I don’t get the hate arch gets - it’s the perfect distro if you want to choose what programs you want to use, it’s not meant to be an out of the box experience. Been using it for 3 years, and sure it might take me a couple of hours to set up initially, but after that I don’t really have to do anything.
I fully agree that it’s bad for users who aren’t that tech-savvy, but I meant it in a more general sense - during my time on Lemmy I’ve seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a “good for nothing distro”, with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
It’s like arch except it doesn’t break all the time. And it has a great hardware and kernel utility, and still has access to the AUR. And I like pacman a lot better than apt.
From my experience (2 years Manjaro, 3 years Arch) it’s the other way round. Manjaro presented me with a terminal way to often after Nvidia updates. Never had that on Arch. Especially the Nvidia updates are very reliable. I don’t know what people do with their Arch installations. Mines rock-solid for the 3 years now. Possibly the most stable distro I ever used.
But I understand that you just can’t advise newbies to install Arch, even when archinstall is relatively easy to use. Maybe EndeavourOS which brings a lot of convenience features and a graphical installer to the table. A fellow linux newb is running it without problems for a year now.
I’ve been on Manjaro for about 10 years now, and these days (last few years) nvidia-dependency-conflicts-caused-by-eol-kernel is the only real issue you can run into unprompted. Even that kind of requires you to have at least a couple year old installation (for the kernel to go EOL), which means newbie shouldn’t ever be running into it. Not sure what Arch is doing these days, but when I was running it there was certain expectation of vigilance (reading Arch Linux News before updating) and readiness to fix issues caused by updates yourself. On Manjaro such major breaking updates are never sent to users on the stock stable branch, meaning you can practically run “pacman -Syu --noconfirm” willynilly.
I still wouldn’t recommend it as the first distro as it doesn’t hide the underlying complexity as well as something super mainstream like Ubuntu, but Arch/EndeavourOS is obviously much worse in that regard.
It’s been nearly 4 years since I last used Manjaro and I had that error quite often around ever ½-¼ a year in my 2 years of Manjaro. iirc to resolve it I had to uninstall the current nvidia driver > restart without driver > install supported kernel > install driver. Don’t know what I did wrong tho.
Manjaro did otherwise a good job to keep the sys together.
What bugged me a bit was the painfully long retention of the big KDE updates. At that time KDE was making big QOL leaps and quite a few distros had those updates already. But I could also live with that.
In the last month of my time with Manjaro a few Proton games dropped frames heavily and that’s the end of the story. Made the switch to Arch and never had probs with nvidia again, apart from when new Steam UI came out.
Manjaro can be a real pain depending on your hardware setup. They make a lot of choices that are difficult to work around when you need to (for better or worse) which kinda defeats the whole point of arch (to not be opinionated)
I have the same setup of packages on a few computers. 0 issues on one, plagued with boot issues on another. And unfortunately, the attitude of the devs and forum is that if you have boot issues its obviously your fault.
It was definitely a good first arch distro for me, but pacman, aur, and everything else work just as great on Endeavour and all my devices are far more stable than when they were on Manjaro.
I think even if you’re tech-savvy you can have issues with Arch tbh. I don’t think the distro is without merit — a minimal rolling release binary distribution is clearly something people want… But I’m not sure Arch does a great job of being that (for me, at least), and I’ve personally found pacman and the official packages to be kind of lacking (keyring update issue that they’ve maybe finally fixed, installing specific versions of packages / pinning specific versions / downgrading packages are either not supported or not well supported, immediately removing kernel modules on upgrade, even if the currently running kernel may need them, etc…). It just doesn’t feel very polished in my experience and for my use cases (clearly it works for some people!), and that’s what has driven me away from Arch personally. I think a lot of this stems from Arch’s philosophy of being aggressively minimal, which is maybe fair enough… but I don’t think it’s for everybody.
I’ve seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a “good for nothing distro”, with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
All distros have their little hate-clubs. Try being an Ubuntu user! Or Debian (“why are all the packages so old!”), or Fedora (“ew, Red Hat”), or Gentoo (“is that a laptop or a space heater?”) or…er, openSUSE (now I come to think of it, does anybody actually hate SUSE?). You get the idea, anyway. People get super weird and fanboyish about distros.
I don’t think arch has it any worse than the rest.
I have not used it for a long time but it’s really easy to fuck the install and potentially your entire system, depending on the fuckup(s).
