15 minutes from booting the ISO to a Plasma installation is probably average. There are probably people who’ve done speed runs in 5 minutes. archinstall has gotten so good.
Ex arch btw user here. I noped out and wiped after thinking I had it all nailed down, then I tried to connect my Bluetooth headphones and I came to a grand awakening. I am too old for this shit.
I mean… I would consider anywhere that you might download software from sensitive. This isn’t really a smart move. And sure, the mirror’s page they link to uses https, but if the regular site doesn’t a man-in-the-middle could change the url and serve an official looking malicious version… I wouldn’t consider putting your users at an elevated risk when it’s relatively easy to set up TLS “a smart move”.
If it hasn’t I would just assume that Slackware isn’t a big enough target and that anybody in the position to man-in-the-middle a large number of people would have better targets. I mean, to be clear TLS is not a silver bullet either, but it goes a long way for ensuring the integrity of the data you receive over the internet in addition to hiding the contents.
Distros usually sign their ISOs with PGP as well (Slackware does this), so it’s a good idea to verify those signatures as it’s a second channel that you can use to double check the validity of the ISO (but I’m not sure many people actually do this). Of course, anybody can make PGP keys so you have to find out which key is actually supposed to be signing the iso, otherwise an attacker can just make a bogus key and tell you that that’s the Slackware signing key (on the official website too, because it doesn’t use tls!). The web of trust arguably helps some (though this can be faked as well unless you actually participate in key signing parties or something), and you can hope that the Slackware public key is mirrored in several places that you trust so you can compare them… but at the end of the day for most people all trust in the distribution comes from the domain name, and if you don’t have TLS certificates you’re kind of setting up a weak foundation of trust… Maybe it will be fine because you’re not a big enough target for somebody to bother, but in this day and age it’s pretty much trivial to set up TLS certificates and that gets you a far better foundation… why take the risk? Why is it smart to unnecessarily expose your users to more risk than necessary?
I just installed Nextcloud on Arch and the official packages caused the most headaches I ever had within my 3 years of arch. In contrast I installed the official Jellyfin and Prometheus Server packages and they ran OOTB.
I ended up with not using the official packages but extracting the tar.bz2 into /var/www/nextcloud and slightly modifying the nginx config from their site. I had to move the inclusion of the MIME-Types file to a different block for nextcloud to deliver its CSS, SVGs and images. It wasn’t exactly straight-forward too considering permissions. I found it a beast compared to many other server software.
Its probably just one package. I guess for example pacman -S plasma-desktop plasma-meta flatpak fish plasma-wayland-session sddm sddm-kcm && systemctl enable --now sddm does the trick.
Archinstall with the entire plasma desktop is probably also nice, or just EndeavorOS which will be preconfigured
I actually did the whole KDE shebang with archinstall. I never really expected that Arch btw deigned it too opinionated to just provide an audio and Bluetooth interface. Instead I have to choose between pulse audio and pipewire and bluez and a bunch of others. I just didn’t have the patience nor time to look into what and why these options are presented, and this was after I already wasted days figuring how to get my pc to boot with my 12th gen Intel and Nvidia gpu combination.
Turns out there’s a bunch of kernel finagling you absolutely have to do first before it even decides to boot from the gpu and not the igpu. Oh well.
A Debian blend like SpiralLinux might be better for less technical people. Debian is one of my favorite distros but it’s pretty bare bones and requires some configuration to become an everday usage desktop.
I had a friend who wanted to try linux but insisted on arch because it’s what I used at the time even though I said they shouldn’t and gave many suggestions for better distros. They gave up after about a day and went back to windows. I don’t know what they expected, multiple people warned them not to use arch.
I’m switching from manjaro to endeavour atm, and i am liking endeavour a lot. I kept having issues with manjaro boot after every kernel update, but otherwise didnt mind it. Probably whatever manjaros build chain for boot is just wasn’t working with my hardware, but also the attitude on the forum is that you are stupid if you have to roll the kernel back.
Endeavour really just provides you arch with some maintenance utilities and otherwise lets you do your thing.
