Arch is aimed at people who know their shit so they can build their own distro based on how they imagine their distro to be. It is not a good distro for beginners and non power users, no matter how often you try to make your own repository, and how many GUI installers you make for it. There’s a good reason why there is no GUI installer in arch (aside from being able to load it into ram). That being that to use Arch, you need to have a basic understanding of the terminal. It is in no way hard to boot arch and type in archinstall. However, if you don’t even know how to do that, your experience in whatever distro, no matter how arch based it is or not, will only last until you have a dependency error or some utter and total Arch bullshit® happens on your system and you have to run to the forums because you don’t understand how a wiki works.

You want a bleeding edge distro? Use goddamn Opensuse Tumbleweed for all I care, it is on par with arch, and it has none of the arch stuff.

You have this one package that is only available on arch repos? Use goddamn flatpak and stop crying about flatpak being bloated, you probably don’t even know what bloat means if you can’t set up arch. And no, it dosent run worse. Those 0,0001 seconds don’t matter.

You really want arch so you can be cool? Read the goddamn 50 page install guide and set it up, then we’ll talk about those arch forks.

(Also, most arch forks that don’t use arch repos break the aur, so you don’t even have the one thing you want from arch)

  • purplemeowanon@lemmy.mlEnglish
    41·
    3 days ago

    it’s a good beginner distro because getting thrown into deep water is how one learns to swim. archinstall makes it easy enough to install. some configuration may be needed, but that’s the point of Arch as a learning process! still, i’d recommend Fedora, Tumbleweed, or even Debian (it’s out of date but some people prefer UIs that don’t change very often and it still offers 32-bit for your grandpa and his old laptop that’s now too slow for Windows 10/11) over Arch.

    Arch is good for beginner sysadmins/programmers/CS students. Fedora and Tumbleweed for enthusiasts who want the latest software but aren’t trying to be that hardcore. Debian for people who have old laptops and only want to learn GNOME/XFCE once and never have to re-learn it with every update.

    Gentoo is a good example of a distro that’s absolutely not for beginners. Arch, on the other hand, really isn’t all that bad.

    • zurohki@aussie.zoneEnglish
      131·
      3 days ago

      it’s a good beginner distro because getting thrown into deep water is how one learns to swim

      That’s… not how it works, for distros or for actual swimming. Usually when someone who can’t swim is thrown into deep water, they drown and/or reinstall Windows which is much the same thing.

      • purplemeowanon@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        19 hours ago

        I don’t think archinstall is drowning sysadmins/programmers/CS students. What it will do is teach them to swim.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 days ago

      it’s a good beginner distro because getting thrown into deep water is how one learns to swim.

      It’s exactly like getting thrown into the deep end, if you don’t know how to swim you’ll drown. No one learns to swim by getting thrown to the deep end, and you’re more likely to have a bad experience and be discouraged from trying it again.

      • purplemeowanon@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        19 hours ago

        For people who are beginners when it comes to computers in general, yeah. But for people who are new to GNU/Linux but experienced with CS/math, it’ll really not be that hard to run archinstall and configure from there. It’s not that different than many other distros, which also have an installer and then post-install configuration to contend with. I’d just argue arch has newer packages and better documentation which some beginners (in the sense they’re coming from macOS/Windows but know how basic software concepts) might appreciate.