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)
The real problem: Define beginner distro
Every user is starting from a different point. There is no such thing as a beginner distro. You can say this distro is good for people who can grasp the idea of a command line or this distro is good for people who have no idea command line interfaces exist, but that doesn’t differentiate between beginner friendly or not.
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My first distro was an Arch fork and I moved to vanilla Arch a year later. My problems in that time have been minimal. Personally, I am glad that someone recommended that I use an arch-based distro as a beginner. Mind you, I came in as a modestly computer-literate Windows refugee willing to learn. I think for those types of people it can be appropriate to recommend Arch-based distros.
So, yes, if you are not willing to google a problem, read a wiki, or use the terminal once in a while, Arch or its forks are probably not for you. I would probably not recommend Arch as a distro for someone’s elderly grandparent or someone not comfortable with computers.
That said, I do not know that I agree with the assertion that Arch “breaks all the time,” or that I even understand what “Arch bullshit®” is referring to. This overblown stereotype that Arch is some kind of mythical distro only a step removed from Linux From Scratch has to stop. None of that has been my experience for the last 4 years. Actually, if anything, it is the forks that get dependency issues (looking at you, Manjaro) and vanilla Arch has been really solid for me.
I came in as a modestly computer-literate Windows refugee willing to learn
That’s like 2% of the people who want to switch to Linux
How so? I see plenty of posts by folks who recently switched from Windows, and I imagine the ones who are willing to take that leap in the first place lean towards the more tech-literate side.
“Willing to learn” is more subjective, perhaps, but I do not think my case is that uncommon.
I’d argue the demographic that writes posts about switching their OS is more likely to be happy switching to Arch than most of the people who switch. The way I imagine the average Linux noob is a university student who installed Ubuntu for their coding class.
On the contrary, I’d still argue it’s a good distro for beginners, but not for newbies. people who are tech-sawy and not hesitant to learn new things.
I jumped straight into EndeavorOS when I switched to Linux, since arch was praised as the distro for developers, for reasons.
Sure, I had some issues to fight with, but it taught me about all the components (and their alternatives) that are involved in a distro.
So, once you have a problem and ask for help, the first questions are sorts of “what DE/WM do you use?.. is it X11 or wayland? are you using alsa or pipewire?”.
Windows refugees (like me) take so many things for granted, that I think this kind of approach really helps in understanding how things work under the hood. And the Arch-wiki is just a godsend for thst matter. And let’s be real, you rarely look into Arch-wiki for distros other than Arch itself, since they mostly work OOTB.
The Arch-wiki was my main reason for switching to arch. When I used an ubuntu based distro I felt like I had to rely on forum posts to figure out anything whereas with arch everything is documented incredibly well
We, long-time users of Linux, all have our opinions based on various preferences. The thing is that a lot of these preferences are pretty technical, like Ubuntu having snaps, Fedora and Mints’ flat pak policies, etc…
For the average user, they will not know what this is or even see a difference between the systems at first. The linux community would do better if we could have a unified front on distro recommendations. People will switch distros as they learn and their curiosity grows.
I think, we should ask people to pick based on their DE preference. If they want something like windows, let them have Mint or Kubuntu, if they want something closer to mac, let them have Ubuntu. I say this as someone who likes Fedora Plasma spin.
Everything else, is just information overload and will give users decision paralysis.
Our goal should be conversion of users. Once our numbers start growing, then things will pickup. Just imagine if we had office and adobe products here. How many people would be able to switch. I still use windows on my work computer as there is a single app holding me back.
The level of disillusion in the thread is insane. At no point in time is it a good idea to recommend Arch and it’s derivatives to Linux newbies. They will 100% wreck their install in the first two weeks. Even I, as a pretty experienced user had to wipe my arch install after failed update attempts, luckily I had a separate home partition. Anything else like fedora or tumbleweed will provide packages that are very up to date, but that are also tested. For example I don’t fear that updating my fedora install will completely brick the networking of my system like what happened to me on arch.
Ironically I wouldn’t recommend any Ubuntu derivatives as for some reason, every single time I’ve installed Ubuntu or one of its variants like PopOS they ended up messed up in some way or another, albeit never as critical as Arch did to me numerous times. Probably some kind of PPA issues that make the system weird because it’s always the fault of PPAs
Mint has worked consistently for me on the PC it’s installed on.
Second this. Am not a huge fan of ubuntu itself and I have had issues with other debian based distros (OMV for example) but mint has always been rock solid and stable on any of my machines. The ultimate beginners distro imo.
Honestly, as someone who ran Arch and its derivatives, no one should be running upstream Arch but the testers.
No amount of experience or expertise will save you from breaking it. It WILL break, and you’ll be mocked for that as well by “Arch elitists” who will then face the same issue.
