That may be so, but installing Arch the way it is supposed to be installed is also the best way to completely turn someone new to the environment off Linux entirely IMO. Even after several days of...
If you are a new user you're shooting yourself in the foot by not installing Arch Linux the way it is meant to be installed
That may be so, but installing Arch the way it is supposed to be installed is also the best way to completely turn someone new to the environment off Linux entirely IMO. Even after several days of intense fiddling I still couldn’t get my multi-monitor, multi-keyboard+mouse setup working properly in Arch, despite the Arch Wiki and various help forums. Whereas everything worked right away using Manjaro.
and even then, you should learn how to compile the software yourself without relying on third party repos
Another surefire way to ensure nobody new adopts Linux.
You gain nothing from doing it any other way.
Disagree. Convenience, ease of use, and things “just working” without hours of frustrating troubleshooting is important to me (and many others). I value my time way more than the impossible ideal of perfect security and knowing all the minute intricacies of my software and OS.
I think recommending anything Arch or Arch-based is just a crime. It's not meant for new users. (I'd argue it's not good for anyone but that's another story)
Another surefire way to ensure nobody new adopts Linux.
I think recommending anything Arch or Arch-based is just a crime. It's not meant for new users. (I'd argue it's not good for anyone but that's another story)
I'm curious why you wouldn't recommend Arch? Generally I've thought it was fairly well regarded, though that could be my own bias (as I use it) so perhaps there's some stuff I'm overlooking
I'm curious why you wouldn't recommend Arch? Generally I've thought it was fairly well regarded, though that could be my own bias (as I use it) so perhaps there's some stuff I'm overlooking
If we're expecting people who are new to Linux to just use the commandline and follow a guide to just install the OS, then keep up with updates and when Arch breaks, fix it themselves then I think...
If we're expecting people who are new to Linux to just use the commandline and follow a guide to just install the OS, then keep up with updates and when Arch breaks, fix it themselves then I think we're doing something completely wrong.
I can see why a power user would want arch but I think the security issues and the maintenance aspect is just not something I can get onboard with.
I've always thought that if I can't recommend what I use to people who are new to Linux then I couldn't possibly hope for people to actually use Linux.
Those are all solid points - I wasn't really taking a user new to Linux into account, so that part was lost on me originally. I've been sticking with Arch for a while mostly because I like pacman...
Those are all solid points - I wasn't really taking a user new to Linux into account, so that part was lost on me originally. I've been sticking with Arch for a while mostly because I like pacman & makepkg, which aren't things a user new to Linux would likely consider at all.
Lately though I've been running Arch on top of Bedrock Linux which allows the user to have multiple 'strata', each the bare minimum install of a distribution, and use/run programs from all of them (for example, I'm currently using a Debian kernel with an Arch system with some software installed via dnf and portage) - so now I'm wondering if an install disk with some stable base distro with some bedrock-like functionality might be good for new users, for example maybe an install based on Ubuntu with a centOS/Fedora stratum for compatibility with enterprise software. At this point it's probably getting far to complex/hard to maintain, but I still think it could be interesting.
That... actually seems pretty cool! I'd heard about nix a while back but never looked too closely at it before, I'll have to take a look when I get a chance. Thanks for letting me know!
That... actually seems pretty cool! I'd heard about nix a while back but never looked too closely at it before, I'll have to take a look when I get a chance. Thanks for letting me know!
Not completely sure about security, but you should/need to update an Arch install fairly regularly to avoid potential conflicts and issues. I'm not too sure why or what causes them, though, I...
Not completely sure about security, but you should/need to update an Arch install fairly regularly to avoid potential conflicts and issues. I'm not too sure why or what causes them, though, I haven't run into any problems myself (yet)
LOL, I wouldn't go that far. Despite my not recommending it, I did actually enjoy my time tinkering with Arch, and I learned a lot about Linux by going through the installation process, even...
