I love arch but I actually haven’t used it since before they added the arch install. I can’t imagine how much easier it is cause it’s still the terminal. The “manual” install was easy as hell
It’s like a page worth of instructions you can follow verbatim excluding bootloader and network. If you watch one video of someone doing it to fill those gaps there is nothing to it.
Source: I watched Kai Hendry speed install arch, bookmarked the video and all my machines are now arch “from scratch” in 10 minutes or less of actual keyboard time.
I don’t remember the channel anymore, but there’s one guy constantly updating various setups. Like Arch with encryption, Arch with BTRFS, etc. I started with one of those videos and wrote my own step by step guide. Now I’m just following my own guide whenever I install Arch.
I think calling it “a page worth” is understating it somewhat, especially if you want a full install to actually use stuff. In reality, when installing at first, you’ll be finding stuff you missed for a while, like hardware video decoding.
Also, are you referring to just the direct instructions for one choice? Because to me, the point of installing manually is educating yourself on the choices, choosing one that suits you, and understanding what you’re doing to set it up. Of course, when you’re doing subsequent installs, you already know that stuff - but at that point you might just want to write an install script instead of running them manually.
I don’t use Arch but if I did id probably go with archinstall. I don’t see the point in going from scratch unless you absolutely need to. I could care less about bragging rights for installing an operating system lol.
I just don’t bother going for archinstall when regular installation “from scratch” takes 5 minutes (or 15, if you do it the first time). It is not scary and extremely simple, contrary to memes. Besides, it makes you understand the processes involved.
Archinstall is just a little, nice helper to shorten and simplify installation even more.
I tried so many distros in the last decade, but I recently had to start with a fresh setup again and I went with Linux Mint. I think it’s the most underestimated workhorse you can get. Everything just works, tons of help online if you need it and instead of tweaking it forever you just get work done.
I totally get that and I used to do the same. Maybe this community is different but on some online communities people kind of looked down on mint and pretended it was only a beginner distro.
NixOS is the new Arch… (cat, meet pigeons) Unfortunately It doesn’t have as much basic training as Arch did (which archinstall obviates, not that I think this is a bad thing, it’s time is here), which did so much to improve community. Unfortunately NixOS’s doco is woeful, while ArchWiki is gold standard.
I say this as an ex Arch type who moved to Fedora, now ublue-kinoite, waiting for Nix to mature enough to daily (although I do have a T440p with 3 boot drives not doing much, hmm)…
Yeah nah, arch has an actual use case for normal users - it’s just the same old Linux with the most recent packages.
Nix and guix simply don’t work as distros for regular people. They’re made for scientific and corporate applications. They add a huge amount of complexity in order to solve problems you don’t have.
Nixos is like rust: hyped into the stratosphere by people who don’t use it
I say this as an ex Arch type who moved to Fedora, now ublue-kinoite, waiting for Nix to mature enough to daily
I’m running guix in fedora as a PM. You get most of the benefits, and can still use other PM’s like npm without crying for a week first. Although imo guix works better in that scenario since you can just “guix install X” and then use X like any other binary.
Endeavour Os was the best thing I ever used. Easy to install, out of box is minimal but sufficient. I traded my Linux Mint to be able to customize my workflow, look and feel.
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