EndeavourOS Is Hoping To Be The Successor To Antergos - Convenient To Use Arch Linux

[boxie]

I once speedran (don't ask) an Arch setup in 10mn, including downloading and installation inside the livecd. Not that hard really..

I install an OS maybe once every other year.

Sinking time into learning *how* to do (and by that, knowing which commands to type in, when) it is wasted IMO.

The Cost/Reward balance is definitely not in its favour.

The only time it is worth investing time into learning these things is if you need to do it often. And if you have to install Arch that often, is it really worth doing? an OS should really get out of the way and let you do things, not be the thing that gets in the way.

[boxie]

People like you only need to RTFM.

Jesus Christ. What is this with the "easy to use Arch" meme? Is ArchLinux all of a sudden trending on YTMND?

That's just it. Why should we have to RTFM just to *install* it. It seems counter-intuitive, especially when this is a many times over solved problem.

[boxie]

Oh for the love of Zod.

That's a clear design decision in a distro where you also have to configure everything manually, again by design.

Arch has not and has NEVER marketed itself as easy to use, it's about having more understanding and control over what the system does.

So there is no shit to get together.

It's hardly Linux from scratch though, is it - so you are not configuring everything. I am sure there are lots of defaults and lots of conveniences that make your life a lot easier.

I find the demarcation point here strange.

Serious questions: Are they just giving you the illusion of control? Are my assumptions wrong and you really do need to configure "All the things' with 0 defaults (as someone above has said they speedran an install in 10 minutes, I am assuming there is a healthy swath of sensible defaults that one can change).

[Gusar]

Why should we have to RTFM just to *install* it.

There was a user at the Arch forums who had problems booting their system. When asked what bootloader they used, the user... didn't know. They didn't install Arch proper, but used either a derivative distro or a "simple installer script" they found somewhere.

Now, how do you help such a user, when they have no clue which bootloader they have, let alone how it is configured? The answer is, you can't. Had the user done a proper Arch install, with the required RTFM, they'd know exactly what bootloader they have and how they configured it, they'd be able to show said config and help would've been much easier.

That's why you're required to RTFM just to install. Because it's not just about getting the distro onto the disk, it's about picking up valuable knowledge along the way. Knowledge that then makes it much easier for others to help you when you need it, because you're able to provide a much better bug report.

[Panda_Wrist]

I install an OS maybe once every other year.

Sinking time into learning *how* to do (and by that, knowing which commands to type in, when) it is wasted IMO.

The Cost/Reward balance is definitely not in its favour.

The only time it is worth investing time into learning these things is if you need to do it often. And if you have to install Arch that often, is it really worth doing? an OS should really get out of the way and let you do things, not be the thing that gets in the way.

So you hate learning new things? This begs the question of why would you want to try Arch out in the first place. It's something new that you have to learn. Stick to your distro that you know so you don't have to learn anything more. If you want to try different things, you will have to learn different things. Makes sense right? So simple.

[boxie]

There was a user at the Arch forums who had problems booting their system. When asked what bootloader they used, the user... didn't know. They didn't install Arch proper, but used either a derivative distro or a "simple installer script" they found somewhere.

Now, how do you help such a user, when they have no clue which bootloader they have, let alone how it is configured? The answer is, you can't. Had the user done a proper Arch install, with the required RTFM, they'd know exactly what bootloader they have and how they configured it, they'd be able to show said config and help would've been much easier.

That's why you're required to RTFM just to install. Because it's not just about getting the distro onto the disk, it's about picking up valuable knowledge along the way. Knowledge that then makes it much easier for others to help you when you need it, because you're able to provide a much better bug report.

Let's flip this around. Why were the forum users not able to point to a page in the quite extensive Arch documentation that says "This is how you get your bootloader config" and have the user follow the bouncing ball?

Valuable skills are still attained and the process is documented for all.

[boxie]

So you hate learning new things? This begs the question of why would you want to try Arch out in the first place. It's something new that you have to learn. Stick to your distro that you know so you don't have to learn anything more. If you want to try different things, you will have to learn different things. Makes sense right? So simple.

Quite the opposite, I love learning new things. I like learning new things that help me well into the future.

I object to the "having" to learn new things that do not really benefit me.

I want to stand on the shoulders of giants, not learn about why this one time the giant got crabs from a one night stand 20 years ago.

although, that was a nice attempt at a strawman.

my objection can be boiled down to "There is a very steep onboarding process" and that that user experience can be refined.
My experience here was "I was dumped at a CLI and not told what to do", that's just bad UX.

If your argument is that this is a teaching tool, the tool needs work.

[hotaru]

Let's flip this around. Why were the forum users not able to point to a page in the quite extensive Arch documentation that says "This is how you get your bootloader config" and have the user follow the bouncing ball?

because there are different pages for different bootloaders and there's no way to know which one to send the user to if they can't tell you which one they're using.

[boxie]

because there are different pages for different bootloaders and there's no way to know which one to send the user to if they can't tell you which one they're using.

which begs the question, why is there this gap in the documentation?

[cyring]

For Arch veterans, Archiso exists and is tooled to let you functionally clone systems as boot ISOs. I have in the past used this utility to copy my Arch installs between computers in a much simpler way than booting from a generic image and reconfiguring everything by hand.

Installers aren't "bad" things. Neither is not having one. They are design choices. Many distros around Arch adopted installers because Arch didn't, and they give you options to use pacman et al without having to do the install from CLI. Some people want the convenience of pressing next a bunch of times to have a preconfigured maintainer "best" set of defaults. Others want to set their own defaults.

Arch has never been about market share. Its been about being an operating system that gets out of the face of someone who knows how to use it. A lot of that - the positive signal / noise in the forum, the quality of the wiki, etc - come from how well the lack of an automatic installer keeps a lot of people with the mindset of "if it doesn't do exactly what I want it to do its broken and someone else should fix it to work the way I want" out. That mindset is found everywhere, and is undesirably pervasive in at least American society, and its one of the best qualities of the Arch ecosystem IMO to have what is effectively a trivial set of command line tools to use as a means to avoid being flooded with that personality type.

Theres a reason why you don't go on the Ubuntu forums or use the Ubuntu wiki much.

I do agree, ArchISO is far enough and easy to make your own distribution: at the link example, I'm leaving instructions to bundle an app demo live image, C compiler suite included.