Antergos: An Easy, Quick Way To Try Out Arch Linux

[FLHerne]

But the real problem is with 'nvidia'. The fact is you need to figure out what graphics driver you're going to use, and if you're not on Intel you have to figure out whether you want open source or proprietary drivers. Most people on this forum understand this decision, but it's something others would have to research.

I don't think that is a real problem (or at least not a major one) - I don't think anyone's expecting people with no Linux experience to go with Arch as their first step. I haven't encountered many people with reasonable experience (a year or two, say) who haven't picked up at least the basic choices to be made with drivers.

And in this case, it would install VESA and at least function until they did some basic research anyway.

[blackout23]

That's for an experienced user on a machine that is well known. Problems with your analysis:



Seems a bit of an oversimplication. What if you want btrfs? I had to read up on that before I used it recently. You seem to have brushed over swap partitions, the possibility of separating your home directory, that sort of thing.



Gnome is crap, but I'll leave that. I have nothing to back this up, but I think most people would go with grub over syslinux. But the real problem is with 'nvidia'. The fact is you need to figure out what graphics driver you're going to use, and if you're not on Intel you have to figure out whether you want open source or proprietary drivers. Most people on this forum understand this decision, but it's something others would have to research.



I've never used syslinux so I don't know how easy or difficult it is, but with grub there's a whole bunch of considerations that are a complete minefield. It's very easy to follow the wrong directions depending on whether you're doing the bios or uefi method. And if you're going uefi, you have to have already accounted for the fact that you needed to create a GPT partition thing when you did your partitioning (I forget what it was, type EO2 or something, some small 2mb partition at the start of the disk). I imagine this has caused a few 'scrap it and start again' moments when people got to this stage in the Arch install wiki.



You meant KDM, right? Oh yeah, Gnome. Gotcha. But NetworkManager sometimes isn't that simple, especially if you don't want to use dhcpcd. And networkd is probably a more forward-thinking choice for Arch users.

I love Arch, and I think more people should use it. But I disagree with your characterising it as easy to install. I've installed it many many times, and it's never that quick.

It is easy to install if you know what you want. I have used NetworkManager on basically every desktop so far with static ips, dhcp, encrypted wired connections, wifi. Worked every time. If you want some super dupper special setup with encryption and some super experimental file system some standardized GUI install won't get you far aswell. And yes syslinux is way more KISS and easier to install than GRUB. That's why it's the most used bootloader . https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=174790&p=7

But the real problem is with 'nvidia'. The fact is you need to figure out what graphics driver you're going to use, and if you're not on Intel you have to figure out whether you want open source or proprietary drivers.

Right that's super hard to figure out what to install when you have an NVIDIA card. Is it older than 7 years? No? Install the nvidia package. Done.

[halo9en]

Indeed, installing Arch from scratch takes a few hours (mostly RTFMing.)

The Arch installer won't even start on a couple of recent notebooks I have. I'd rather do more productive things with my time and let Antergos do the dirty work while I'm working.

[Akka]

The Arch installer won't even start on a couple of recent notebooks I have. I'd rather do more productive things with my time and let Antergos do the dirty work while I'm working.

You can install Arch from arbitrary linux dist or live medium.

[NothingMuchHereToSay]

"Arch Linux fans are frequently requesting more benchmarks of their preferred Linux distribution at Phoronix over claims that it's faster than the likes of Ubuntu, more versatile, etc."

Wow, how often does this happen? Because it should be painfully obvious that Arch doesn't have a set schedule for releases and stuff. It's THE distro for enthusiasts, and they should understand that.

[kaprikawn]

"Arch Linux fans are frequently requesting more benchmarks of their preferred Linux distribution at Phoronix over claims that it's faster than the likes of Ubuntu, more versatile, etc."

Wow, how often does this happen? Because it should be painfully obvious that Arch doesn't have a set schedule for releases and stuff. It's THE distro for enthusiasts, and they should understand that.

Michael has frequently given his reasons for not using the likes of Arch for benchmarks. Basically it boils down to the fact that Arch is a moving target, and he wants to provide benchmarks which are easy to reproduce. If he does a benchmark on Ubuntu 14.04, then he wants you to be able to install Ubuntu 14.04 and run the same benchmark on your machine so that you would have an apples to apples comparison, the variance being the hardware, not the software.