No more firefox home page getting constantly reset to the manajro home page so they can market you their laptop partnerships either 😉
I’ve been off windows for a long time, and when I was forced to use it, it was enterprise, locked down and stripped by knowledgeable IT teams.
Yesterday, I had my first exposure to Win 11 S mode. What a piece of crap. Not just the way its locked down, but the incessant Onedrive ads, broken settings app with missing features, AI buzzword addons, sloppy UI and general lack of control over your own computer.
Recommending my friend install Linux ASAP with my support. Nobody should have to endure that much cruft and garbage on their owned computer. They can’t even install software outside of the MS store? Gross.
Oh yeah no I was not at all saying windows was better, I was just saying arch was definitely not a good distribution for beginners and it was weird how one just insisted on using it. I use arch on my laptop and opensuse tumbleweed on my desktop and have not used windows for anything serious in years because it is so unbearable.
I understood you weren’t advocating for Windows (as an Arch user? The very idea!), but your mention of your friend returning to Windows got me thinking about my friends laptop and how icky it felt.
Glad there are fewer and fewer barriers to using Linux full time these days.
I love Arch but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. In my eyes, the only way one should choose Arch is despite all warnings against it, because they feel confident enough to deal with all the problems they encounter.
Honestly I’ve had so little trouble with arch compared to other things, so I would definitely recommend it to experienced linux users, just definitely not unexperienced users. The aur is amazing and rolling release means you don’t have to deal with the horrors of major updates breaking packages. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is also a great candidate though for people who don’t want to set as many things up themself, I’m currently using both arch and tumbleweed on different computers
Yup! Same here. Once I’ve got everything set up, it has been running smoothly and without any issues for more than 5 years in my case. It’s literally the most reliable system I’ve ever set up, but I understand that the entry hurdle is pretty high.
My IT Bros said the same back when I had to choose W10 or Linux, they haven’t used arch and I had 0 Linux experience. I messed up every single step of the installation to a point where I knew from the problems I created what I did wrong. After many tries and a week later I had a working installation with dual boot. Never used windows and removed it a year later. It was rough but I learned how to recover from most errors a user can create.
If learning is the goal arch and arch-wiki is great.
I Arched for like 4 years or so, and now I NixOS. Got somewhat tired of modifying configs in 100500 places and eventually forgetting what exactly I’ve changed 😅
Nevertheless, I still think arch is great, and, as a side note, it does provide a good understanding of Linux on the upper-low level (not like LFS or even gentoo, but still very much viable).
About 3, idk what’s going on with my system, but sometimes after a big yay update, the kde login fails (something about the plasma environment failing to boot or idk I have not debugged it correctly yet), then after a reboot systemd-boot fails to load it and the efi entry dissapears. I’m forced to arch-chroot and reinstall the bootctl. After doing so, sometimes I have to do it again and other times it logs correctly.
Again, not debugged it correctly but it’s not like I did any kind of weird change to any config, just installed some flatpaks, some steam games, and lutris for League, which in the end is basically wine, and a yay update provoking this behaviour is pretty bad.
I’ve had this happen. I never did figure it out, personally. I distro hopped a bit and eventually ended up back on Arch and it didn’t happen again, so I guess it was a bugged install?
Yeah, I’ve taken the routine of logging into tty3 before kde to pipe the journal tal output into a file to debug only the error if it happens. Yeah I know I can fine tune then output to get only the last execution and so on and I have done it, but it was not that clear and this happened after a work day and I wanted to fuck off and chill so the next time it happens I’ll be more through.
I’ve personally encountered mentioned behavior with kde on both arch and kde neon, so I’m inclined to think it’s their f-up. As for sd-boot, I’m not sure: I’ve used it on arch for a short while only, and then just ditched bootloaders altogether for efistub
Yeah, it’s not that big of a deal for me, but damn if this would not be a deal breaker for a regular user, and I ensure you that a regular user would install league and steam or something of the sort xD
Like, I’m a software engineer and arch-chrooting once in a while to launch some commands is nbd, but a regular office worker that hardly runs some commands once in a while in terminals, copied from (safe) random places? Yeah good luck I bet they would just either distro hop or format and reinstall windows.
