As a developer and sysadmin, I welcome you.
Honestly I’m gonna go against what people usually say and say that Arch is better to start with than Ubuntu, as long as you’re not afraid of command line or editing txt files. Whether it’s Arch or Ubuntu, as a noob you’re going to be doing a lot of wiki reading and copying and pasting of commands.
Personally though, a big difference between the two I found is that after a couple of years of copying and pasting commands in Ubuntu, I still didn’t really understand anything about how Linux works behind the scenes. Whereas Arch had me feeling like I too could be a sysadmin, if I felt like it, within a week.
And maybe things are different these days with Ubuntu, it’s been a few years, but I find that Arch has a way more enthusiastic and helpful user base. And the Arch wiki is practically a bible. Whereas searching for problems and solutions in Ubuntu can feel a bit like searching for problems and solutions in Windows, where you’ll probably get copy pasted generic solutions or someone telling you to restart your PC.
Arch as a first distro is an interesting choice.
But likely fr better than my first distro, Slackware.
I had known about the Church of the Subgenius and then heard that there was a Linux distro based on that…
At the time, the wikis were not really up to the task…
These days I run Mint on my writing laptop, and unfortunately am back to Windows on my gaming rig.
But might swap back to Gaurda for gaming…
I feel like with the Arch distributions like EndeavourOS and CachyOS it’s a lot easier nowadays.
I agree with you for a hobby OS. Like if somebody wants to learn and knows generally how to back up what they don’t want to lose, Arch is invaluable! I’m currently enjoying EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop for how newb-friendly the community is.
If someone just wants a working machine that allows them to dabble if they’re feeling it, Mint is good for that. Not everyone’s gotta be a sysadmin right?
I personally feel like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great balance though.
It works, yet it rolls, and you can still mess around if you want. Although it’s sometimes frustrating when it does things differently than Arch or Ubuntu and the advice is scant… But I guess that’s it’s own learning experience!
I occasionally make a project out of learning things like compiling software, but it doesn’t demand too much maintenance when I just need to get stuff done.
I’ve been playing with Bazzite
Bazzite is so good, especially on the Steam Deck. I did run with Arch for awhile, but ended up switching back to Bazzite when I realized that all I ended up doing was recreating Bazzite in Arch. KDE 6 with all the gaming essentials pre-configured is just so nice.
Thata how i learnt. Arch + i3. Broke it a couple times, but learnt alot
Same. Time Shift was a god send in those first few months. But that was the only way I was going to learn…
I switched from Windows to Mint this week and I’m also that derpy dragon
Heh. I just went from a Chromebook to mint.
Honestly baffled by the basics. Currently youtubing how to mount a NFS share from (on?) my NAS.
Not 100% sure if there’s an easy-mode for this one but just a friendly reminder to copy fstab to
fstab.oldorfstab.backupso you can revert to it if something doesn’t go right. :)Thanks! When I get distracted common steps do go out of the window :)
Are you me?! Also just migrated to Mint, and I’m really impressed. Good level of polish, and stuff just works out of the box.
Currently still have it on dual boot, I’ll give it a week or two and I don’t need Windows in that time I’ll move it to my main M2 SSD and ditch M$
I tried it from a USB drive first and when I saw how easy it is I just took the leap and fully switched.
My biggest worry was gaming but even there was no problem at all
I was you six months ago.
Formated the W10 drive before christmas as I never spun it up anymore. Have fun in Linux!
I’m an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh… twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that’s what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.
Is nobara really more familiar territory than arch? I’d never heard of it before. Arch may not always hold your hand, but it’s extremely well documented.
Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it’s quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody’s hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.
I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu’s star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don’t have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday’s hiccup) Nobara was much closer to “it just works” out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.
So… actually (put on fedora hat) it’s a GREAT way to learn!
What I do NOT recommend though is distro hopping with your data and your daily life setup. Namely the safest to learn is main system is stable, easy to setup and fix, you’re comfortable with even if you are not “proud” to claim it on Lemmy BUT the weird stuff you do on the side, it’s on a dedicate harddrive (ideally not even partition, just so that you can even mess that up) and you go LinuxFromScratch of whatever rock your boat knowing your data is safe and if you fuck up you can still go on with your day.
This is great advice. Heed this advice, people.
Know what? I’ll add to it. In Windows a power user will often end up screwing around in the registry or system files or whatever to crowbar it into doing what they want it to do…
But if you’re opening a root shell or file-explorer screwing around outside your
/homefolder, digging around in/? On your daily use machine?STOP. ☠️
- FACT:
PeopleSystems have died and data has been irrecoverably lost by going into this cave. - There’s probably a much less dangerous way to accomplish whatever you’re trying to do!!
- You shouldn’t be poking around things and exploring a working system as ROOT! This is by design!
GO. NO. FURTHER!
These sorts of shenanigans are why you play around in virtual machines. :)
–Sincerely: Someone who manually deleted his writable in-use BTRFS snapshot when trying to free up space, thinking it was an orphan file that the system tools didn’t detect, rendering his system unbootable and unrecoverable, forcing a complete reinstall. (I found this is analogous to the infamously dangerous “rm -rf /” , or thinking you’re deleting an old Windows restore point but somehow wiping
C:\)If you don’t know what “3-2-1 backup” means. Now’s the time to look that up!
- FACT:
put on fedora hat
I see what you did there
I feel it sould be a Red Hat in this context
It’s actually how IT career ladder looks from right to left
Why hate on the sysadmin?
Hate? Where hate? I’m working as sysadmin
You put sysadmins below developers.
Keeping it working versus creating it in the first place.
Well duuuuh, how else will you admin a system with a dev developing the system to admin
Everyone is a bit lost at first… That’s the fiest step to becoming an expert.
Great that you’re trying to learn something new!
Imo being a nerdy Linux enthusiast is pretty cool :3
(I use Arch btw)
I have a coworker who went from windows only to “i want to try self host a bunch of stuff”
Ran into lots of learning curves and problems
Conclusion? “Linux sucks! Too difficult!”
Everything I selfhost was easily setup with a simple compose file and various env files for each resource. What the heck was he trying to setup? I haven’t used Windows in a long time, but I doubt they have anything as easy as a declarative file like compose.
Skill issue.
Technically difficult thing is technically difficult, let’s blame John Linux for not making a big red “host server” button.
Man. THANK YOU.
I’m all for welcoming and teaching everyone, but I’m getting real tired of all the “Linux will never catch on because grandma can’t instantly VM-passthrough her NVIDIA card and remote in with Wireguard” or “changing the wallpaper requires terminal-ninja skills” rhetoric.
Some common things could use simpler on-ramps but people act like mega-corpo
you're-too-dumb-let-us-do-it-for-you-ification is some kind of “good thing” for tech adoption , when the strategy is really to create dependent customers without a fundamental understanding of how anything works.
Oh well at least I know when something is over my head.
I’ll give him a week, I’ll give him 11 minutes
11 minutes to what?
Hyprland was the first time I had to look up what a window manager was XD
I got this
I need this as my desktop background lmao
Sadly, I did not know how to Screenshot that, but it definitely would be my background now if I would’ve managed it.
This pic goes so hard
Why didn’t you just screenshot with slurp /s
That doesn’t look quite right.
It’s pretty though
Indeed! I immediately had to take a picture 😂
Doesn’t look totally wrong, either. I mean… there are windows.
Ah, this is fine.
This is how I feel a lot of times. But I did at least have the sense to go for Endeavour rather than straight to Arch (and prior to that, Manjaro and Ubuntu).
