(No provocation)
I see these reasons:
- newbie
- lazy (don’t wanna edit config files etc.)
- unique features (like assistant/toolbox, some optimizations like in cachyos)
- wanna check how different systems are set up (that’s rather distrohopping)
Personally, I used manjaro i3 when I was beigginer and wanted to see how tiling WM should be configured (check out ranger config, for example). But after some time, I don’t see reasons why not to just customize pure arch (same with debian and debian-based distros).
I am indeed lazy lol
I’ve been using bare Arch for a while but after five or so installs I couldn’t be bothered anymore and realized that EndeavourOS is basically doing exactly what I’m looking for.
So it’s mostly the installer.
I tried pure Arch. Installed it and then realized I have to set up everything myself and lost all motivation. Didn’t know about archinstall at that time. Found CachyOS and stuck with it. It runs perfectly and I see no reason to switch.
Manjaro is too logical in multiple ways.
Because the PC enables me do do my hobbies (gaming, 3d modelling and printing), the PC itself isn’t my hobby. If I spend more time tinkering with the OS than having the OS run the things I actually want to do, I’ll go do something else.
I think this is a common misconception about Arch, that it requires continuous tinkering. I see that word used so much, too, “tinkering”.
What I’ve been doing for the past decade is just install Arch, set things up the way I like, and then just keep everything up-to-date as I go. Of course, I install and uninstall things as I try new software, but the OS itself? Zero tinkering. I just use it.
Especially if you only game on it and stuff like that, then simple plain Arch is great. Lean system that just works. Install the things you want and enjoy.
I got two kids and way too many hobbies so I can relate to not wanting to fiddle with the OS. I run Arch on my two home desktop PCs, and my two work laptops. 🤷♂️ Zero maintenance.
Enjoy!
Why do people say to keep Arch healthy you must follow the mailing list for needed manual changes for some upgrades? It that a misconception?
That’s not a misconception, but with a slight modification. Stick around:
First of all, you can decide to do an upgrade at your own leisure. There’s no need to run it 10 times a day as some memes will have you believe. I upgrade probably once a week, but I feel like that’s a lot. If nothing is broken, no need to upgrade. Of course, I want to keep up with security updates and browser updates, so when those happen, I tend to upgrade too. So probably once every six weeks should be enough (keep up with the browser schedule).
Anyway, the modification I mentioned is that you don’t need to follow anything. The only thing you should to do is to check archlinux.org for any news items before you upgrade. It’s extremely rare that there are manual actions needed, and when there are, it’s even more seldom for a package that I personally have installed. I think maybe once or twice in a decade I’ve had to actually do anything, and it’s been minor. It always has the exact command or tells you exactly what to do. They never leave you on your own with these things.
A lot less maintenance than Windows back when I was running that, I’ll tell you that much.
Thanks for the response and the clarification.
I haven’t run Windows in 25 years and I no plans to. I’ve actually been using linux for my desktop all that time, including gentoo for several years. Personally, I think people should use whatever os they like and the more choices the better!
Definitely, fully agree. Gentoo I can imagine is more maintenance than Arch, even. At least a lot more waiting around. 😅 But maybe that’s a misconception, too!
But yeah, definitely use whatever you like. I just want to clear up the misconception that Arch is heavy on maintenance. It most definitely is not, unless you want it to be.
I originally switched to Gentoo when I got my first AMD64 workstation. Gentoo was the only distro with full support and optimization for a little while.
a lot more waiting around
For a big build I would kick it off at bed time :)
Ah, neat. I assume it had early support since you compile the packages yourself?
And tell me if you will: did it ever occur that a build had failed when you woke up? 😅 Or maybe builds didn’t really fail? How common was that?
As a lazy admin of my own computer, I agree… for the most part. Running Debian allows you to be super lazy, whereas Arch will punish you for that. One update screwed up my GRUB because I didn’t bother reading the news. Totally my fault, learned my lesson.
This means that running Arch comes with some responsibilities that a super lazy Debian admin can simply ignore. Just read the announcements before updating and you’re good. Ignore them at your own peril.
It wasn’t a total disaster though. Just needed to fix my stupid mistake with chroot, and the system was up and running in about half an hour. Debian admins don’t end up with situations like that by being lazy. You would need to be actively trying to break your system to have to pay a price like this.
Other than that, my system has been running smoothly with hardly any interference on my part. The joy of a rolling release…
Yeah, I mean, if I were to admin a fleet of computers or something like that, I would definitely not run Arch on those. 😅
LOL. Same.
Every now and then I find a comment where someone who clearly knows what they’re doing is deploying an Arch server in a work setting. Feeling confident with that decision takes something I don’t have. Maybe it’s experience, knowledge or something.
I believe there are docker images for Arch? But those probably have some form of reproducibility, I should hope. Since you can’t install specific versions of packages declaratively with pacman unless you have physical access to the actual package file, I would not use it for a server. Maybe coupled with Guix or something? I dunno.
Maybe they need an environment with very up-to-date packages, or something along that vein. 🤔
Docker would be the sensible approach.
Imagine if the new version of some package is only compatible with the old version of PHP, but now Arch is using the new one. The admin would have to keep the old version of PHP until the devs of that other package release an update. I recall reading something about pacman not supporting partial upgrades like that.
Exactly, partial upgrades are not supported. Always best to do a pacman -Syu to upgrade the entire system instead of just one package.
At least that’s the case for system packages. More isolated packages don’t need as much care or carry much risk of rendering a system unbootable or similar risks, but I say it’s like signaling your turn when driving even if no one is around — best to just make it a habit. 🙂
I see what you mean. But in order to reach the point where Arch is configured and my machine Just Works, I would have to learn how to install Arch, what packages I need, what are the ups and downs of the various packages for handling the same things, resolve any conflicts I accidentally created, and then I can get to installing the things I actually want. It’s a lot of work and time that isn’t going into something I consider fun.