As a matter of fact, that is exactly why I used it the first time : since it’s a nice lightweight distro and it has some interesting gotchas regarding installation, our sysadmin teacher had us all install it and set it up before we could actually use our distro of choice
It’s a great distro to learn a lot about Linux. I challenged myself to install it on my Surface Go 2, and make it usable as a tablet, as well as make it boot with secure boot and more. Now it’s happily running Arch with KDE, using the linux-surface kernel signed with my own secure boot key and a pacman hook that signs that kernel after every update. I learned all of this acompanied by a lot of fuckups and reinstalls, until I was able to fix things after breaking them instead of starting from scratch.
I think Arch kind of deserves the hate it gets. I love barebones distros and have been a gentoo user (now on NixOS), and I’ve used arch a fair bit too… I just don’t feel like Arch is a well maintained distribution. There’s all sorts of little things that they can’t seem to get right that other distros do, like that silly issue where they won’t update the arch keyring first, so if you haven’t updated in a while it breaks. In my experience there’s a million little paper cuts like this and I’ve just been kind of unimpressed. If it works for you that’s great! I’ve just been disappointed with it. I get the niche that it fills as the binary “from scratch” rolling release distro, but I think the experience with it is a little rough. I’ve found gentoo more user friendly, which probably sounds bizarre if you haven’t used gentoo, but ignoring compiling stuff, gentoo does an excellent job of not breaking things on updates, and it’s much easier to pin and install specific versions of packages and stuff.
@Chobbes
Looks like you haven't been using Arch for quite some time now. That used to be the case, nowdays it's way better experience. I've been using Arch for about 11 yrs now and I can see that improvement is noticable. Still not THE BEST, but waaaay better.
This was still an issue maybe a year ago, but I think they fixed the keyring issue finally in the past few months. This is not my only complaint with arch, but it’s frustrating that something this simple went unresolved for so many years. I honestly don’t understand why people love pacman. Downgrading packages is a pain, and there’s no way to install and pin a specific version of a package. I guess they want to keep it really minimal, but I find that this really gets in the way. All in all it was a death by a thousand papercuts for me! I won’t be going back to it. If other people like it that’s fine by me, I can understand the appeal, but I just find it frustrating personally.
Downgrading seemed really easy to me with the mentioned downgrade script. With the IgnorePkg option in pacman.conf it won’t get updated. I did it with nvidia drivers when Steam pushed their new UI and nvidia drivers weren’t ready for that.
What’s dissapointing about the fix? Does its job or not?
A Debian blend like SpiralLinux might be better for less technical people. Debian is one of my favorite distros but it’s pretty bare bones and requires some configuration to become an everday usage desktop.
Many distros do their own packaging on their repos, adding dependencies and custom-builds with custom configurations, and this often breaks my OS. On arch, this doesn’t happen to me. What’s your experience?
However you are right that Arch tries to stay as close as possible to the source. This is fondamentally different than the debian (and thus all debian-derived distros) way of packaging where they aim for a fully integrated OS at the expense of applying their own patches to many packages.
The patches can sometimes bring issues since they can bring unexpected behaviour if you come from Arch and sometimes will help the end user tremendously since they won’t have to configure every piece of software to work on their computer.
This is really two way of looking at the issue: Arch is make your own OS and Debian has a more hands off approach.
Custom configs is for people who might not want to tinker as much so maybe it’s not for you if you prefer Arch.
To answer the question you asked previously, yes I had issues with custom configs from Debian. One I remember is mupdf being launched by a bash script and thus not understanding why did I have two PIDs (one for bash, one for the mupdf binary) when starting.
For context this was important because I needed to know the PID of mupdf to send a SIGHUP to update the view.
Arch is great, but I’m too lazy to learn how to set it up. Once it’s running I think Arch is amazing. I just use Garuda Linux and love it. The Arch wiki is an amazing ressource.
My first ever distro was EndeavourOS. I installed it when I was 13 or 14 years old because someone on reddit said it’s customizable. I never felt like I need to switch to anything else.
A lot of new users are coming to Linux not because they like tinkering with their setup but because they are tired of Microsoft tinkering with their setup. For these people Arch will probably never be the answer. That’s ok, we should encourage all Linux adoption and the best way to do that is to start with the simple and familiar.
I mean, who doesn’t love to have candy crush and facebook automatically bundled with their OS? I mean, I had a fantastic two years waiting for the never combine taskbar feature to be released. The never-ending prompt to make edge my default browser is also utterly refreshing. m$ is so ahead of the game, they even anticipated my needs by shoving onedrive prompts in my control panel. How about that Office 365? Have you tried it yet? No? Well you’re missing out my man, in case you change your mind I’m going to put it right there in the front page of settings so you’ll never miss it.
