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Comment by burntsushi | Hacker News Reader

There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial, but the canonical install instructions for Arch are instructive and detailed: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide

Also, if you want to use Arch in a dependable way, subscribing to arch-announce is important[1]. It's a low traffic mailing list that notifies you of any manual steps you may need to take during a package upgrade.

(I've been using Arch for years, both at home and at work. I love it.)

[1] - https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-announce

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>There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial

That's often true, but I was disappointed that this was little more than a rephrased version of what's on the Arch Wiki.

I love the Arch documentation on the Wiki. It's perfect for me– laid out well, easy to follow, arranged in a logical wiki order, and stuffed with insanely useful tips. The pages on stuff like tmux are fantastic.

Most of the time the information is already in the wiki. And it's nice how the installation guide covers every corner case. I smoothly migrated my laptop from a simple installation to luks+lvm, just by following the guide. You can actually read TFM because it's already there. It's also kinda funny how many google searches that relate with configuration issues on linux link back to the arch wiki. Definitely documentation is one of the stronger parts of arch.

Just wanted to add that if you're not into mailing lists, the official Arch Linux News[1] page seems to be the same thing as arch-announce. It also has an Atom/RSS feed[2].

[1] https://www.archlinux.org/news/

[2] https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/

Also https://twitter.com/archlinux . And yes, Arch rocks.

This deserves to be a visible comment. The arch documentation is pretty phenomenal, and may be some of the best distro-specific documentation I've ever come across.

That said, I've just moved back to mint after about a year with arch. At the end of the day, arch required a little too much of my time and attention. Still a great distro, though.

Shameless plug: I've been trying a list with every issue I encounter while using arch [0], as of today I've had ~10 issues in ~170 days. Each issue has taken me ~5 minutes to solve.

[0] https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/list.html

Indeed, the great upside about following the wiki for installation, is that you actually learn how all the pieces fit together - and can actually fix things yourself later on (or diverge slightly from the instructions if you want something different).

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