Arch is great for people who want to build their OS to be precisely what they want it to be. I happen to not be one of those people.
I would have to learn […] what packages I need, what are the ups and downs of the various packages
I consider that important knowledge for just using and troubleshooting your system, and one of the great reasons to go through the installation process - knowing what you’re using and why means when you want to change the behavior of something or figure out why it broke, you’ll know what software to look for.
Not just something to do for fun, or to have precisely the right things, but so you understand what it is you truly do have. This isn’t to say your approach is invalid, but for me it’s a reason to recommend Arch for people who want to go through the learning process.
Arch elitists don’t want you to know this but you can just type archinstall and a text installer guide thingy will install the system for you based on what you tell it.
That said, you’re spot on on the last part. I love arch exactly because it is the easiest one to customize the way I want to but it’s not for everyone and not everyone should use it
Why Arch based distro then? Why not, say, Fedora? Debian. Popos.
The complicated parts of the setup are already done and I still get the benefits of a fast update schedule, without (mostly) having to worry about accidentally breaking something.
And you’re right about running another, less finicky distro. It’s why I’ve got Bazzite on the HTPC and the handheld. Because I want those to be zero finicky, as poking around in them is way more of a pain in the ass.
Opensuse tumbleweed would likely be a goos choice.
In my case - 90% of Linux issues eventually lead to an Arch Wiki article any way. Might as well give it a go, but I’m too lazy and too much a noob to try the real deal.
I started out with Ubuntu and went straight to Arch. I knew absolutely nothing. I followed the installation guide to a T, and it worked. I didn’t understand anything I did. Then I installed it again, in a new computer. I understood a lot more the second time.
You don’t need to know what you’re doing in order to succeed here. There’s a lot of handholding and learning as you go. 🙂
When I was younger, I’d be all over that stuff, and it’s great to hear people still do this.
Now? I’m too tired after fixing broken IT shit at work all day, man, I just want to get home, press the power button, watch some funny videos and play some games.
Garuda gives me that experience from the moment of installation to OS maintenance.
I hear that, and I feel that. I completely understand. I’m glad you’ve found something that works well. 😊
That’s exactly my experience. Now I understand most things I do, and I smile at this ‘installing Arch is difficult.’ No, it’s not. I can install it without any help from the wiki, by memory. As I understand what I’m doing and why. It’s not the difficult part. The difficult part is to make it yours.
I still can’t install from memory 😆, even if I understand every step now. The reason is quite simple for me: I install it so rarely because it’s so stable. I only ever install it on new hardware. Every computer I have has basically only seen a single Arch install. 👌
AUR, etc
I use CachyOS because I don’t feel like going through the hassle of installing drivers for my 1070ti. The kernel optimizations are nice, tho.
SO I CAN FEEL SUPREME!!!
And so I can configure EVERYTHING
But I dont use Arch right now.
Fedora has a nice “ecosystem” or more like unixsystem", too and its ready out of the box and has copr similar to aur which is integrated in the official dnf package manager and super-frequent updates including kernel ones AND last 1-2 kernels for backup… it seems much better than Arch, right off the bat thought.
Gentoo, on the other hand… yes okay maybe a decent PC required… but… it feels good
Using Garuda Linux.
I’m a lazy newb who enjoys QOL features and Gardua has a bunch of those. For instance - suggests which gaming apps to install during the initial set up, and comes with a “Garuda Toolbox” which helps take care of OS maintenance.
Same. Garuda has by far been the most “it just works” OS i’ve used.
I didn’t have time to set up arch manually as I wanted, after two/three hours I still didn’t have a desktop environment and needed a working PC in the afternoon. I tried both cachyos and endeavouros, they’re both good and they just work ™. If I were to format the PC another time I guess I could try again with arch Linux, always happy to learn new stuff.
Arch. When you can’t Gentoo, but are too proud to tell everyone directly.
ArtiX because I don’t want age verification systemd on my computer.
Last time I installed Arch I just told Codex to build an ISO with my favorite stuff, flashed the physical media, and started using it. Now that’s a one step setup
Do you have it detailed somewhere? A blog or something. Would be interesting to see what it looks like.
Nah, but it’s an sdcard with arm arch for raspberry pi. It runs wayland/gnome and has full fps to a little display I keep on my desk. I had Codex install various gnome shell plugins to give compiz-y window effects. I even had it set up zram (compressed ram) to optimize the machine. It’s so much easier than when I had to actually read the wiki and type into some keyboard with my meat sticks. Now I can just tell my computer to fix itself and it does. I’ve had it configure and manage kubernetes clusters before, that works great too. Run LLMs as full yolo root my guys
You can make your own image, read the Arch official manual
I’ve spent far too much of my life configuring computers. I want to do as little configuring as possible. Also, I’d heard that Cachy had custom kernel changes that made pretty much any game run better.
Games run phenomenally, not sure why I’d go try anything else. (Bazzite, mint, zorin did not work with my setup)
Same. I worked with Linux professionally for 15+ years but my main battle station runs Bazzite, and home server runs unraid. Pretty much as plug-and-play as you can get. Laptop however is on NixOS so that I can swap configs depending on usecase.
FWIW I tried catchyOS as a comparison to Bazzite and I prefer bazzite.
i used to use manjaro because i was scared of the text based installer for Arch. Also i liked the shade of green
I’ve installed arch manually a few times. The last time I did it I had issues with my nvidia gpu and plasma glitching out drawing weird lines on the screen. I got tired of trying to fix it and went back to windows for a while. Figured I’d try crunchyos to see if their setup resolved that and it did. And now that it’s installed there’s no reason to uninstall.