LOL, I wouldn't go that far. Despite my not recommending it, I did actually enjoy my time tinkering with Arch, and I learned a lot about Linux by going through the installation process, even though I ultimately abandoned it. I don't even use Manjaro anymore either though, and instead opted for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), since that allows me to remain in the Windows environment, which I am intimately familiar with, while still dipping my toes in the Linux world without much risk or aggravation. ;)
If/when I do finally get comfortable enough with Linux to take the plunge to it full-time, I will most likely go back to Manjaro though, since I had the best experience with it out of all the distros I tried. Antergos was in the running too though, since it also worked well out of the box (Mint too)... so it's a shame the project is shutting down. :(
I think you'd be much less frustrated if you didn't use anything Arch or Arch-based. It's really not meant to be stable and they make things much harder than they need to be. I would highly...
I think you'd be much less frustrated if you didn't use anything Arch or Arch-based. It's really not meant to be stable and they make things much harder than they need to be.
I would highly recommend Fedora for a stable and vanilla experience with great defaults but I think that's going off-topic.
Eh... I was only really ever truly frustrated with base Arch. Manjaro+KDE (and also i3) was great. It was just the right level of "frustration" for me, stable enough that I wasn't pulling my hair...
Eh... I was only really ever truly frustrated with base Arch. Manjaro+KDE (and also i3) was great. It was just the right level of "frustration" for me, stable enough that I wasn't pulling my hair out on a regular basis, while still providing a lot of cutting edge features, flexibility and customization, which is important to me.
The only reason I stopped using it was because I dislike dual-booting and I am not quite comfortable or familiar enough with Linux to switch to it full time. Plus as a very active PC gamer, Linux just isn't quite there yet for me, though it's getting closer with each passing day it seems. And WSL is a nice middle ground for me so I can play games without issues, and keep using my Windows power-user tools/software, all while also gradually getting more experience with Linux environments.
I've personally heard great problems with Manjaro's security and practices by the Arch community, they do some really stupid stuff. Fedora is both stable and adopts new technologies quite fast. I...
I've personally heard great problems with Manjaro's security and practices by the Arch community, they do some really stupid stuff.
Fedora is both stable and adopts new technologies quite fast. I would really recommend it over something Arch-based if you care at any point about stability.
Plus as a very active PC gamer, Linux just isn't quite there yet for me, though it's getting closer with each passing day it seems.
I'd be curious to see what doesn't work atm for you.
And WSL is a nice middle ground for me so I can keep using my Windows Power user tools/software while also gradually getting more experience with Linux environments.
A VM is much better at that since WSL is not actually Linux, that's why WSL2 is gonna be interresting. Also, most people would rather use a GUI over a CLI and you can't experience that or any of the GUI applications on Linux so I think it's slightly unfair.
(PS: can you mark my comment as off-topic so people don't have to see this conversation by default.)
I will chime in with my experience with linux gaming. My issues with linux gaming came from gsync. Apparently, last I checked, nvidia only supports gsync in a multi monitor setup if all monitors...
I will chime in with my experience with linux gaming. My issues with linux gaming came from gsync. Apparently, last I checked, nvidia only supports gsync in a multi monitor setup if all monitors are the exact same refresh rate. The only workaround I could find was to create 2 different x server instances so that the gsync monitor would be the only monitor in its x server. This is far too much work for me to deal with, and I'm not even sure if all the issues that would cause are solvable.
Nvidia in general is really bad. Out-of-tree proprietary drivers are just not meant to work on Linux. If you want me to expand on that, I can but I assume you already know.
Nvidia in general is really bad. Out-of-tree proprietary drivers are just not meant to work on Linux. If you want me to expand on that, I can but I assume you already know.
You actually can use some GUI applications with WSL using something like Xming. I haven't used it too extensively since there are hardly any GUI linux applications that I use that don't exist on...
You actually can use some GUI applications with WSL using something like Xming. I haven't used it too extensively since there are hardly any GUI linux applications that I use that don't exist on Windows, but it works really well for Remarkable, which I use when taking notes, writing documentation, etc. I was also able to get a the linux version of phpStorm to run a while back, but that's already cross-platform and Java-based, so no surprise there.
I suspect that the more complex and graphics-heavy the application is, the more likely you are to run into problems.
Without running through every instance of games that didn't work for me, I'll put it this way, my Steam library has almost 1000 games and the majority of the ones I tried didn't work in Linux....
I'd be curious to see what doesn't work atm for you.
