I wouldn't recommend Arch to Linux beginners, though. It'll take quite a bit of tinkering to get to work and you have to develop a pretty detailed understanding of the whole thing. Which is absolutely fine, of course, if this is what you want to do. But if you just want something that works with minimal hassle, try Mint.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Yes, I find this obsession with Arch on Lemmy very weird. It's certainly not a distro for beginners. Ubuntu (let the hate flow), Mint, Fedora, and many others would be better choices.
If it is what you like, fair enough but I feel that it is encouraged around here as a default for both beginners and advanced users, which is bizarre. It's too complex for beginners and not optimisable enough for very advanced users. I don't hate it but I hate to see it become the standard.
From my personal experience Arch is several months ahead of other distros and depending on the package and sometimes has everything you need already included for gaming.
I believe this is due to the Steam Deck.
However for ease of use, I agree there are other better distros. Fedora is only 2ish months behind arch in terms of graphics drivers and Ubuntu… has the latest proton from steam and lutris since proton isn’t installed from the local app stores.
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I find Mint to be the most obvious choice for beginners who don’t use Lemmy.
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I used to use Arch Linux. It's really good, honestly, especially if you want to know how the OS components work from inside or make something custom. For anything else, I would recommend Debian and its non-snap-based derivatives (Linux Mint Debian Edition or Tuxedo OS, or KDE Neon).
I had to help a friend install the VMware kernel modules, since VMware is weird and VirtualBox sucks for virtualising Windows. I had to guide him through it step by step, making sure his commands were exact.
He's only started using the terminal properly. Hell no, I'm not going to recommend Arch to him.
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There is a certain kind of beginner I would recommend Arch to, those rare folks who really do learn best from the bottom up. Candidates must also see "computers" as a hobby, and have separate hardware from their daily driver they're installing/learning Linux on.
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Mint all the way
Endeavor OS solves most of those problems. Out of box experience is fantastic, and the installer is the best I've ever used.
That being said, I still wouldn't recommend it due to the Arch package maintainers willingness to break userspace.
You will do a system update and it will break something. Most recent for me was Python packages. I updated my system and suddenly pip stopped working because they decided to follow PEP-668 and force the user to install packages using pacman.
The rationale given was allowing the user to install packages outside of the distro's control can potentially break system tools like Fedora's DNF, which is python based.
Now, I've done this on Fedora, it's not fun. But you know what else? FEDORA DOESN'T EVEN ENABLE THIS FEATURE YOU FUCKING IMBECILES.
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I think it depends on what the said beginner is after. If they just want something that works then sure archlinux isn't the best option, but if they want learn more about linux then there's nothing wrong with installing arch. When I was new to linux, I found the beginners install guide on the archwiki to be very helpful and learnt a fair bit about how things work. I think you then have a good overview of how your system works and therefore have a better idea of what needs fixing when things break.
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especially if you have Nvidia
This is something that needs to be highlighted over and over again: Don't buy nvidia if there's ever a chance of running anything but Windows.
Mmh. If you like Machine Learning / AI / Stable Diffusion you're kinda screwed. Hope AMD ups their game regarding this.
IDK, I used to have a dedicated software for playing with CUDA. Most of the image-specific AI stuff from the internet require 8 GB of VRAM or more, though.
Nowadays, I don't feel the need for GPU-accelerated computing, though. If I needed, I would write Vulkan compute shaders for that thing.
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Not really though, more like if you need open source drivers. Nvidia cards with the proprietary driver work great on OSes like Illumos (solaris) or FreeBSD, Linux on X11 where no other card works properly.
I’m not sure I would say that Nvidia works “great”. I’ve had numerous issues over the years trying to get my laptop with an Nvidia card set up and working just right. I’d say it’s more like Nvidia “can” work in Linux.
I just bought a new laptop with AMD graphics, and so far the difference is night and day. It just works.
I would agree with this, I use Nvidia cards for professional work on Linux and I've never had a problem. Yeah there's some upfront work configuring the drivers, but I've never had it take more than an hour to setup.
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Arch is the one of the last things I'd recommend for an out of the box experience.
I'd recommend Fedora with Gnome if people are coming from iOS and KDE if people come from Windows.
It's also one of the last things I'd recommend to someone migrating from Windows to Linux lol it has a fairly high learning curve
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don't recommend manjaro. instead - vanilla arch or endeavour os
Noob question here. Why so many ppl is against Manjaro? As someone who just tried many distros , Manjaro was the one that just worked for me without errors, untill I was bored to try something else.
