I’m wondering why “I use Funtoo btw” didn’t become a meme, and arch did. Gentoo is objectively better at letting the user customise everything compared to arch
I’m pretty sure it’s because less people use it. They make fun of Gentoo taking longer to compile stuff on install/update, but that’s pretty fast nowadays. What really takes up time is making all the choices. I remember hours of selecting obscure kernel options and choosing use flags “what is ncurses? Do i need ncurses? What is sdl? Do i need sdl? …” I mostly use Ubuntu now, because I got no more time for that.
There are binary versions of heavy stuff at least. Although, yeah, it kinda becomes tedious once you get into more or less obscure options… Mine was compiling everything with musl (for some reason)
I honestly had no idea how to do use flags and just gave up on gentoo since a lot of things I wanted to install needed me to tinker with them somehow, but I might try again later on.
I’m kinda weird for this one. I started with arch a long time ago, and ended up distrohopping because I borked my install. Everything else had problems for me eventually, including Ubuntu and Debian. At this stage, if you can figure out iwctl you’re good to go. This enables me to have a system up and running quickly in which I feel I have no restrictions on my abilities as a developer.
archinstall will do proprietary drivers for you, works great for me.
Even I wasn’t cruel enough to banish my mother to arch. She uses fedora on her desktop (because she liked gnome) and Linux mint on her laptop because I wanted her to make sure she still wanted to switch after trying it for about a month.
She wanted to jump head first but it would have been a pain to go through four installs if she didn’t like it.
I finally tried out Linux Mint this year at work (we use Fedora for some of our different tasks). It arms like such a nice experience out of the box, and I’d put it on a family computer in a second.
Indeed, besides most linux distributions are fairly equally lightweight and can be customized. I tried 4-5 distros this past January (Arch being one) when I got my new gaming laptop and they all booted in ~9.5 sec for example, and perform equally well in general, they had fairly similar RAM load with the same desktop environment.
Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.
One problem here is that new users install Endeavour/Garuda but don't know how to manage updates safely about pacnew/pacsave/etc. So the system might slowly "rot" without them knowing about it because new components use old configs, etc..
I also recommend Mint to new users. I don't use Mint, nor do I use Arch.
Tbf I don’t think many people know about pacdiff. The way I found out about it was by looking up a warning about pacnew/pacsave during an upgrade, because I was bored. Very random.
As a Gentoo user currently vacationing in Arch-land I'm not sure whether to feel insulted or affirmed. Imean, it is but some might say that to disparage it or its users 😅
For me: Gentoo is a meta distro, you are the distro maintainer then the power user of that specific distro you created for yourself which can definitely be fun. Arch is more like: let’s give you one instance of a Gentoo distro when you are tired of being the distro maintainer.
As a seasoned distrohopper, can confirm. When I try something new, I always ask myself: Would a noob be ok with the fact that in this distro you have to do things this way. In Fedora, Debian, Manjaro and so many other I always end up saying “no” more than a few times. With Mint, you just don’t bump into these situations very often. IMO, Mint is the best starter distro for most users. If you know your friend is very technical, you can recommend something else.
Isn’t archwiki one of the most comprehended wikis for Linux distros out there? If anything, the arch-wiki (to me) has often too many answers for the same problem than the other way around.
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