I switched a few weeks ago, it was because my computer is slower than a toaster and windows was tanking it down even more I installed xubuntu, well I must say it’s ok, after I finished setting stuff up I realised I should’ve just gone for debian with xfce (I tried to install kubuntu-deskop on my xubuntu installation just to try how would kde run on my pc, it ran as well as windows did, but was just a tiny tiny bit faster, the way I installed it was probably bad and it could’ve been the way I installed it tho)
And yeah, I definitely love tinkering with stuff so this wasthe obvious choice
heres the thing: as a decade+ software dev, I never want to even think about my distro.
I just want Linux terminal style commands, and Linux style ssh shit to just work in the most middle of the road way as possible. I’m trying to get a job done, not build a personality.
I used Arch for AUR, but with flatpak getting more popular these last few years even the more niche stuff I had to rely on AUR for got a flatpak. So I’ve been trying out immutable distros like Fedora Kinoite.
I interpreted “middle of the road” as doing nothing special, just normal tasks done a normal way and therefore hoping everything just works so you can focus on work
I only ever have Mac stuff from employers, but it is nice hardware and linux-like enough for me to be happy.
Probably also helps Mac that every windows machines provided by an employer is some random HP buttbook that looks and preforms like it could be from 2021 or 2012, who knows
Moved from Fedora > Arch > Manjaro > Fedora > Debian. I consider Arch for learning purposes. For troubleshooting / recoveries , that knowledge will be a great help.
Ex arch btw user here. I noped out and wiped after thinking I had it all nailed down, then I tried to connect my Bluetooth headphones and I came to a grand awakening. I am too old for this shit.
I mean… I would consider anywhere that you might download software from sensitive. This isn’t really a smart move. And sure, the mirror’s page they link to uses https, but if the regular site doesn’t a man-in-the-middle could change the url and serve an official looking malicious version… I wouldn’t consider putting your users at an elevated risk when it’s relatively easy to set up TLS “a smart move”.
If it hasn’t I would just assume that Slackware isn’t a big enough target and that anybody in the position to man-in-the-middle a large number of people would have better targets. I mean, to be clear TLS is not a silver bullet either, but it goes a long way for ensuring the integrity of the data you receive over the internet in addition to hiding the contents.
Distros usually sign their ISOs with PGP as well (Slackware does this), so it’s a good idea to verify those signatures as it’s a second channel that you can use to double check the validity of the ISO (but I’m not sure many people actually do this). Of course, anybody can make PGP keys so you have to find out which key is actually supposed to be signing the iso, otherwise an attacker can just make a bogus key and tell you that that’s the Slackware signing key (on the official website too, because it doesn’t use tls!). The web of trust arguably helps some (though this can be faked as well unless you actually participate in key signing parties or something), and you can hope that the Slackware public key is mirrored in several places that you trust so you can compare them… but at the end of the day for most people all trust in the distribution comes from the domain name, and if you don’t have TLS certificates you’re kind of setting up a weak foundation of trust… Maybe it will be fine because you’re not a big enough target for somebody to bother, but in this day and age it’s pretty much trivial to set up TLS certificates and that gets you a far better foundation… why take the risk? Why is it smart to unnecessarily expose your users to more risk than necessary?
I just installed Nextcloud on Arch and the official packages caused the most headaches I ever had within my 3 years of arch. In contrast I installed the official Jellyfin and Prometheus Server packages and they ran OOTB.
I ended up with not using the official packages but extracting the tar.bz2 into /var/www/nextcloud and slightly modifying the nginx config from their site. I had to move the inclusion of the MIME-Types file to a different block for nextcloud to deliver its CSS, SVGs and images. It wasn’t exactly straight-forward too considering permissions. I found it a beast compared to many other server software.
Its probably just one package. I guess for example pacman -S plasma-desktop plasma-meta flatpak fish plasma-wayland-session sddm sddm-kcm && systemctl enable --now sddm does the trick.
Archinstall with the entire plasma desktop is probably also nice, or just EndeavorOS which will be preconfigured
I actually did the whole KDE shebang with archinstall. I never really expected that Arch btw deigned it too opinionated to just provide an audio and Bluetooth interface. Instead I have to choose between pulse audio and pipewire and bluez and a bunch of others. I just didn’t have the patience nor time to look into what and why these options are presented, and this was after I already wasted days figuring how to get my pc to boot with my 12th gen Intel and Nvidia gpu combination.
Turns out there’s a bunch of kernel finagling you absolutely have to do first before it even decides to boot from the gpu and not the igpu. Oh well.
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