this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I’ve used arch for the past 10 years or so as my primary OS, and it only took 7 or 8 of those years to get the OS set up.
/s in all seriousness, I kind of get what you’re saying. But I don’t think that having a bad experience is the goal at all though. I think the goal is to provide an OS that lets users decide on exactly what collection of packages they want on their system, and to provide packages that are up to date and unmodified from their upstream.
Setting up your system additively comes with a cost, though. It’s way less convenient than just installing something that someone else has configured.
To me personally, I think the one-time upfront cost of setting up arch is less burdensome than dealing with configuration files that have been moved to non-default locations (transmission-daemon on Debian-based distros is one example), packages being seriously out of date and thus missing new features and bug fixes (neovim), and dealing with cleaning up packages if you prefer to use non-default software and don’t want a ton of clutter.
Definitely valid to prefer a preconfigured system, I just think it’s a misrepresentation to say that the point of arch is to be difficult, or that configuration takes a ton of time for users of arch. Maybe learning to use arch takes longer, but learning to use arch is just learning to use Linux, so it’s hard for me to see that as a bad thing. And it doesn’t take that long to learn, I was more productive in arch after a couple days than I’ve ever been on *buntu, Debian or Mint.