With Arch that's not possible, if he runs a test suite on Arch today, the same benchmark run next week will have different software versions underpinning it, and therefore the original benchmark has not been reproduced.

I'm not saying he's correct, that's just the logic behind the decision. He does sometimes undermine his logic somewhat by frequently upgrading to the latest version of the kernel or mesa. But when he does he usually includes a benchmarks against the stock kernel, or stock version of mesa on whatever he's running (usually Ubuntu).

[stiiixy]

Two schools of thought; Michael also does a shit-tonne of testing-quality repo tests, so that argument about it being a 'moving target', is bollocks in my opinion based upon his history of test-cases. So, on one hand he does the stability tests, the other, rolling and/or bleeding edge etc.

He can do it with Arch as well. It's small enough and agile enough that it's not that difficult to set up. And once you have a basic configuration you like in the way of profiles and networks shares etc, *shrug* How hards it to back up then copy over.

If targets are moving, majority of users on that system all tend to be at the same package version, even the package groups and people can pick and chose between them based on results (much like how Michael has used Oibaf's PPA)

This way, if the results are vastly differant from vanilla to 3rd-party repo to Ubuntu, then we can all look and go 'hmmmm', that tweak/package version/whatever might actually be useful to me after tracking down the why.

Many eyes thrown at many things from many perspectives can show up quite a lot of hidden results, and help with bug-fixing from what I've experienced with various distro's.

[magika]

Seems a bit of an oversimplication.

Thats what it seems to you but its not, its really as simple as that, Arch philosophy is KISS.

That list of commands is almost carbon copy of Arch installation guide from the wiki. Just instead of 'mkfs.ext4' they tell you <link>format your system<link>. Want btrfs? Just type btrfs in the search (or follow the links). Want Intel drivers? Search for 'Intel'. Not sure about desktop environment? Search it.

Arch wiki is the best infoirmation resource out there, and not only for Arch users, second best is man

[kaprikawn]

Thats what it seems to you but its not, its really as simple as that, Arch philosophy is KISS.

That list of commands is almost carbon copy of Arch installation guide from the wiki. Just instead of 'mkfs.ext4' they tell you <link>format your system<link>. Want btrfs? Just type btrfs in the search (or follow the links). Want Intel drivers? Search for 'Intel'. Not sure about desktop environment? Search it.

Arch wiki is the best infoirmation resource out there, and not only for Arch users, second best is man

I agree whole-heartedly. I'm just saying that installing Arch typically does not take 15 minutes and is not straight forward.

When I installed Arch recently, I wanted btrfs, and did exactly what you said. I went into the wiki and read the article on btrfs. I read about what programs can format a disk to btrfs, I read about how using btrfs affects grub for both bios and uefi configurations, I read about how formatting to btrfs is different to formatting to ext4 and the rest with regards to partitioning. Basically I read a tonne of stuff about btrfs, and just reading about btrfs added more than 15 minutes to the install time in itself.

As someone who is keen to learn new stuff I had no problem with this, but I can totally see how this might be daunting to someone else. A Linux noob would have no chance, they'd probably struggle to install the most basic version of Arch even while following the beginner's version of the install guide (installing a bootloader is particularly un-noob friendly IMO, there's lots of considerations and variables).

[blackout23]

I agree whole-heartedly. I'm just saying that installing Arch typically does not take 15 minutes and is not straight forward.

When I installed Arch recently, I wanted btrfs, and did exactly what you said. I went into the wiki and read the article on btrfs. I read about what programs can format a disk to btrfs, I read about how using btrfs affects grub for both bios and uefi configurations, I read about how formatting to btrfs is different to formatting to ext4 and the rest with regards to partitioning. Basically I read a tonne of stuff about btrfs, and just reading about btrfs added more than 15 minutes to the install time in itself.

If you want BTRFS you obviously want it for its advanced features like snapshotting or dynamic resizing of volumes. All those features are exposed as terminal commands so why use a GUI to set up BTRFS. You need to learn about it anyway. For anything else just slapping ext4 on 1-2 partitions with mkfs is enough.