Just giggled as my last meme mentioned trouble with displays and appropriately, a large chunk of the replies were “well MY displays work just fine!” (And charmingly, many were thoughts of things to check, other distros etc. It’s a very kind community, though that may also be the fediverse.)
I have a friend who runs arch, and recommends arch to people. His computer constantly has problems because he doesn’t fully know what he’s doing.
I respect doing it for yourself, you do you, but I feel like he’s actively discouraging my friends from giving Linux a go because of his constant issues. Recommending the hardest distro to beginners just bugs me.
I run arch on a thinkpad just so I could learn it, and it will pretty much always break the wifi and whatnot if i update, so I just haven’t updated it.
Just FYI, it doesn’t need to be like this.
This is Me. I had more problems on Bazzite and Debian, so I prefer Arch. It still breaks all the time and I still don’t know what I’m doing, but at least sometimes it works.
That’s actually really surprising to me, bazzite is fairly plug and play, and Debian while slow to update is still very stable. What kind of issues were you running into?
Bazzite would overtax the CPU and freeze a lot. Debian didn’t like Proton 10 when Splitgate 2 first came out, and Splitgate 2 needs Proton 10 in order to use a mouse. With CachyOS, performance is better and I can install the newest graphics drivers.
Try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
It’s practically Arch minus elitist culture minus breaking all the time minus having to manually manage anything and everything. Also, it has properly set snapshots by default, so almost any screw-up can be reversed.
No thanks, I love the elitist culture. I want to be expected to learn and get better over time, and I have been. I even learned how to enable snapshots.
To each their own
Overall, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has all you need to practice in a safe environment and learn all the things you do with Arch. It just doesn’t force you to do it when all you want is open a document :D
You might just have learned more about how stuff works by now. Arch is very much “you need to make every choice manually, but then you’ve seen what choices exist”
I actually thought I was having issues with Debian. I was only getting like 6 - 8 updates when I tried to do them, even after a longer period of time. I kept searching around how to update Debian properly, but found no good answer.
Then something like 2 months later there was a large number of updates at once. So it is working then, huh.
Yeah, let everyone do their own thing - there’s nothing wrong with starting with Slackware if you want to. But if we’re going to recommend a starting point to people, maybe go with something that is designed to work out of the box. There’s going to be so much else to get adjusted to that extra options aren’t necessary.
Oh, and by the way, most people don’t like tinkering. They want their car to take them from A to B and their computer to do the thing, it’s not a hobby for them and we shouldn’t expect new users to be looking for a new hobby.
Infinitely this!
Yes, it’s super cool to have control over your own damned machine but for some, the computer is just the thing the lets them work, porn and game.
I run slack, alpine, freebsd, deb and mint for the gui testing on various servers personally and professionally.
I recommend kubuntu.
Thank you
I have a recommendation for your recommendations. There’s KDE Neon which is distributed by the KDE project, which is Ubuntu-based. That’s what I personally run, now that I really don’t have the time/energy to tinker.
I think a verrrrrrry very large part of the problem is that the most vocal linux proselytisers have never actually had to do a job (or have, but done it very badly) where you have to tailor to the client.
Rookie mistake.
Is it really a rookie mistake if it’s not their job though?
‘Rookie mistake’ applies colloquially in many situations that aren’t professional.
When someone asks you for advice on an OS, tech kit, or any other item you should be considering their use case, not your own.
I know I was just being difficult
OK, you explained it well to me with the car example. I am not a car person, all I know about them is they can usually move, but I am not really interested to learn more.
Hmm, when a car has problems, you go to someone who fixes that for you. People under 60 usually don’t do that for PCs.
I don’t recommend Arch to newbies, but I do prefer it because it’s more robust: other distros patch stuff to make it easier, but those patches mean things are farther from the tested upstream version. Arch doesn’t do that as much so I run into fewer bugs.
But this view might be outdated. I just remember that before 2017 (when I installed my current Arch system) I constantly had problems with dist-upgrades in Ubuntu
No you’re probably right, I’ve had my Ubuntu-based distro act up after upgrades, and I actually find it more random now than what it used to be like in the 2010s. My feeling is that Debian/Arch are better in this regard, and most newbies don’t actually need bleeding-edge patches.
I’m running arch now for gaming.
I never had any issues* which makes me worry, cause i truly dont know what the fuck am I doing. Jesus take the wheel…
*im surfing on issues actually
Sounds like the average Arch user to me
Funny meme btw lolololo
… why are you like that?
Fucking Donkey describes recommending Arch to noobs. It’s astounding.
Gentoo begs to differ