Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

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  > idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

Because its supposed to be stripped down. To serve as a base to create things like Endeavour, Manjaro, or Cachy.

There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs.

But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB

I don't think it is because they can't do it or that they want to be a base for other distros. They simply let the user choose what the user wants. And if you don't know what you want then you learn it.

I switched to arch 15 years ago to learn Linux. And it is by far the best way to understand it.

Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.

  > Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.

I think this is an important thing to recognize. It's exactly why I tell people that want to learn Linux to do it (but not people who want to use Linux). The struggle is real, but the struggle is part of the learning process. The truth is that distros are not that different from one another. The main difference is in the package manager and the release schedule of their package databases.

I'd also like to tell any Linux newbies, the Arch Wiki is your best friend. It doesn't matter if you're using Ubuntu, Mint, or whatever. The Arch Wiki is still usually the second place I go to for when I need help. The first is the man pages (while there's some bad documentation out there it is quite surprising how well most man pages are written. Linux really has shown me the power and importance of writing good documentation)

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