12
votes
Friendly Linux Chat
I'm having some problems with a notebook I want to set up for a friend. And its the first time in a long time I'm not able to solve it just by myself. So I tried asking at #manjaro and #archlinux-newbies but I got no answer at all. It just seems that IRC changed a lot in the last 15 years. Or maybe my IRC manners are not up to date?
Anyway, do you know a place where there is a nice Linux-crowd? What are your favourite Places to get help? (besides the archwiki) ;-) I'm out of the loop for 10-15 years now because most places got pretty toxic.
Can I suggest that if your friend needs help, Arch Linux may not be for him? And Manjaro seems to be a much smaller community. I am usually able to get help really quickly on the Ubuntu and Debian IRC channels.
I know that Arch Linux has a forum that seems to get pretty good traffic. If you decide to go the Arch route maybe try there?
No, I need help setting it up for him. And as I'm most versed with arch, that's what I'm using to troubleshoot the problem.
And yes, you should not start your Linux expirience with Arch. But I'm managing a couple of notebooks for friends and family, all of them Arch and they never encountered any grave problems, so that's fine.
The problem with Arch is that even once it is set up, it will require knowledgeable upkeep. Arch and its derivatives are bleeding-edge rolling release distros. While a lot of work is put in to keeping them stable and not breaking systems with updates, things breaking is practically inevitability.
Unless you want to be his tech support for the life of the device, I would choose another OS. *buntu, Linux Mint, and Elementary OS are good places to look. I would go with LTS versions if available as well. These distros are designed to be easy to install, easy to configure, and easy to maintain. An LTS version means you usually get years of security updates without worrying about major new features or kernel versions causing problems with your existing setup.
That's not really true; you can get away with a cron job (or systemd daemon if you're wanting something more complex) to non-interactively run
pacman -Syuu -noconfirmevery night and things'll go just fine, unless you're doing something out of the ordinary enough to where you'd have the knowledge to configure it.Source: every non-mobile/wearable device I've got outside of a laptop dual-booting Haiku & Void Linux and a very old PC running Inferno run Arch, and I've had zero issues in a decade of doing the above on two of said devices.
You are absolutly right. It means support till end life for that devices. And i would advice other people the same way. But as these people i help need lifetime support anyway (there is no chance letting them upgrade even an ubuntu) and so they at least have an system thats always up to date, and if they need support i can use a system i know well and do not have to look up how to do stuff the ubuntu way. So for me, arch on their devices is actually easier to maintain.
Besides that, i think the instability of arch is a myth for a while now. There is a box running it for 2 years now and i never had to fix something. Look at archlinux.org, the last message was a year ago. But I remeber it was very different only some years ago.
While I agree with you that most new Linux users should probably spend some time on Mint or some *buntu or other before moving on to other distros if they so choose, I've got to disagree about Arch breaking inevitably. I've run Arch almost constantly on various mainstream consumer hardware for the last 3 years, and the only times that
sudo pacman -Syuhasn't been enough to keep a simple desktop setup running perfectly were when I did something non-standard that I knew would likely break things.Whenever I get KDE updates through
pacman -Syu, Plasma gets buggy until I reboot. One of the bugs I consistently encounter is the reboot/power buttons in the launcher stop working. This would leave any typical user with no way to safely shutdown or reboot their computer. Of course a simpleshutdown -r nowfixes everything, but once you need to use a terminal you've lost 95% of your users.yes I know, I tried Manjaro afer I could not get any help on Arch-IRC. But the response on #manjaro was the same.... none :-/
And yes I know the arch way. For quiet some time now. As i said, its the first time in a longe while I need some help, b.c. I can't figuer it out on my own (which is something I learned b.c. the arch community is not a friendliy one)
My problem is that the wifi of the "HP 15 Notebook Energy Saver" is not working. The chip is mostly a Broadcom BCM43142 or some utilities give back BCM4365?!? I tried different distros, now even Ubuntu. I tried installing the propiary drivers (broadcom-wl and broadcom-wl-dkms) I tried ndiswrapper, I configured wifi by hand, I used network manager, I tried netctl... I learned a lot about kernel modules and drivers, I learned a lot about Wifi and how it works. I googled my head off, but still the wifi connection breaks after some data is sent and it ask for the wifipw again and again and again.
So a forum is not really helpful as it takes ages to get back and forth, and I'm looking for somebody very well versed with some time who might be able to help me through chat. IRC is where I used to find people like that, but that seems to be in the past.
I'm about 98% sure that this is a permissions bug in KDE; write your own
wpa_supplicantand have your system check to see if it's running every X minutes, or alternatively use a different desktop environment.I actually tried that too. didn't work. but I found a workaround. It seems that the chip/driver did not like our wifi setup, with a 2,5GHZ a 5Ghz and a Repeater all with the same issid. When only one was running it worked fine.
There's not a single way a
wpa_supplicantcould ask for your password.This is true, it just did not work :-D
What issue are you having?
I guess I might as well link to some relevant tough love about seeking help on IRC and the like for these kinds of things.
Thats kind of what I'm looking for. And I'm not directly looking for a solution, but a friendly place I can drop by and ask some questions and where I might make some friends on the way. #arch and #manjaro do not feel like that kind of community.
Thank you very much, this seems nice and might be something i'm looking for. I will check it out tomorrow. To late today to start using discord :-)