That’s why Linux veterans are rarely using Arch. It’s good for its purpose, it’s very important both for downstream Arch and for the entire Linux community, but it is NOT the distro you should run on your PC.
Go Fedora. Go Debian. Go to the downstream distros if you’re strongly into Arch, take Garuda for example. Make your machine actually work.
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Some functionality (menus, networking) working not as expected, random glitches, bugs, instabilities…also, now coming from the experiences of others (wasn’t there at the time), one time even GRUB had an update that broke it on all systems with Arch, forcing many to halt updates. In my eyes, from personal experience and experiences of others, it got a reputation as a quite messy system.
Oh wow yeah I had forgotten about the grub update, the only way to not have a bricked computer was to be active in the arch communities because they didn’t remove the faulty package even though it was known to brick computers
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The GRUB update is why more Arch needs more testers lol. They do have separate repositories for testing, but none of the active testers had the relevant problematic configuration that caused that problem during the testing period, and then it shipped to stable. The package maintainer did configure the package to not include the breaking change that same day, but it doesn’t look like that was ever shipped for some reason.
Ubuntu or one of its variants
Even Mint? Seems to be the go-to recommendation for newbies.
Never was able to try mint, I only did once but the installer didn’t work for some reason, probably Nvidia related so I don’t blame mint for it.
Petulant counterpoint: SteamOS 3.0 is based on Arch and is a good newbie distro
I mean, I’m just one reference point, but here we go. I started with Kubuntu – I liked KDE, and Ubuntu is a stable, LTS distro. What could go wrong?
But my PC is Intel/Nvidia, so I’m constantly facing driver issues, and not to mention, snap is completely fucked. Ubuntu is supposed to be LTS but I’ve somehow still got 2-4 GB of updates every day or two. I’ve also got random bugs here and there and no real idea of how to troubleshoot them because the support is disparate or doesn’t address my specific issue.
Meanwhile, on my Chrultrabook, I decided to go with Arch, which of course presented its own set of issues. The archinstall script was straightforward, and debugging it was also fairly easy since the Arch wiki and forums were a trove of information. But debugging and tinkering, even when I accidentally bricked my laptop and had to do a clean slate (don’t ever interrupt pacman, I’ve learned!), has been a great learning experience. It’s made me feel like I actually understand a little more of what goes on under the hood. Ubuntu could do that as well, but it isn’t meant to be design.
Neither is good nor bad on its own, but different people enjoy different things. I didn’t think I would be the type to enjoy Arch, but it gave me valuable experience and a fun project (even if I did end up staying up until 3 or 4 AM on work nights). I’ve got EndeavourOS on my laptop now and still Kubuntu on my PC, but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just switch over. Arch/eOS being a rolling release feels nice too, as I’m doing all these updates on Ubuntu anyway, but I’m slightly more worried about fucking something up.
The install guide is not 50 pages-long, common!
the arch experience is weirdly weird honestly. arch is not hard to use, the wiki documentations are pretty extensive. but still there are people who dont even know how to use a wiki. what people needs to do is not learn how to use arch, but learn how to change their perspective on arch instead
I’m not completely up to speed with the core principles of Arch, but I think it revolves around KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!). Meaning that Arch doesn’t hold your hand with nice GUIs. Instead, it tries to make the command line interface as easy to understand and use as possible. So if you run into a problem, you’re more likely to understand how to fix it, or at least what the root cause is. Which is not a given when you’re used to distros with more abstraction like Ubuntu. Then again, this design concept is not for everyone.
I don’t think arch does much to make commandline easier to use it understand - instead I’d say it aims to teach you how to use it, because it might be easier than you realize, but importantly it tries to tell you why. Instead of just giving you the command to run, the wiki explains various details of software, and the manual installation process tells you which components you need without forcing a specific choice. As a result, hopefully after using arch you’ll know how your system works, how to tweak it, and how to fix issues - not necessarily by knowing how to fix each individual issue, but by understanding what parts of your system are responsible and where to look.
is the basic arch CLI commands any different from discord bots? it feels easier to use if you think its same as playing with a discord bot. using CLI isnt some kind of programming
is the basic arch CLI commands any different from discord bots? it feels easier to use if you think its same as playing with a discord bot. using CLI isnt some kind of programming
Thanks for the hearty chuckle, zoomer.
Bash and all other shell languages are programming languages. The terminal is just a REPL for a language primarily meant to be used as a REPL for managing your OS.
learning CLI commands is 10 times easier than HTML
If you’re mindlessly pasting commands, sure… but you have zero idea what your fucking with if you think bash is simpler than HTML.
