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.
Arch is several months ahead of other distros
Source for that? It's one of those weird, wild affirmations that go around regarding Arch. Ahead in terms of what? Integrating the most up-to-date kernel or something?
Is it because of the rolling release model? But it's not the only one to have rolling releases.
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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 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.
It's because it's bleeding edge, extremely well documented and extremely popular. Bleeding edge is exciting and you're gonna end up on the arch wiki anyway regardless of distro, so you may as well go to the source.
Do mind though it doesn't mean it's easy, like at all, and I fundamentally agree, there's a million better choices for first timers.
you're gonna end up on the arch wiki anyway regardless of distro, so you may as well go to the source.
Absolutely not. I've never used a distro that required me to check the forums or wiki of another distro.
it's bleeding edge
What now? I feel I have fallen asleep and just woke up at a marketing meeting at my job.
I've ended up on the arch wiki a few times on non-arch distros, it covers many generic Linux tools very well
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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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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
Yeah, something arch based is a really weird recommendation for beginners...
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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.
Yeah. Lots of frameworks are optimized for CUDA (Nvidia). ROCm (AMD) and Intel's efforts are a niche. Hence often cumbersome to set up and get all the performance out of it. Nvidia invests orders of magnitude more into AI. I believe they consider this to be the more profitable market in the future.
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 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.
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 @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml @nooter692@lemmy.ml @MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml ?
Dang! DistroChooser is neat. I hadn’t heard of it before and it recommended Arch for me, which I’m already using (btw)
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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.
I'm curious what you mean by "no animations while playing games"?
I like Wayland and use it on my laptop. But I also have Nvidia on my PC and while it's janky at places, I don't get all the problems you describe (at least on i3 for me)
I use multiple monitors with different refresh rates and don't really have any major issue. It syncs with the highest one. I indeed don't use a compositor because it's distracting and also turn off all the composition pipe line stuff. The result of turning off the latter is less latency and a teeny tiny bit of tearing in the lower 3rd when scrolling web pages but that's it.
Games can run utilize gsync when in-game vsync is enabled so long as you disable the second monitor with xrandr.
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Archinstall is included on the Arch installation ISO. Which makes it a bit easier to get into Arch Linux.
Arch, KDE, Wayland, pipewire... Not the most easy for a first jump but lot of goods choices 👍
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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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!
Try using virtual machines. You can do this entirely free. Install then take a snapshot. You can learn about the OS in a safety net. If you fuck up too badly, roll back to the snapshot and try again.
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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.
Gaming outside steam is fine too. Use Wine, Lutris, Proton
And Heroic Games Launcher.
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For gaming, I would add Heroic Games Launcher for Epic Games ang GoG titles. Otherwise a great summary. Welcome back to Linux! I made the switch a couple of years ago and have not had Windows installed on any of my computers since.
There are quite some comments and to clarify all misunderstanding regarding Arch vs something else or any other debates in this thread, I would like to add this comment.
I do not recommend Arch based distro over Debian based or anything else. Topic is about using Linux at its current state, I assume that most of distros will be more or less similar when it comes to statements of the post. In my case it was Archlinux distro, because I had prior experience and it's philosophy is appealing to me. Like rolling release, configure yourself, install only necessary for you things and etc.
I do not recommend to use Arch itself for a new user. I hope from the post it was clear, that new user should not care much about mentioned topics, like Pipewire vs Pulseaudio or Wayland VS X. One can use more high order distros or even different base, like Linux Mint. Which I also used long time ago and was quite happy about.
I do not say that KDE is better or worse than Gnome or whatever. For me it's just a preference, like possibility to have more control over UI and looks and to avoid some blockers, like DRM on Wayland. You can have them all on your machine, beauty of Linux.
And please do your own research on the topic and do take everything with grain of salt. There are a lots of great distros, desktop environments and other things. And there are tons of good and bad advices, navigating through which sometimes is not so easy.
And I would like to underline that there are not so many up to date objectivly better things when it comes to software, pick what you need and like.
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