I could say inability to edit a config file is worth reevaluating of what is a failed piece of garbage here… But it won’t be fair. If you don’t want to deal with configs, go ahead and use chromeos or something :P
I’ve kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.
Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.
I often use Arch in a container, when I need a fhs distro. EndeavourOS is great for desktop use if you don’t want to go through the Arch install process.
DeltaChat is an awesome messenger. It’s federated, quick and simple to use. Also, I didn’t realize DC was on the fediverse for so many years.
The first part is about the meme. Arch has it’s (dis-)advantages depending on the use case.
I wrote the second part because OP mentioned they’ve found the meme “at deltachat”, which is a email-based messenger I use. It’s a topic adjacent to linux as it’s open source software with linux support.
Trying to install a lot of shit, primarily. I figured out that a lot of programs that I wanted were only available (to my knowledge) in .deb format which I couldn't get working in the distro, That and I'm still not used to using the terminal to install anything. Literally the only thing I miss from Windows is using wizards to install things. I understand a lot of this is purely skill issue though.
I found installing pamac and the enabling the arch user repository gives you most things that are debs, that of course involves using the cli to install pamac though
But installing via terminal is so much more convenient compared to those stupid windows installer. Not to mention you don’t have to download all those stupid installers again each time you want to update, unless the devs provide their own update mention in the software itself.
It spits out all the packages with SEARCHTERM in its name or description. The packages are listed like “REPO/PACKAGE” , where REPO tells you if it’s from the official repos (core/extra/multilib) or from the AUR.
Then pick the number of the package from the list and that’s it.
If you want to update all your packages, even the AUR ones just enter yay and press enter on the follow-up questions. If you update with pacman -Syu then AUR packages won’t get updated.
Also Octopi is a nice frontend for yay and pacman. Not as fancy as Discover or Pamac but it does its job well.
Just using endeavour's bundled yay, you can install most packages including deb ones that users have written a "how to install" for. https://aur.chaotic.cx/ would also be nice.
People try to use Manjaro as Arch when it isn’t Arch. Manjaro has it’s own repositories that may not match Arch version. You install an AUR package that depends on an up to date Arch package to work and it fails.
Many distros do their own packaging on their repos, adding dependencies and custom-builds with custom configurations, and this often breaks my OS. On arch, this doesn’t happen to me. What’s your experience?
However you are right that Arch tries to stay as close as possible to the source. This is fondamentally different than the debian (and thus all debian-derived distros) way of packaging where they aim for a fully integrated OS at the expense of applying their own patches to many packages.
The patches can sometimes bring issues since they can bring unexpected behaviour if you come from Arch and sometimes will help the end user tremendously since they won’t have to configure every piece of software to work on their computer.
This is really two way of looking at the issue: Arch is make your own OS and Debian has a more hands off approach.
Custom configs is for people who might not want to tinker as much so maybe it’s not for you if you prefer Arch.
To answer the question you asked previously, yes I had issues with custom configs from Debian. One I remember is mupdf being launched by a bash script and thus not understanding why did I have two PIDs (one for bash, one for the mupdf binary) when starting.
For context this was important because I needed to know the PID of mupdf to send a SIGHUP to update the view.
My Ideapad Gaming 3 with a 3060 didn’t have Wifi working out of the box.
For awhile I had to install a kernel module everytime I updated Linux to get Wifi working. Thankfully I found what I needed on Github the day I got the laptop.
Ugh I had to get an obscure PCIe card working a few years back and it was a huge pain. I believe I ended up having to find the broadcom chipset by model because the generic brand driver didn’t support it, then the arch repos didn’t have the driver for the model, and there were several aur packs available that I had to try one by one. And it was kernel module loaded, so each was a reboot.
Absolute hell of a time, probably about 5 years ago.
I’ve got two Linux boxes that I got new, different, wifi cards for recently. Turns out both those cards have the same Intel AX200 chip which has had a variety of problems causing frequent dropouts that the community has slowly nutted out since I’ve had them, including requiring a kernel patch.
The two big ones are a faulty default power saving mode, and problems talking to a Wireless n router when in WiFi 5 mode.
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