In the context of maintaining an Arch distro you will absolutely need to understand that executing CLI commands is in fact programming.
hard disagree on this… while for people who don’t know it it might look like programming, it’s really not much different than editing config files (which people who don’t know it will assume is programming too).
Sure, the language used by bash can be used to write massive programs. But in 99% cases using the CLI is like using a gui with a button and a text field - type some text into the field and then click the button, letting whatever software you’re running take the content of the text field and do something with it.
way closer, in fact, to executing a discord bot command, than to actual programming as in software development (what i’d argue people think of when talking about programming)
They’re a liiittle harder but yeah basically
Admittedly, the installation for Arch Linux is not that difficult.
It’s the General Recommendations that become bullshit.
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I’ve heard about that, but I haven’t tried it myself.
Thanks for mentioning it.
What do you mean by “become bullshit”?
2 requirements for arch:
- Not fearful of CLI
- Able to RTFM.
- Willing to spend a whole day on your first install
that’s it. That’s also not MOST PC users. Just suggest popos or mint or that one “gaming” distro and let them enjoy it.
If they want to nerd out after they’re used to Linux they will learn the CLI. If they want to, they’ll find Arch or whatever DIY/rolling whatever distro.
I was not technically a newbie since I had previously used ubuntu in the distant past (as if ubuntu would truly prepare someone for a more advanced distro), and probably a few others I can’t remember, but I came back with EndeavourOS and I’m having a great time. I did have a few challenges though I am fairly tech savvy and I knew what I was getting into so I was definitely not a regular novice.
After a single serious oopsie that bricked my system but I was able to fix I’ve been running a very stable system. I’ve kept with it for nearly 2 years now on my initial install with practically no issues, at least none I wasn’t willing and able to solve. I troubleshot an issue I was having with a package installation the other day without finding any help online and that made me proud of myself.
I would have considered myself a decent power user on windows, and I feel like a sub average arch user, but hey I get to learn and improve more now.
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.
What are people doing that breaks their computers? I have used arch for like 15 years now and nothing ever goes wrong?
The closest would be on my desktop sometimes nvidia drivers are in a state that breaks display reinit on wake from sleep but my thinkpad is always fine.
Seriously who are you weird computer vandals going around and breaking everything all the time? What do you do?
I had my first ever “breakage” on Arch recently. Actually two just recently (both on an old Mac):
- the driver for my Broadcom hardware was broken for a day
- with the upgrade to kernel 6.13, the FaceTimeHD camera is not working
Neither issue seems to be present in the LTS kernel (which is 6.12). I have both a current and an LTS kernel installed. So rebooting to LTS had me up and running. If I did not have that, no WiFi would have been a bigger issue os the MacBook Air has not Ethernet. The lack of a camera would be no video meetings without the LTS kernel as well. The problem has existed for a few days.
So, I can no longer say that I have never had an issue on Arch. I can say they have been rare. I can say I had more issues with Ubuntu or Fedora in the past.
I can also say that the only breakage I have had was mitigated by having an LTS kernel to reboot into.
Fair, that’s defs breakage that would trip up a novice computer user.
I’ve been around enough to know that everyone ignores “have backups”. Although I think pacman can do rollbacks because it keeps a cache by default? I’ve never had to and I use snapshots so /shrug.
Still a novice computer user would probably not feel comfortable reading manual pages, and even an expert would be annoyed if this happened.
I tried to run linux on a mac once (work supplied) and it was very annoying compared to a think pad. I can’t remember specifically why, maybe the touchpad had low level drag scrolling I couldn’t overrule or something like that. How do you find it?
sometimes nvidia drivers are in a state that breaks display reinit on wake from sleep
That happens so often that I’ve just bound a hotkey in Hyprland to poke my monitors config (toggling VRR off and on again) in order to force a mode change and wake up the display.
Timeshift has turned my system breaking updates and tinkering into a non-issue. I just set up all my systems with it right off the bat. One snapshot per day, one weekly, and one monthly.
Since doing that, I’ve never had to toss a totally borked install.
I really need to set it up, not because I have issues but because having backups feels so nice.
I went from noob to arch about 3 months ago, and only had to reinstall twice after I broke things. Couldn’t figure out how to get my vpn and tail scale to play nicely together, even if I only used one at a time. After the 2nd attempt/reinstall I just gave up on tail scale, and haven’t had any show stopping bugs/issues since. Sure would be nice if rustdesk played nice with Wayland tho.
I didn’t realize archinstall existed until I had to reinstall, so I can see why a terminal based install from scratch might scare some people away.
tailscale works without issues on cachyos, i use it so i can ssh to my computer and have automation on my iphone to turn it on when using ssh apps like neoserver. (it drains battery if always on)
Yeah, tailscale also works fine on arch, by itself. But the problem was with tailscale AND a vpn being installed at the same time, even if only one was active/running. Almost certainly not an issue with arch or tailscale, the vpn was probably the problem.
sometimes nvidia drivers are in a state that breaks display reinit on wake from sleep
Hmm, got a question for you about that. What did that appear as for you? Just a black screen and nothing else if it went to sleep?
