So, few days ago I asked the thread which distro they’d recommend and one of the most recommended was debian and debian based. But I for myself(Even though the post says otherwise) now chose to use an arch based distro, because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers as well as automatic hardware detection. So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself. I personally have gone for Manjaro now, kind of hoping that it won’t break on the attempt to cut themselves of the company side of Manjaro and becomming they’re own non-profit.
Greetings, Konke
I think everyone needs to stop positioning Arch as something complicated. It’s not. Every Linux distro has nasty moments, and you’re better equipped to deal with them when you understand what’s happening. Perhaps that’s difficult concept for a newcomer (the idea that you need to understand what you’re doing, at least to some degree). But apart from the will to learn, there’s nothing really difficult and complicated in there. I had so many weird little moments with Fedora (which I assume should just mostly work out of the box), that if I had no knowledge Arch helped me to gain, I don’t know what would I do. I’ve consider migrating home shared computer from Fedora to Arch, and not doing it simply because it’s still mostly works on its own, and the Arch magic for me is in the customisations I have made. Fedora gave me unbootable system more times (with me doing nothing! Just updating) than Arch with me tinkering with basically everything all the time, that I won’t even say Arch is some complex mess. Rather the opposite, I think. That’s why I think scaring the newcomers away may be the wrong thing. It’s not too difficult if you’ve arrived to this point already. All you need is to accept you would learn along the way, and Arch (and the community!) would help.
Re-read my post, and tell me where did I said Arch is complicated? My view is summarized in the last paragraph, and I can summarize it even more here “good, but not beginner friendly”. Arch expects you to know how to deal with it, it expects you to read the news, it expects you know how to downgrade a package and it expects you’re comfortable in a terminal. A newcomer is unlikely to even know about any of that, they already have to learn a lot of other things like package manager, learning what’s the name of each program and how they behave slightly different from what they’re used to, etc, they don’t need to learn about pacnew/pacsave files on top of all of that. If you’re already comfortable in Linux, yeah, Arch is amazing, but if you’re presented with a terminal not even knowing what KDE/Gnome are you’re going to have a bad time.
And that’s the thing, it’s not that it’s complicated, but it’s the unknowns unknowns that will get a new user, they don’t know they need a session manager, they don’t know they need a printer daemon, etc. And if you bypass that by using Manjaro/Cachy, you’re now in a position of using a distro that expects you to know about that but didn’t taught you about them.