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Comment by gameoverhumans | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you're the kind of person who wants a computer that "just works" with user-friendly point/click software out of the box.

You're absolutely not the target audience of Arch Linux, nor this "Arch-like" Windows install guide.

Personally, I learned more about modern Linux userspace by following the Arch install process (and subsequently maintaining an Arch install for daily-driver use) than I ever did from 5+ years of using Ubuntu desktop.

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And I did it 2005 with gentoo and scratch... it's unnecessary and you could have learned the same using ubuntu or whatever distro without debugging your system. But you are right as a noob it probably helps to do everything by hand at least once. The most annoying part about Arch is that if you look in forums, reddit or mailinglits a lot of users don't really learn to debug. They fuck up their system and install from scratch... so in the end a lot of them are really good at installing Arch but nothing else.

This is a pretty interesting perspective because my experience of using Arch for a decade is that the Arch forums are a great treasure trove of learning how to troubleshoot a Linux desktop. I also have never seen any prescribed advice of reinstalling from scratch and rather the recommended approach is booting a live image and chrooting into your system to actually fix what's broken when something truly is borked. This is also why there's such a hefty RTFM culture around the distro and avoiding going through the install without actually understanding what you're doing.

Arch has been the most stable desktop system I've ever used, but a lot of that stability comes from understanding exactly what is installed and configured, which is something I personally never got with Ubuntu or other fully configured distros

I've used Linux for more than 15 years now and my salary depends on how good I am with Linux.

Although I agree you learn a lot with these distros, nowadays I just want something that works out of the box. If you spend years professionally bringing up Linux boxes, you don't want to it in your free time...

I guess I'm not the target audience either because all I did was use the archinstall script that comes with the ISO and had an arch installation on btrfs with KDE up and running in about 5 minutes tops.

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