I had a recently installed app fuck something in my settings so my display is going to sleep after 10 minutes, and when I wake it up I get a normal appearing lock screen with a login. If I login, the screen goes black and all I can see is the mouse cursor. I think about 1 time in 10 it will have no issues and I get back to whatever I’m doing.
Yeah black screen with mouse cursor is the thing. If I check the logs it’ll complain about errors trying to get display foo. Can switch to a TTY session and kill shit and get display back if I restart X.
nfi why the mouse cursor still works.
Recent Python 3.13 update broke the ProtonVPN client
Is the protonVPN package maintained by the arch team? Or did you install it on your own?
If the latter you can’t rely in pacman to know about dependencies you never told it about or took steps to ensure were met.
It’s on the “extra” repo
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/proton-vpn-gtk-app/ doesn’t list a particular version of python in deps.
Seems like the proton team made a mistake /shrug. Not exactly a system breaking though, it’s a third party piece of software not being kept up to date.
just roll back till they maintain it. Normal enough procedure
Normal enough procedure for you and me, not for someone who’s learning Linux and has no idea what any of that means and needs proton VPN for work.
This is what people need to get through their heads, you’re an expert in the field, this comic applies https://xkcd.com/2501/
Almost a decade for me (on CachyOS currently) and I also have no idea how people are breaking their systems so much. In that decade, I think my system broke twice due to an update hiccup and both times were easy to fix.
I think people might be saying their system broke when a specific, non critical, application doesn’t work after an update based on an interaction here.
That does become more common if you start installing third party software and/or use less common/recommended tools. Personally I wouldn’t consider that breaking, but I guess to a casual person it might not be clear that rolling upgrade systems have this risk and the weirder your system gets the more familiar you should be with backups and rollbacks.
If that is the case, that’s a weird way to think. I mean, if I was using Windows and one app stopped working, I wouldn’t blame that on Windows, I would just assume an issue with that particular app being incompatible with an update. 🤷🏻♀️ At least, my definition of my system breaking is either it won’t boot at all, or it won’t boot into the DE. Even then, not booting could be a broken bootloader (not a broken system) which is usually straightforward to fix.
Yeah, I would say broken if it wont boot to a normal userspace. Like if you need to insert a recovery tool, or even just login as root and unfuck something before you can get your X/Wayland session up, or if applications start crashing because toolFoo has some critical bug.
But the last time that happened was on Debian when I tried to write a fstab file manually without reading the manual. Also this was the era of CD drives and no multi PC households. Learned a valuable lesson on the ride back from the library, printed documentation in hand haha.
He’s exaggerating, Arch has never broken the system with an update, but it has broken some components in the past. Most of the time you just rollback the package for a couple of days and you’re fine to update again, but you can’t expect a newbie in Linux to know that. For someone who’s already having to adapt and learn a lot of stuff just to get their daily use adding instability to the system is a recipe for disaster.
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 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”.
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
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.
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.
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.
Is there really enough of an epidemic of newbies being recommended Arch to warrant this amount of ire? All I ever hear is how Arch is the “hardcore” distro and beginners should all use Linux Mint.
I’m someone who has only ever poked around with Linux Mint on a thumb drive a few times to see what it’s like and thinking, “Yep. This is a working operating system.” and then going back to Windows because there was never any compelling reason to switch.
But I recently decided to have a dedicated PC with Linux on it and I chose CachyOS because I want to play games. (Yes, I know you can game on other distros.) And I’m… fine. I’m computer literate, I did my research, and I knew that using an Arch-based distros was “being thrown into the deep end.” But I followed the instructions, as well as some advice, and the setup completed without any issues.
I’m using my PC and things “just work.” Apparently I’m just an update away from everything collapsing into smoldering wreckage. If that happens, I’ll try to fix it, and maybe I’ll learn something in the process. If not, I’ll try to keep my files backed up so I can restore things. Or maybe I’ll decide that I hate it and try something else, but… so far so good.
If timeshift is not already installed, please do. Do a snapshot before you update and set the settings to auto delete / keep only a certain number (or do it manually) so you don’t fill your hard drive. I usually keep 1 monthly, 3 weekly and 3 dailies on a rolling basis
If you do the snapshot religiously then when an update breaks it you can just boot a liveUSB and restore (mint iso is a live USB and has it already installed).
You do of course then need to work out what broke and why once you’ve rolled back to the prior working state
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.
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.
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.
