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I've found two things to be true after moving to Arch:
The users on forums and other help boards are actually quite willing to link directly to the thing you should have read before starting a new thread and are generally polite about it.
The Arch Wiki is really that good, so you should read it.
I have had nothing but good experiences with the arch community. They legit want to help.
Can't say the same myself unfortunately. The community was one of the main reasons I moved to Gentoo. I've had so many bad encounters on the Arch IRC channel, they often made me feel like a complete idiot for not knowing certain things. On Gentoo on the other hand the community has very knowledgeable people but they don't feel 'elitist' about it and are in fact very kind and helpful.
That’s unfortunate. I’m glad you found your place though!
I went straight from windows to Arch. I had used Ubuntu for a couple of weeks 10+ years ago. The arch wiki is a great resource and I was able to follow it to get up and running. However, there are things that aren't detailed enough (like literally hold your hand) on some things the wiki expects you to know. Now, maybe starting with Arch is not the best path, so that's probably mostly on me. I think that since there are so many different ways to do things, that following some of the instructions can be difficult for a user's specific case. Boot loaders where my biggest hangup early on since I didn't want to use Grub. Modifying boot loaders, setting up pacman hooks, learning and configuring different file systems, and learning how the config and system files is tough, and the wiki has all of the info to do it, but it's not always linear. I wish there were more practical code examples and/or short videos showing exactly what files to modify and how to do it right.
That’s all fair. I think everyone should go through that process once and then use archinstall forever after that.
I probably could have watched a couple of 10 min videos before jumping into the wiki just to get an idea of the process b fore getting so deep. The initial setup instructions are pretty good, it's just those deviation points where you get to decide your path that gets confusing. I first did an old laptop and got that going after many hours. When I committed to my desktop, it went smoother, but I opted to go with btrfs and snapshots without Grub, and that took a hot minute to figure out. Now I have piece of mind from my snapshots, which is great for trying new things. So far, I've been very happy with my setup, and it's been very stable. Now I need to get Wayland and plasma 6 going with my Nvidia card. I got a bit hung up on setting the kernel mode stuff, and haven't really gone back in a while, so it's time.
You can only be getting voted down by the illiterate, because you are correct.
What about the programming socks? Is that true?
It's true for some people but it's not true for everybody. Some people really like to wear those long socks, and other people don't.
I reference the Arch wiki for just about all things Linux.
In all honesty, I use the arch manual to troubleshoot all distros. It is well written and has the info you need and no more.
My steps for looking up something are usually
make will NOT throw a dependency error.PSA: it stands for Read The FINE Manual
Now canonically switched to "read the friendly manual" which I find more patronizing
Read the Fucking Manual
reading comprehension is a very useful day to day skill.
I think zoomies just want to watch a video. I'm not trying to just insult them but I've had so many times people linking and recommending guide videos that are 15 minute long and full of dumb filler shit when an article would've been much better and quicker.
Yeah, I can't stand technical videos for that reason. I just want the content and nothing more.
I really dislike video tutorials. Just let me read a manual or the readme of a git repository.
"You want to actually read documentation? Hokay."
*links to Discord*
you sunova.... :D
This is why nerds who don't like literature class are missing out. If you can figure out the meaning of some inscrutable poem most documentation should be a breeze.
IME the skills needed to parse the poetry class stuff and the documentation wiki are distinct because I found that math, eng and software materials were always literal in what they were saying but I didn’t pick up on that because I was looking for a hidden meaning or secondary property or subtext. I had to rewire my brain for switching between different types of texts.
arch and gentoo wikis are really, really good.
Gotta admin the Arch Linux wiki is an impressive piece of work since long.
Well... to be fair their manual is really well done and helps a ton of other people running on other distros.
Well, to be fair, it's an AMAZING manual.
I used to have a t-shirt that said RTFM, so useful as a linux tech😃. If someone asked something, I'd just point at the shirt jokingly and tell them where the documentation was
So it works, works because Arch isn't for newbs
I use Arch, Browse The Wiki.
It was like that 25 years ago. Same for Linux as for FreeBSD.
BSD users are even worse than Linux users if you ask me... back in the day I mean, have no idea if things have changed the past 10 years or so.
One thing I have learned using OpenBSD is actually reading the manpages first. After an install there's a friendly mail from Theo, then afterboot(8) and intro(8) answers a lot of questions.
Usually I'm not too phased by having to read something to learn, but damn if learning how to span video games over 3 monitors has been a daunting task for me.
xrandr is something I've never been able to wrap my head around.
xrandr is something I've never been able to wrap my head around.
Arandr?
It's basically like a tool for controlling what X does or doesn't... at least that's how I see it (have never read a manual of what ot actually is).
You know liquid nitrogen cooling can get you some insane cinebench scores, but you can't just pop a liquid nitrogen cooler in your PC and expect to boost your framerates. You need to disable so many safety things and if you don't know why they were there in the first place you're going to permanently damage your CPU.
Archlinux is that but for software and because it's software there's no physical barrier to entry. Arch is powerful, but if you don't know what you're doing you're better off with fedora or debian's hand holding.
My board lets me set vcore to 2V, what safety lol
Mind doesn't. At least I think. You know I've never checked. I better not. I'd probably break something. I know when to stay in my lane.
Besides the installer, in what ways do Debian and Fedora hold your hand?
ls -- then double press tab. It should suggest valid arguments. This isn't a thing on arch unless you install the bash-completion packageThey have far less failure points. Also, the AUR. None of them have anything remotely like that, which is also a big stability issue, but hey, it's bleeding edge, so you should be prepared for that.
Debian is more or less like RHEL/Rocky... with RHEL being even more stable and taking even less risks. They update only if they have to and only security related issues. Otherwise, RHEL is feature fixed. You have to upgrade to a new version to get a new set of libraries and applications. Debian... yeah, they're also feature fixed, but they sometimes update certain things that are required by most users, since Debian is also considered a desktop distro, not just a server distro.
Let's see how this goes - I'm almost there but I chickened out and got manjaro first to get a taste, next mission is pure arch!