventually, you realize that an operating system is just an operating system: something you use to get work done, and the less you notice it, the better it’s doing its job. The pride of setting it all up mostly ends very shortly after you’re done. At that point, you realize that pretty much all distros are the same, give or take.
That said, there are always moments that make you realize that your OS is amazing. When you’re faced with a new and difficult task that you don’t know how to achieve, then you look at your distro’s documentation and solve it in a few elegant steps. And I’m not an Arch user, but that’s when the Arch wiki will really be your friend, as well as all the other resources that Arch has for its users. I can’t think of examples of these kinds of moments because they’re so rare, but those are the moments that feel great and really make you appreciate your OS.
This is probably true of most distros.
This is why I still don’t know more about computers. Lol. Switched to using Linux as my primary years ago, thinking “I’ll learn more about how computers work, and become better at this by forcing myself to use Linux.” Found Ubuntu, it worked well, then found mint, it worked so well I never needed to actually do anything, and switched to fedora when I realized how much I like Gnome, and still never needed to actually do anything, because shit just works. Once you’ve made the switch, Linux is super unobtrusive. It’s just sorta there, in the background, doing everything for you while you play YouTube videos or watch porn. Lol. I still don’t know much about computers, but I now recommend every switch, because seriously, almost no one is computer illiterate enough not to be able to use mint or Fedora.
If you want to learn more about computers by using Linux, I suggest something like Gentoo. Don’t know if it’s still the case, but I started with Gentoo back in 2003 and it took me 3 days until I even had a GUI. Learned a ton in the process about Linux under the hood and how it all works together. Thanks to Gentoo I have a well paid career as a Senior Linux System Administrator.
That being said, i should mention that I grew up with DOS, so I didn’t have the same apprehension as some people, when it comes to the command line and editing config files.
Exactly the same here. I was originally exposed to Linux around 1996 with red hat but didn’t really learn it until around 2004ish when I spent a couple years on Gentoo. I now consult and work with Linux systems and Linux based integration projects.
I started with config files on an AIX system I had to maintain vs DOS though
Check your neck for extra beard hairs, or your legs for knee high socks
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Ooh, a Gentoo user!
Knee high socks are for any Linux flavour 💖
Hell yeah! 💖💖💖
You must have missed the small print that says “Personality not included”. Linux is simple, individual character is hard.
Yup, that’s it.
Next, join us at [email protected] spend a day or 2 setting everything up and compiling every package from scratch, rice your setup, and realize that even that is barely different from Ubuntu to use once you’ve actually got everything set up.
Maybe Linux From Scratch feels a bit more special, but I never got to the finish line with that one, even as a teen I had better things to do with my time lol
The graduation from Linux from Scratch is to be able to make your own mini-distro. I reckon anybody who gets that far is above petty feuds about the install process or packaging in this or that distro.
This amuses me, since I literally went from Gentoo to Arch because it felt like the same bleeding edge distro without having to wait for the compile time for half of the packages.
That said, I generally don’t recommend Arch (or Gentoo) to newbies. It’s great when it works, but the number of times I’ve had to troubleshoot some random dependency issue because I took more than a week to update my system would scare any newbie away. It’s a bit like the parable of the cobbler’s kids having the worst shoes, or the mechanic always driving a project car - when you have the skills to fix something, you’re willing to put up with a lot of bullshit that a normal person wouldn’t.
I think it’s not a newbie but a general user issue. I have learned to recognize the linux newbies for whom Arch is a good fit over time… just by watching which people distro hop until landing with Archlinux.
PS: And among the typical distro hoppers is really a big chunk of them… because for a lot of them distro hopping is just a symptom of wanting to make the mandatory big system upgrades every few years at best worth it by trying something new. Those should actually get a rolling distro as a recommendation much earlier.
I’ve done it.
Don’t.
I’m trying out Arch on my laptop atm, and tbh the only real advantage (at least for me) is that the packages tend to be a lot fresher than on Debian-based distros. The question is how many of your packages you really need to be that fresh.
I think a lot of Arch users feel like wizards because they connected to the home wifi using the command line, but if you’ve tinkered with (/broken then had to fix lol) other distros, you will have done all this stuff before
I find OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a good solution for up-to-date packages without slow install times or hours spent compiling and configuring things. It’s straightforward but current.