Without running through every instance of games that didn't work for me, I'll put it this way, my Steam library has almost 1000 games and the majority of the ones I tried didn't work in Linux. This was about 8 months ago though, so I'm sure that has improved since then with the further development of Proton... but even many of the games that did work natively on Linux behaved rather weirdly and had major performance issues. E.g. in Rocket League, a lot of the maps had missing/broken textures and massive framerate issues, which isn't a problem on Windows. That's not Linux's fault, per se, as I'm sure Nvidia's drivers and the game devs poor implementation were the major causes of that, but it was still annoying to the point where I would much rather play it on Windows.
A VM is much better at that since WSL is not actually Linux
I have used VMs as well and am fully aware of the limitations of WSL. But WSL is still way more convenient and doesn't require segmenting my computer resources to operate. And yeah, I am excited for WSL 2.0 (and the new Windows Terminal) as well. :)
p.s. I will give Fedora a try if/when I give proper Linux another fair shake, especially since it was actually one of the distros I never actually tried. Thanks for the recommendation.
Did you install the Nvidia proprietary drivers or were you trying to use Nouveau? I've never heard this before. I'd look at https://www.protondb.com/ to see if your favourite games work. It's...
E.g. in Rocket League, a lot of the maps had missing/broken textures and massive framerate issues, which isn't a problem on Windows.
Did you install the Nvidia proprietary drivers or were you trying to use Nouveau? I've never heard this before. I'd look at https://www.protondb.com/ to see if your favourite games work. It's possible though that many of your games don't work because of Anticheat but EAC and BattlEye are now working with Valve on proton compatibility so that could change soon.
p.s. I will give Fedora a try if/when I give proper Linux another fair shake, especially since it was actually one of the distros I never actually tried. Thanks for the recommendation.
If you have any questions, feel free to PM, I can most likely help if there's anything.
Proprietary, since I read Nouveau is significantly worse in terms of performance and compatibility, especially when it comes to gaming. And yeah I don't doubt that given another year or two the...
Proprietary, since I read Nouveau is significantly worse in terms of performance and compatibility, especially when it comes to gaming. And yeah I don't doubt that given another year or two the vast majority of games will be working fine on Linux... but right now, there are still far too many "borked" games for me to switch over. Gaming is not the only factor though.
If you have any questions, feel free to PM, I can most likely help if there's anything.
Thanks for the offer, and will do if/when I make the switch. For now my plan is to wait for WSL 2.0 and give that a spin first, though.
Nouveau is that way out of neccessity really, Nvidia doesn't want to help us build open drivers which would actually work for us and instead just keep on chugging with their horrible drivers but...
Proprietary, since I read Nouveau is significantly worse in terms of performance and compatibility, especially when it comes to gaming.
Nouveau is that way out of neccessity really, Nvidia doesn't want to help us build open drivers which would actually work for us and instead just keep on chugging with their horrible drivers but yeah, that does result in nouveau being less capable.
but right now, there are still far too many "borked" games for me to switch over. Gaming is not the only factor though.
Some of those games have working versions with lutris.net but yeah, overtime it'll get better.
Unless you’re doing it for educational purposes, I don’t see the point in using a distribution that requires so much fixing. I want my car to run, not to stay in the garage while I tinker with it....
Unless you’re doing it for educational purposes, I don’t see the point in using a distribution that requires so much fixing. I want my car to run, not to stay in the garage while I tinker with it.
I tried Antergos many times and the installer was so buggy I wondered if reviewers were testing the same program. The simple act of clicking on stuff was an exercise in patience.
So now we have Manjaro with its promise of stable bleeding-edge. Let me just save everyone the trouble: they don’t deliver.
I’m back to compiling stuff on MX. The Arch way is for ricers, not people with actual tasks.
I got a bit salty, sorry about that. But every time I hear someone call an Arch distro “stable” I feel the urge to throw my head at a wall.
This is why using smaller projects can be a risk, in lieu of projects you know are going to be around for a while
Fingers crossed that Void lives forever.
That's sad, Antergos was my favorite distro. I used to use it back when it was called Cinnarch.
R.I.P.
I suppose Manjaro remains the best alternative at the moment.
