Arch Linux Announces New Project Leader

[andrewjoy]

Thanks Aaron. Hope the project continues.

So many people complain about a lack of installer, but you only have to install once. With Arch, if you mess up your system, you can always fix it. Other distros have so much preconfigured things in them, but the problem is you don't know how they configured it, and just trying to remove some built-in configuration can be virtually impossible, since it keeps cascading and breaking something else.

Arch is great to be configured exactly how you want, and if anything breaks, you broke it, so you can fix it. At most it requires an install media + chroot, but it can be fixed.

The biggest complaint seems to be the lack of installer, but you only install once.

That is fine , but the old installer they used to have was handy , not to automate. But as a checklist to make sure everything is done . Its not big deal tho , just have the install guide open on your phone .

[AndyChow]

Thanks Aaron. Hope the project continues.

So many people complain about a lack of installer, but you only have to install once. With Arch, if you mess up your system, you can always fix it. Other distros have so much preconfigured things in them, but the problem is you don't know how they configured it, and just trying to remove some built-in configuration can be virtually impossible, since it keeps cascading and breaking something else.

Arch is great to be configured exactly how you want, and if anything breaks, you broke it, so you can fix it. At most it requires an install media + chroot, but it can be fixed.

The biggest complaint seems to be the lack of installer, but you only install once.

[ermo]

Thanks for all your hard work Aaron. Not using arch at the moment but will be going back soon (TM). I do miss the Ncurses installer (more as a check list than anything else). Having a security person as the lead tho can only be a good thing.

(emphasis mine)

Famous last words?



(No, I'm not being serious and no, I don't have a dog in the fight)

[andrewjoy]

Thanks for all your hard work Aaron. Not using arch at the moment but will be going back soon (TM). I do miss the Ncurses installer (more as a check list than anything else). Having a security person as the lead tho can only be a good thing.

[TemplarGR]

I recently switched from Manjaro to Arch and have been very happy with it so far. My only suggestion is that they at least offer a default GUI installer as an option.

I mean my goodness, I'm an old time hardware/firmware/software designer and even I find it an unnecessarily complicated process. Yes, we can all use the command line, and I guess for some that's impressive or a mark of superiority. But I can also do long division by hand, but use a calculator instead because doing long division by hand in the year 2020 would be silly

In any case, once you get it installed and set up, and research and fix the many quirks in setting up a full desktop system from such a low level, Arch really is awesome. My anecdotal experience is that it seems much faster than Manjaro, and there's more flexibility when attempting to install or experiment with the latest Linux features and developments. Manjaro does a great job of being an easier to use bleeding edge distro, but some of those ease of use features like kernel and GPU driver management can cause difficulty when attempting to utilize modified kernels and drivers.

You should have used Arch 10+ years ago then.... It was MUCH harder to setup and install back then. Today, it is so simple it is almost simpler than installing Ubuntu. Aside from partitioning the disk (which can be done under Ubuntu liveusb environment anyway using a GUI) which might seem a little scary performing from the console, installing Arch is literally 5-10 copy pasted commands from Arch Wiki. Then you are in a desktop environment and you can install everything else normally. It is not that hard.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I had a play recently with Anarchy Linux. It's basically a fancy script for installing Arch, which takes quite a lot of the pain out of it. I've not actually run it baremetal yet - currently not got a box spare I can lose for a few days if it all goes horribly wrong - but it has been generally well behaved with some rather non-standard VM settings I use when trying-to-break-testing-OS...

[creoflux]

For those wishing for an installer it could be simple to take the old Antergos installer and use that. Just make sure wipe out all their repo stuff.

AUI could be another alternative:

https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui

Not graphical but still reasonably easy to use.

[skeevy420]

For Manjaro sometimes days, sometimes Weeks and sometimes month where Stable is in freeze because they cant get the testing repo to a state where they want to ship it and in the end fuck it up anyway.

Like the last update where they shipped Linux 5.5 without considering users that might be using ZFS? That pissed me off when I rebooted and I couldn't access my games or movies until I went down a kernel. Crazy ass me switched distributions.

[skeevy420]

If you do rpm-ostree reset and then rebase, then re-layer it should let you do all that without needing to do the reboot in the middle.

Try not to use ex lifefs, it will cause more issues than it's worth, there's a reason behind --i-like-danger. Once you've got your base install done, try and use podman/toolbox/flatpak for everything else.

I've actually never used ex livefs. Honestly, the only real annoyance is I installed it on my 2nd drive so I have to manually access my system's bootloader to boot into Silverblue. Well, that and encryption which adds another dammit to the process.

Because I'm a KDE user I'm using Siosm's wonderful Kinoite variant and I've been installing things breeze-gtk, xsettingsd (so Flats use breeze-dark), the RPM-Fusion replacements for Netflix, and other stuff that I think the base Kinoite system is missing. Flatpak and containers are great and all, but that's not where xorg-x11-drv-amdgpu comes from or goes

[lumks]

What are the delay times - hours? Maybe a couple of days at most?

For Manjaro sometimes days, sometimes Weeks and sometimes month where Stable is in freeze because they cant get the testing repo to a state where they want to ship it and in the end fuck it up anyway.