Is Arch Linux still near impossible to install flawlessly on first try? Reporting in @ 7 tries here before I finally got it working.
I hadn't installed a linux distro that wasn't a *buntu since Gentoo ~8 years ago when I started a new job a couple of months ago. They gave me a Lenovo laptop, and when it came to picking a distro I thought I'd try Arch.
I just followed the beginner's guide[1]. Apart from the first bootmanager I tried (uefi is a new experience for me) not working right everything just worked as easily as you'd expect. Wifi worked ootb, graphics acceleration was as easy as installing the right driver package. For anything else I wanted to install (eg xfce) I just read the wiki page for that particular package on the arch site, and did what they said.
I was actually blown away at how easy it was to install a command line "do it yourself" distro. I'm guessing from your comment that's not the standard experience then :-/
The first one was an old netbook. I hadn't done an Arch install in a long time (I've been spoiled by the simplicity and convenience of the Wubi installer) and wanted the learning experience. I also wanted the HDD to be encrypted using dmcrypt and LUKS.
The main problem I had was wrapping my head about the various partition schemes. This was made more difficult by my insistence to have the HDD be encrypted which meant I needed a separate /boot partition along with the special 1MB linux boot partition required to use GPT with BIOS (I missed that in the instructions and it tripped me up for quite a while). Altogether, it took three fresh installs before everything was exactly the way I wanted it but the last one was quite quick and was really on a fresh install because I wanted to make absolutely sure I had everything nailed down.
The second laptop was a midrange, 2 year old HP "media"-style laptop. With my new knowledge, partitioning and installing was easy even while maintaining an existing Windows install. But this laptop has both Intel and Nvidia graphics shared via PowerXpress whereas the netbook has simple Intel graphics. I still haven't taken a stab at the proprietary drivers but using the open source intel and nvidia graphics in tandem (after some fumbling around but it seemed counterintuitive to simply install both drivers side-by-side) it works well enough for what I'm using it for. I don't really relish the prospect of installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers, though.
I've probably spent 20 hours installing Arch on both of these machines but I've learned a lot in the process. It's been good.
The majority of those installs have been on my main computer (a laptop) because I couldn't find the source of my issues with X not initializing. You could argue full re-installs are overkill, but I say no.
Fun-fact, Turned out to be a fault with GDM (I use Gnome Shell), and I finally fixed my pains with a total of three commands.
That said, I still contend that pacman is hands-down the best package manager in existence. I just prefer to use it on Frugalware nowadays.
Not to say that it doesn't have it's downsides, like scaring off new users.
Simple, because no one wanted to maintain it. I don't miss it, either.
Well, I'm not being fair here, the commands are not really obscure (except the ones they made up), and I'm sure they had a reason. But I just recently had to reinstall Arch after many years, and found the new "installer" strange and kind of daunting compared to the old one.
Pacman is really the best. I had to be reminded of that recently when I had the luxury of dealing with a Ubuntu system. Granted I don't have to deal with that system everyday but having to use apt, aptitude, dpkg to accomplish different things? What a fucking mess.
But it's probably just me that got used to a simple and easy life with pacman... There was a time that I even had to create an ubuntu package, well, don't get me started, I cried a little and lost around 3 days.
Last time I installed arch was before they removed the menu driven installer and it sure had some problems and bugs, so even if I have not tried it yet, I think I prefer this way of installing. It's cleaner, simpler, so better.
I have tried Arch on three machines (old netbook, laptop, desktop) and all went fine during installing (all LUKS cryptorooted). What made me mad was when some stuff broke on two of them due to infrequent updates this spring (didnt use both netbook+desktop for a longer time). Alas, I can't remember details any more.
Made me switch back (to debian) I almost never use aptitude and dpkg only for low level stuff (e.g, when there are errors). Apt alone is in almost all cases sufficient.
[1] single GPT partition, no lvm, no encryption, no fancy devices.
[2] simple unix tools : disk, mkfs., *chroot. arch : netctl (network setup), pacman and a bit of systemd (not traditional yet ;)
But between the official and unofficial install guides, I got it working.
Yeah human errors that threw the entire process off.
However the journey was really fun, I learned a lot, and I highly recommend other to try the same as once you get it running, it really is amazing. My crappy netbooks boot time went from 2 minutes with win7 to 14 seconds with arch.
Really? I find it pretty easy to find instructions to configure a particular device or install a certain software. If you want to install a DE, just Google how to install a DE to Arch Linux, or if you have a Broadcom wireless, you can Google how to install the wireless card.
There's little laptop-specific instructions you'll need, and you don't need to be a guru since there's very good instructions available, especially in the Wiki.