this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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I know you're making a joke but I was convinced recently to try out Arch. I'm running it right now. I was told it's a DIY distro for advanced users and you really have to know what you're doing, etc etc. I had the system up and running in 20 minutes, and about an hour to copy my backup to /home and configure a few things. I coped the various pacman commands to a text file to use as a cheat sheet until muscle memory kicked in.
..and that was it. What is so advanced about Arch? It's literally the same as every other distro. "pacman -Syu" is no different from "zypper dup" in Tumbleweed. I don't get the hype. I mean it's fine. I don't have any overwhelming desire to use something else at the moment because it's annoying to change distros. It's working and everything is fine. As I would expect it to be. But people talk about Arch like its something to be proud of? I guess the relentless "arch btw" attitude made me think it would be something special.
I guess the install is hard for some people? But you just create some partitions, install a boot loader, and then an automated system installs your DE. That's DIY? You want DIY go install NixOS or Void, or hell, go OG with Slackware. Arch is way overrated. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it's just Linux and it's no different from anything else. KDE is KDE no matter who packages it.
Arch is supposed to be used, it is a normal distribution. It is not hard, it is simple. That's its whole philosophy.
It is only difficult if you are new to Linux, because it doesn't hold your hands and has no opinion about a lot of things hence you must make many decisions yourself and configure everything like you need it. You have to know what you need and want.
The notion of a difficult distro for the sake of it is ridiculous. Who would ever want to use it? Arch is popular, because it is easy to use, but lets you configure the system to your desires for the most part.
Yeah I get that. I'm running it as we speak. I suppose my expectations were set more by the community than the distro itself. Arch users, by and large (and perhaps not you specifically), talk about Arch as if Jesus Christ himself built pacman. I didn't find it hard to install, but as you say I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I know exactly what I want. I got caught up the hype and the DIY aspect I suppose, and I was evangelized to pretty hard to try it. Maybe it's people new to Linux using fdisk for the first time thinking they did something cool? They talk about "getting through the install" like it's some rite of passage.
I think I probably still prefer Tumbleweed but I'm not going to bother changing again any time soon unless Arch gives me a reason to because it's not worth the hassle. Arch and Tumbleweed are pretty similar but I think Tumbleweed has a few extra touches that I appreciate.
Just to reiterate my position, I'm not saying anything is wrong with Arch but the hype is enormous and I'm not fully convinced it's deserved. Something like NixOS on the other hand is starting to gain a lot of buzz and I think that's warranted because it's so radically different it deserves to be talked about. So far Nix is my "learning in a VM" distro.
Isn’t Gentoo the one for that title?
Gentoo isn't hard either, but it assumes you need what it offers. If you don't actively want to recompile this and that package with a custom combination of features then it's wasted and its normal way of doing things seems cumbersome.
The Gentoo install isn't hard, it's very methodical. But it is a much more in-depth process than Arch, that's for sure. Granted these days Gentoo seems to only do Stage 3 installs which is half the system in a tarball anyway. The way people spoke about getting through the Arch install I was thinking it would be a step-by-step process like Gentoo is. It's really not.
10 years ago the installer dumped you out in the CLI and you had to run pacman -S kde (or whatever your desktop environment was), so that was much more of a "DIY but with good tools and the best wiki" kind of deal.
But yeah, agreed. These days it's pretty dang easy.
That's exactly how I installed it. The install media boots to cli. You partition your disks, install the boot loader, add a user, and then pacman does the rest. I didn't really find this all that "hands on". Sure it's not the same as clicking Next on an installer but none of it is very complicated at all. Don't get me wrong, as someone else replied, being needlessly difficult is stupid. But when people are saying "advanced users only, DIY, etc" I'm thinking like a Gentoo install or something. I was surprised how simple it was with all the hype and evangelizing that goes on around Arch. It's a good package manager, AUR seems interesting even if I don't really need it. But you must admit the hype is a bit overboard.
Oh, yeah, for sure. AUR stuff is a somewhat more hands-on, at least if you actually read/edit PKGBUILD files the way you're meant to, and it's not too hard to shoot yourself in the foot if you've never had the guard rails off before, but yeah, pacman makes stuff easy.
"Advanced users only" these days seems to generally just mean, "CLI is a hard requirement" and maybe "you have to edit config files and not use a GUI" or (heaven forbid) "you may need to actually read and follow instructions"
You are saying that the elitist reputation of Arch overblown. I agree. It is not that Arch it self is overrated though. Arch is awesome ( and not as “hard” as people make it out to be - we agree on that ).
My favourite distro right now is EndeavourOS and that is just easier to install Arch.