I think it's mostly do with the carelessness of the devs. They've let their certificates expire multiple times (and suggested their users put their clocks back as a workaround) and DDOSed the AUR a couple of times by accident. To be fair, I haven't heard of any foul ups in a long time so maybe they're being more careful now.
TLDR: poor project management & bad security and stability even though it specifically promotes itself as stable. Here's a video I think explains it pretty well https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5KNK3e9ScPo&pp=ygURbWFuamFybyBsaW51eCBiYWQ%3D
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I hope people will take my post with a grain of salt and do their own research anyway.
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Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton
And Heroic Games Launcher.
And Bottles
For picking a distro, I'd rather recommend https://distrochooser.de instead of just saying "Arch or derivative". IMO it should be in the sidebar. Opinions @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] ?
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I agree with most of your statements, though not with all of them.
I'd say use X11, only if you're on nvidia and you've got 1 monitor or monitors with the same resolution and refresh rates and are ok with having to disable the X11 compositor and having no animations while playing games... You also have to be ok with tearing while gaming too... It's a lot, and the next version of plasma, plasma 6 is supposed to fix all the jankiness with kde on wayland, as afaik GNOME on wayland is stable on nvidia, I'm on AMD so I can't confirm though...
EndeavorOS is great, though I'd also suggest trying out nobara (or fedora if you're not gaming... or recording).
I'm really surprised that you managed to get VR working at all, didn't know that worked at all on linux.
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Archinstall is included on the Arch installation ISO. Which makes it a bit easier to get into Arch Linux.
That sounds fantastic. Long term Linux user here. I hope you like the world of Linux and Free Software.
~~migrated [...] to Linux 10~~
~~I don't think there is a Linux 10. Arch has installer version numbers like 2023.09.01 After that~~ it's a 'rolling release' that means there are no version numbers, it changes continuously and is constantly updated.
Archlinux installation took me quite some time
That is correct. Arch Linux isn't recommended as a beginners distro. YMMV. If you managed to do it: Nice. You shouldn't have. But you're probably fine, now that it works and you've probably learned more in the process than lots of other people have in the first few weeks.
Music making
Make sure to also check out the free software for music making. "LMMS", "Ardour" and similar.
Gaming works out of the box with Steam
That's also my observation. Steam works fine. And Proton is awesome. Also, check out a few of the free games from your package repository. I like "0 A.D.", "Supertuxkart", "Super Tux Party", "Supertux", "Slingshot", "Mindustry", "Minetest", "Performous", "Sauerbraten", "Hedgewars", "X-Moto" Just to name a few. There are hundreds more.
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Does Archlinux take some time to set up but then is as easy to maintain as Manjaro or does the struggle never end?
Always wanted to try out Arch but feel intimidated by all the people telling me not to :P
In my experience, once you've got Arch set up, it less work to maintain than Manjaro. On Arch, you have noticeably more frequent, but smaller, package updates. On Manjaro, compatibility issues with the AUR may occur, which happened a few times for me, while that won't happen on Arch.
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I recently found an Android app on F-Droid called "Linux Command Library" and for the first time I'm not as intimidated to try Linux for my main driver/gaming rig. Previously, I had always fucked my installs up by facing an issue I wanted to fix, and using any info online to do so, even if I had no idea what the command was actually doing. Almost always I end up fucking everything up and needing to reinstall.
I've been saving posts and comments regarding Linux info for the last month on Lemmy and cannot wait to take the plunge and finally rid myself of Microsoft!
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I recommend ZorinOS for new-new people.
I settled on EndeavourOS.
NixOS is tempting me, but ultimately I don't believe it would be an improvement for me rn. All I do is yay from time to time to update my system. It just works.
Honorary mentions to Fedora and OpenSUSE, which I used, but they demanded more input from me. On EndeavourOS everything just works, so I enjoy it the most.
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Personally, Ardour > Bitwig. Couldn't ever figure out how to do anything in Bitwig. Very complicated an unintuitive.
Ardour is also unintuitive but 1) I did eventually figure it out and 2) it's at least free
I'm coming from Ableton Live, which I've used for a very long time and got used to, Bitwig turned out to be similar (I think I've seen that company was created with people from Ableton), so it works for me. But it's better to try everything first of course.
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Arch, KDE, Wayland, pipewire... Not the most easy for a first jump but lot of goods choices 👍
Wait until you find out that your BIOS and Firmware are also proprietary! Gotta get rid of those, but Coreboot/Heads is a real rabbithole and needs lots of work to be usable.
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