Comment by Johnny_Brahms | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Johnny_Brahms | Hacker News Reader

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I like Arch. I would love to have it installed on my laptop, but then I don't want to spend the time actually installing and configuring it. I got fed up with that stuff using linux 15 years ago. I remember the days when you had to write your own device drivers. I don't long for them. In fact, I still cry a bit when I think about that day my RedHat 6 install configured eth0 for me. Imagine: Plugging a network cable in, and it just works! The future is here!

I use Arch for my SoC devices (RPi2 and Odroid XU-4), and for that it is hard to beat. I install what I need, configure it and then forget about it. But for a desktop? I didn't get a computer so that I could spend an hour getting WIFI to work the way I want.

I have built LFS more than a dozen times, I used gentoo for the better part of a decade (back in the days when linux actually was harder to use than osx/windows). I don't have to prove myself worthy any more. Give me an easy way to setup arch with stuff like X, network-manager and media hotkeys working out of the box and I'd switch any day.

So: arch is a very nice distro, but online it has somewhat become what gentoo was in the early 2000: an e-penis enlarger. The only thing it proves is that you have the time and knows how to copy and paste commands from the arch wiki.

For me the issue with Just Works distributions is that I actually spend more time reconfiguring all the parts than if I do it by myself from the ground up. In my opinion, Arch has the perfect balance between things just working and allowing you to decide whatever you want ro use.

I just recently bought a new laptop that I had set up within a day. A lot of that time was spent playing around with various hidpi settings, though.

And it certainly helps that I have most of my configurations in my dotfiles repo (including media key bindings).

I agree with your idea of configuring stuff to an extent I'm a recent switcher to Arch and love it so far, but on my other laptop I use a Debian minimal install with i3wm and all my manually installed programs, and I find it is that fine line between easy to use (installing, drivers, etc) and manual configuration.

I love Arch, but Debian min install will always have a place in my heart for getting set up easily while still being extremely fast and custom.

Out of curiosity: What do you have installed on your laptop instead?

A bit of everything during the last couple of years. After Gentoo, which was my distro of choice for a long time, I used frugalware, which is slackware-ish but with pacman and an "easy" installer. Then I got a laptop and a 3g USB modem which would only work properly with NetworkManager, so I went around between distros that packaged it (Fedora, Ubuntu).

Now I run emacs on CentOS 7. I only do security updates and have been using guix to handle userspace (Userspace = mostly emacs).

For work I have an Ubuntu laptop. We code pascal, so I almost never leave the GUI. After configuring Unity I actually like it a lot. I might switch to ubuntu on their next LTS release (which, after all the kinks are worked out, will be 16.04 + ~4 months)

I can't say I've had to fiddle that much. If we're talking things like deciding which packages to install, I have a script that clones my explicitly installed packages and logs them to a file, and then is able to read it and install them all on a new box.

Setting up wifi was as simple as just installing whichever manager you want and getting going, though. Contrary to a lot of peoples' experiences I seem to have a really easy time with Arch. Most of it just works after install.

Setting up Arch is a simple as partitioning your hard drive, mounting it, pacstrapping it, and setting up the bootloader.

That's it, really. There's a bunch of stuff you probably want for a functional system, like user accounts and graphics drivers and stuff. And yes, Arch is still a pain with laptops. But with practice you can get it up "from scratch" in 20 minutes tops.

Hopefully you'll note that I didn't actually say anything about proving yourself. I even gave a list of other distros. But my point was that you don't need an Arch-based distro when there are plenty of distros that are better at giving you an easy way to set them up.

If one's ego is so seriously fragile that they depend on an operating system to feel adequate... well, it's kind of sad. It wasn't my intent to imply anything about people using distros I like less, if that's what you got. But this distro in particular is probably not as useful, because there are many more "user-friendly" distributions.

This week I purchased a new Dell XPS 13 9350 and installed Arch. The process of installing and getting a working OS with WiFi, screen brightness adjustment, media keys, Gnome 3, touch screen, and trackpad gestures took around 3 hours. It was as simple as repartitioning, pacstrapping, installing Xorg/Gnome and following the steps on the wiki.

There's Antergos for this.

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