I guess I used a whole lot of words to say what you just did in just a few sentences. Thanks for summarizing my thoughts. Just out of curiosity though, why EndeavourOS? See this is also something that tripped me up. I see quite a few Arch spinoffs that all claim to be easier versions which naturally lead me to believe Arch itself was complicated. Which again is probably a community/communication problem and has nothing to do with the OS itself.
I run Arch as my daily but I installed Endeavour as my teen's first intro to Linux (and also because I couldn't be arsed manually installing Arch). I really liked Endeavour's Welcome screen thing. It has yay installed by dafault and you can run stuff like system update just from pressing a button on that Wecome UI. Which means my teen who is clueless about pacman and has no fucks to give for learning can run and install stuff just from clicking buttons.
As to whether it's better or worse than Manjaro (which is my usual go to for Arch based newbie distros), I'm not sure. I think Endeavour feels lighter on its feet than Manjaro but I haven't dine any benchmarks to say for sure. I do like pamac and have it installed on my system and I do think it's great for new folks or people who like a GUI. That said, you can still install EndeavourOS and plonk pamac on there too.
Ah, I see. That sounds like a completely fair scenario for using something a little more automated. Thanks for sharing.
Arch seems fine and I'll probably stay here for at least another few months, out of laziness if nothing else. If I'm not completely happy I'll probably end up back on Tumbleweed which is my usual daily, but I can't say I've had any problems that would drive me back immediately.
@polygon @valentino @turkalino it’s kinda funny. Arch is like 2 steps away from just being a normal distro. Which is why Endeavor and Steam OS work so well. Just add some functions to take care of things like mirrors or installing the AUR or whatever and it’s a perfectly noob friendly distro. People got indignant about Arch install being added but at the end of the day I’d bet that most arch users at this point have the same defaults
Well, most people installing Arch for the first time have no idea what a typical Linux install does under the hood. That makes it a worthwhile learning experience. The same commands you use during the setup you can later use to fix or change things. It basically forces you to become a somewhat proficient Linux user.
Which GPU are you using?
I spent a good 10-20 hours just trying to get it to boot to a largely error-free experience with SDDM and KDE. I set out to daily drive Hyprland and what a shit show that turned out for me on Nvidia GPU and Alder Lake CPU.
The basic gist is you have add nvidia, nvidia_uvm, nvidia_modeset and nvidia_drm to your mikinitcpio conf, regenerate your initramfs, then adding kernel boot parameters nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and i915.modeset=0 before it can even boot to a usable state. Apparently since 6.0, the igpu grabs the display and refuses to give it back. I don’t know how the fuck any “normal” user is going to figure out how to do all of that. Then I spent another evening trying to figure out how to get VAAPI working properly. There’s lots of outdated info in the wiki and not much else to go on, but I figured it out eventually.
BUT, having said this, I do recognise when you go Arch, you’re asking for all of these jank. And, for science, I wiped and tried out endeavouros, and it was surprisingly painless, mostly just worked out of the box (I didn’t check if it was nouveau but it might have been, I also didn’t check if VAAPI was working).
In the end after what seems like 400 wipes and reinstalls, I got it working just right. But it wasn’t painless and it certainly isn’t meant for the faint hearted.
Yes I know the fault largely lies with Nvidia and their shitty proprietary drivers, and so on. But the exact same machine worked just fine in W11, without a single jank or terminal command (not 100% true because I did run OOBE\BYPASSNRO to skip the online junk).
Moral of the lesson: go vanilla Arch if you are comfortable with figuring out shit on your own. Otherwise, stay the hell away and pick a starter distro like Fedora or Pop!_OS that is mostly jank-free.
obligatory I use Arch btw.
I think your experience is more to do with nvidia + Wayland than anything OS specific. Although I think other distros have done a lot of patching and coding around nvidia's incompetence to get Wayland to work better and I think Arch doesn't really do this sort of thing. Definitely seems like you unwittingly took on a project.
I also use nvidia but I have no desire to move to Wayland any time soon. X11 works just fine unless you get into esoteric setups like multiple monitors with different refresh rates. My first boot into KDE with Arch was completely broken and I thought "okay, here comes the hard part" until I realized it was defaulting to Wayland. Changed it to X11 in sddm and it's perfect. I use my ForceCompositionPipeline script on login and set kwin to force lowest latency and it's smooth as butter.
Wayland is the future but nvidia is definitely gatekeeping that future. I've got a 3080 in this machine that is going to last a pretty long time I suspect, but unless nvidia can manage to remove head from ass I see AMD in my future.
Same, my next GPU will likely be an AMD or Intel, been itching to give Intel my money for sometime. They need battlemage to just barely keep up with the same generation xx60ti and they’ve got my business.
Some people needs recent packages. This is the main point of Arch IMO.