I will use anarchylinux instead. It's an installer for arch.
That may be so, but installing Arch the way it is supposed to be installed is also the best way to completely turn someone new to the environment off Linux entirely IMO. Even after several days of intense fiddling I still couldn’t get my multi-monitor, multi-keyboard+mouse setup working properly in Arch, despite the Arch Wiki and various help forums. Whereas everything worked right away using Manjaro.
Another surefire way to ensure nobody new adopts Linux.
Disagree. Convenience, ease of use, and things “just working” without hours of frustrating troubleshooting is important to me (and many others). I value my time way more than the impossible ideal of perfect security and knowing all the minute intricacies of my software and OS.
I think recommending anything Arch or Arch-based is just a crime. It's not meant for new users. (I'd argue it's not good for anyone but that's another story)
I'm curious why you wouldn't recommend Arch? Generally I've thought it was fairly well regarded, though that could be my own bias (as I use it) so perhaps there's some stuff I'm overlooking
If we're expecting people who are new to Linux to just use the commandline and follow a guide to just install the OS, then keep up with updates and when Arch breaks, fix it themselves then I think we're doing something completely wrong.
I can see why a power user would want arch but I think the security issues and the maintenance aspect is just not something I can get onboard with.
I've always thought that if I can't recommend what I use to people who are new to Linux then I couldn't possibly hope for people to actually use Linux.
Those are all solid points - I wasn't really taking a user new to Linux into account, so that part was lost on me originally. I've been sticking with Arch for a while mostly because I like pacman & makepkg, which aren't things a user new to Linux would likely consider at all.
Lately though I've been running Arch on top of Bedrock Linux which allows the user to have multiple 'strata', each the bare minimum install of a distribution, and use/run programs from all of them (for example, I'm currently using a Debian kernel with an Arch system with some software installed via dnf and portage) - so now I'm wondering if an install disk with some stable base distro with some bedrock-like functionality might be good for new users, for example maybe an install based on Ubuntu with a centOS/Fedora stratum for compatibility with enterprise software. At this point it's probably getting far to complex/hard to maintain, but I still think it could be interesting.
That... actually seems pretty cool! I'd heard about nix a while back but never looked too closely at it before, I'll have to take a look when I get a chance. Thanks for letting me know!
I'm gonna hold my tongue on that one. Good luck.
What security issues and what maintenance aspects?
Not completely sure about security, but you should/need to update an Arch install fairly regularly to avoid potential conflicts and issues. I'm not too sure why or what causes them, though, I haven't run into any problems myself (yet)
LOL, I wouldn't go that far. Despite my not recommending it, I did actually enjoy my time tinkering with Arch, and I learned a lot about Linux by going through the installation process, even though I ultimately abandoned it. I don't even use Manjaro anymore either though, and instead opted for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), since that allows me to remain in the Windows environment, which I am intimately familiar with, while still dipping my toes in the Linux world without much risk or aggravation. ;)
If/when I do finally get comfortable enough with Linux to take the plunge to it full-time, I will most likely go back to Manjaro though, since I had the best experience with it out of all the distros I tried. Antergos was in the running too though, since it also worked well out of the box (Mint too)... so it's a shame the project is shutting down. :(
I think you'd be much less frustrated if you didn't use anything Arch or Arch-based. It's really not meant to be stable and they make things much harder than they need to be.
I would highly recommend Fedora for a stable and vanilla experience with great defaults but I think that's going off-topic.
Eh... I was only really ever truly frustrated with base Arch. Manjaro+KDE (and also i3) was great. It was just the right level of "frustration" for me, stable enough that I wasn't pulling my hair out on a regular basis, while still providing a lot of cutting edge features, flexibility and customization, which is important to me.
The only reason I stopped using it was because I dislike dual-booting and I am not quite comfortable or familiar enough with Linux to switch to it full time. Plus as a very active PC gamer, Linux just isn't quite there yet for me, though it's getting closer with each passing day it seems. And WSL is a nice middle ground for me so I can play games without issues, and keep using my Windows power-user tools/software, all while also gradually getting more experience with Linux environments.
