this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Nice! I've been using pure Arch for like a decade, I've tried other distros but I haven't found anything that I like better than it.
I remember the struggles of overcoming the Windows indoctrination, it took a while, and caused a lot of frustration, but that was back when Linux was a lot less developed, back around 2005. Keep hacking at it and it will eventually become second nature. Don't slack on using man command or the help flags, they'll save you a bunch of time.
Setting static DNS servers should be as simple as using PiHole to hand out the DNS servers via DHCP and if you're setting a static IP for the Linux host then you could either just define it in /etc/resolv.conf or set it with systemd-named (I think that's what it's called, I forget, it's the systemd implementation.)
Once you get the hang of Linux, you'll realize that it's actually a lot easier to use than Windows.
Actually just last night I dipped into a vanilla Arch install on an old laptop. The wiki is pretty good, but I feel it skirts over some things that true beginners don't know. I misread a line when seeing my efi partitions, which caused a cascade of issues that took some fixing. Then it took me a while to get a numlock hook set, mainly because I was trying to build a package as root, which again led to other issues with access rights. And I finally got microcode added to my boot file, which took an embarrassingly long amount of time, because I didn't see the line that says I can't update efistub, I have to replace it to add options.
All of that said, the process has definitely forced me to learn a lot of things I didn't know, and I already feel a bit more comfortable rooting around the system with confidence I can fix my problems. I'm ready to install a DE, so I need to do a little reading on some of those. It's been already been quite a journey, and I know I've barely scratched the surface.
As someone who's seeing a lot of this for the first time, I think the toughest part is understanding the jargon. The tutorial will reference some file, or the kernel, or things in the bootloader and ramdisk, but without any prior knowledge of most of those, it's like reading a foreign language. Seeing the big picture of how things jive together so that the small things make sense is a rabbit hole of pages that are easy to get lost in.
Nice! Arch's wiki is pretty much the best of all the distros and it can be referenced for a lot of other distros since they usually only differ in package management.
Arch used to have a Beginners Guide which was the long form of the current Installation Guide, IDK why they removed it, maybe they felt it was redundant.
I love Arch, because, just as you said, it forces you to learn Linux and get comfortable with the inner workings of Linux instead of being like "Click a few buttons to get it installed, and now you have a GUI. Have fun." I had used Ubuntu for like a year or two before I found Arch, I had learned a bit by then (I jumped in head first and learned how to recompile the kernel within a few months of using Linux lol) but still didn't know much. Doing a few Arch installs and horribly breaking them taught me a lot. Also the installation was more complex about ten years ago, so there's that.
There's definitely a lot of jargon in the Linux world, and some of the things are archaic, but you'll get used to it eventually!