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Comment by literallyaduck | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes you will find merchants at the bazaar who insult the customer. Rather than change something that doesn't match your needs why not find one of the thousand other distros? I don't believe every community follows the rtfm attitude, and many work quite well. Sorry you had a bad experience. A lot of the documentation exists for the product because of high strung elitists and they will not be friendly, but that is what a lot of people associate with Arch brand. I think you will find highly skilled Gentoo users, which might not have as much of the attitude.

TLDR Expecting a community to change for you is unrealistic.

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> Expecting a community to change for you is unrealistic

I think the writer is saying there should be some change, for everyone’s benefit, but specifically for new users.

I don’t know if they are right or wrong about that but that’s different than “ Expecting a community to change for you”.

If a community wants to make it hard for new users to get on-board and it is totally for expert users, what's wrong with that? They all decide together and if that's all they want, more freedom and power to them. Too bad they'll be off-limits for new users (including myself, never installed Arch), I'll find another distro. But, I respect them for their right to collectively do whatever they want.

About the only obligation they have back to the larger Linux community is GPL license and making the source code available.

Exactly. Arch would have faded into obscurity if it didn't have the infamy of being a difficult challenge. People use it BECAUSE they want to feel like they've accomplished something difficult.

It would be nice if Arch could be made easy to use, and the community could be less hostile to new users, without falling into obscurity, but it's an impossible catch-22.

Really? I don't think that's why Arch is well known. If you gave me just that description I'd be very confident you meant Gentoo.

In my mind, Arch's reputation is not that of a challenge, but more of an ongoing projects that you can soak up as over much time you'd like to dump into it. Basically the OS equivalent of a daily-drivable project car.

Though to be fair, I think one of the pillars of that reputation is the quality of the wiki. And I've been increasingly finding the wiki not living up to my expectations over the last however many years. But (somewhat concerningly) the Arch wiki seems to be as strong as ever relative to other sources, so I'm not sure how that balances out.

Maybe it doesn't, and I'm just behind the times.

> But (somewhat concerningly) the Arch wiki seems to be as strong as ever relative to other sources, so I'm not sure how that balances out.

This is a very troubling observation. I think that the open-source world would lose a truly great source of information should the Arch Wiki go away, and there is an clear problem with quality all across the Linux desktop space at the moment.

I use Arch because I just want a desktop that's fast while still being able to handle my requirements. I'm also looking into employing it for setups that have very non-standard boot sequences or hardware requirements (think vGPU gaming across multiple virtualised domains) that are impossible to achieve on mainstream distributions without making the ongoing operation of the OS too brittle.

> If a community wants to make it hard for new users to get on-board and it is totally for expert users, what's wrong with that?

I don’t know / not worried about that.

I’m just saying the person’s point wasn’t that there should be change just for themselves.

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