I've personally heard great problems with Manjaro's security and practices by the Arch community, they do some really stupid stuff.
Fedora is both stable and adopts new technologies quite fast. I would really recommend it over something Arch-based if you care at any point about stability.
I'd be curious to see what doesn't work atm for you.
A VM is much better at that since WSL is not actually Linux, that's why WSL2 is gonna be interresting. Also, most people would rather use a GUI over a CLI and you can't experience that or any of the GUI applications on Linux so I think it's slightly unfair.
(PS: can you mark my comment as off-topic so people don't have to see this conversation by default.)
I will chime in with my experience with linux gaming. My issues with linux gaming came from gsync. Apparently, last I checked, nvidia only supports gsync in a multi monitor setup if all monitors are the exact same refresh rate. The only workaround I could find was to create 2 different x server instances so that the gsync monitor would be the only monitor in its x server. This is far too much work for me to deal with, and I'm not even sure if all the issues that would cause are solvable.
Nvidia in general is really bad. Out-of-tree proprietary drivers are just not meant to work on Linux. If you want me to expand on that, I can but I assume you already know.
You actually can use some GUI applications with WSL using something like Xming. I haven't used it too extensively since there are hardly any GUI linux applications that I use that don't exist on Windows, but it works really well for Remarkable, which I use when taking notes, writing documentation, etc. I was also able to get a the linux version of phpStorm to run a while back, but that's already cross-platform and Java-based, so no surprise there.
I suspect that the more complex and graphics-heavy the application is, the more likely you are to run into problems.
Without running through every instance of games that didn't work for me, I'll put it this way, my Steam library has almost 1000 games and the majority of the ones I tried didn't work in Linux. This was about 8 months ago though, so I'm sure that has improved since then with the further development of Proton... but even many of the games that did work natively on Linux behaved rather weirdly and had major performance issues. E.g. in Rocket League, a lot of the maps had missing/broken textures and massive framerate issues, which isn't a problem on Windows. That's not Linux's fault, per se, as I'm sure Nvidia's drivers and the game devs poor implementation were the major causes of that, but it was still annoying to the point where I would much rather play it on Windows.
I have used VMs as well and am fully aware of the limitations of WSL. But WSL is still way more convenient and doesn't require segmenting my computer resources to operate. And yeah, I am excited for WSL 2.0 (and the new Windows Terminal) as well. :)
p.s. I will give Fedora a try if/when I give proper Linux another fair shake, especially since it was actually one of the distros I never actually tried. Thanks for the recommendation.
Did you install the Nvidia proprietary drivers or were you trying to use Nouveau? I've never heard this before. I'd look at https://www.protondb.com/ to see if your favourite games work. It's possible though that many of your games don't work because of Anticheat but EAC and BattlEye are now working with Valve on proton compatibility so that could change soon.
If you have any questions, feel free to PM, I can most likely help if there's anything.
Proprietary, since I read Nouveau is significantly worse in terms of performance and compatibility, especially when it comes to gaming. And yeah I don't doubt that given another year or two the vast majority of games will be working fine on Linux... but right now, there are still far too many "borked" games for me to switch over. Gaming is not the only factor though.
Thanks for the offer, and will do if/when I make the switch. For now my plan is to wait for WSL 2.0 and give that a spin first, though.
Nouveau is that way out of neccessity really, Nvidia doesn't want to help us build open drivers which would actually work for us and instead just keep on chugging with their horrible drivers but yeah, that does result in nouveau being less capable.
Some of those games have working versions with lutris.net but yeah, overtime it'll get better.
I'd say Fedora would be.
Unless you’re doing it for educational purposes, I don’t see the point in using a distribution that requires so much fixing. I want my car to run, not to stay in the garage while I tinker with it.
I tried Antergos many times and the installer was so buggy I wondered if reviewers were testing the same program. The simple act of clicking on stuff was an exercise in patience.
So now we have Manjaro with its promise of stable bleeding-edge. Let me just save everyone the trouble: they don’t deliver.
I’m back to compiling stuff on MX. The Arch way is for ricers, not people with actual tasks.
I got a bit salty, sorry about that. But every time I hear someone call an Arch distro “stable” I feel the urge to throw my head at a wall.