Should I give Arch a shot?

BackOnMyBS , 9 months ago

on the other end of the spectrum, if you really don’t want to learn shit about linux, use Linux Mint. it’s easier to install than Windows, and I only use the terminal for updates using lolcat so I can feel like a rainbow hacker.

frequent questions and thoughts I have as a Linux Mint user:

• why tf is everyone arguing about over whatever systemd is?
• wow, that guy uses Arch, btw 😮
• I don’t understand this Linux meme
• where is this program installed??
• wtf are Vulcan Shaders?
• should I use apt or apt-get to install? eh, it depends on how lazy I’m feeling
• check out my screenfetch. I’m such a hacker.
• i wonder if the people on Linux Mint forums are sick of me asking for help without helping anyone else.
• all these Linux privacy benefits don’t mean shit since I use Chrome
• how come no one ever brags about Cinnamon?

cows_are_underrated , 9 months ago

Systemd is a Programm starter which is used for starting your system programms. It made a lot of things much easier, but since there’s no competitor people are arguing about it for ethical reasons since it can do literally anything it wants to do. Vulkan is the Linux equivalent do directX on Windows. Also, Cinnamon is bloat and actually a kinda bad design. KDE and gnome have a lot of things that are much better than in Cinnamon. Cinnamon is good for new users who need the “Windows like System” but I personally don’t like it at all.

BackOnMyBS , 9 months ago

I appreciate the info. If you don’t mind, what’s directX?

I went with Cinnamon because I assumed that LM was streamlined for it, but I have used both Gnome and KDE, and I really liked KDE. I can install it and give it a shot again. Thank you for the info!!

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

It’s an API, a set of function declarations and tools, which gives a standard way to control GPUs to make them put stuff on the screen as well as 3D maths. DirectX is a proprietary standard owned and developed by Microsoft and as such only supported on Windows. Though we have libraries such as dxvk which act as DirectX drivers and instead of directly interacting with the GPU, use Vulkan, which is similar to DirectX but and open standard, to put stuff on the screen.

BackOnMyBS , 9 months ago

Thank you! Now I at least know what’s taking my games on Steam so long to start

BackOnMyBS , 9 months ago

So I installed Kubuntu, and I LOVE KDE. Thanks for the encouragement 😀

SeeMinusMinus , 9 months ago

I really like KDE. My current system is fedora KDE spin though I also have sway installed but I don’t use it much. I changed some KDE keybinds to feel more like sway and i3.

BackOnMyBS , 9 months ago

cool! i went with kubuntu, but am interested in other distros because of the issues with snap. i’ve heard good things about kde neon. what do you think about that? any other kde recommendations? im not a linux amateur professional, btw.

SeeMinusMinus , 9 months ago

While fedora kde spin is my favorite some other good opinions are opensuse, debian, and something arch based if you want something a bit different. Out of all of those debian will feel the most comfy but its not known for having up to date packages since they do lots of testing before pushing an update.

BackOnMyBS , 9 months ago

cool 😎 beans 🫘

I’m waiting for my brain to come back, then I’ll do some testing. You’re right about Debian being a bit behind for my taste. I hear great things about Fedora, but that means I’d have to learn a whole new distro compared to Debian based ones. I still might give it a try on a laptop to see what I think. Arch is way too much for my level of Linux competence and willingness to put effort into learning and troubleshooting it. I’ve heard good things about Tuxedo OS, though the YouTuber that promoted it was transparent that he was being paid by Tuxedo for advertisement.

If you don’t mind sharing just a little, what do you think I should know or read up on regarding switching to Fedora? Or another way of asking is what difficulties can I expect and how can I prepare? I’m guessing the terminal commands, installation process, and package repos would work differently? Also, since Fedora uses a different package system (so not deb), would I be more limited on what programs I can install in general?

SeeMinusMinus , 9 months ago

The main version of fedora comes with gnome but you have opinions for KDE. A lot of people just install KDE along side gnome but I like Fedora KDE spin because it feels cleaner not having the gnome apps. Even though you can use fedora right after install there are a few things most people like to do first. You will use dnf (its like apt but in fedora) and flatpaks mostly.

• Fedora doesn’t have the best multimedia by default so you need to install some stuff using this thing here.
• Next you should enable rpm fusion. rpm fusion lets you install more stuff using fedoras package manager dnf. look here to see how to enable rpm fusion.
• Next enable flathub. flathub adds more packages to flatpak. flatpak in fedora here.

After that you should be good to go. With rpm fusion and flathub there really isn’t going to be any packages you can get in debian but not fedora

BackOnMyBS , 9 months ago

thank you! 😊

mcepl , 9 months ago

My answer is “No”. Don’t do distro-hopping. It is only waste of time and distraction from actually learning Linux properly. Concerning BTRFS (and I write it as a user of openSUSE which has been supporting it for the longest time), I am absolutely certain that Debian can use it as well as any other distro. Just don’t do the distro-hopping.

wuphysics87 , 9 months ago

Different strokes for different folks. I did nothing but distro hop for my first month or so. You learn a hell of a lot using different package managers and how distros do the same thing different ways. My advise is to have fun and enjoy yourself. If it isn’t a chore, you’ll coming back and you’ll always learn something new.

fxt_ryknow , 9 months ago

My Proxmox cluster has 10+ distros so I can distro hop my heart out. I like bouncing between various distro to stay fresh with package managers… And more specifically the various synax when using various distros

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

Thanks everyone for your advice, I decided to install Arch, I’ve got it all set up with BTRFS and snapper with automatic snapshots through snap-pac.

The only problems in the install were that the default BTRFS subvolume layout given by archinstall gives an @.snapshots subvolume. If you want to use snapper with the root subvolume you need to unmount and remove this subvolume so that snapper can create a new one.

The other problem was that once the proprietary NVIDIA driver is installed gdm will force X11 still on Hybrid graphics laptops. Just had to symlink the gdm config to null which is mentioned in the wiki for drivers older than 470 on single GPU set-ups. Sorry don’t have the links on me.

Otherwise all set up now, we’ll see how this goes

Frederic , 9 months ago

No, go straight to MX Linux you’ll have Nvidia driver, and luks/btrfs and snapshot etc OOB.

lloram239 , 9 months ago

I’ve previously been against trying Arch due to instability issues

Skip Arch and go straight to NixOS if you are worried about that. Gives you most of the same advantages (huge up to date package collection) with none of the disadvantages (everything can be downgraded, patched, rolledback, etc. with ease).

fraydabson , 9 months ago

Yeah once I’m brave enough to move OS on my server (currently running Ubuntu server) I want to switch it to NixOS.

I’m spinning up a VM first to better understand it.

lloram239 , 9 months ago

Installing the Nix package manager on another distribution is also an easy way to get familiar with it without making the full switch.

fraydabson , 9 months ago

Didn’t even cross my mind. So I can install it on my current Ubuntu server to get familiar with it. Def gonna try.

schizosfera , 9 months ago

I would try it in a VM first. But maybe you are braver than I.

lloram239 , 9 months ago

When installed on another distribution in single-user mode it goes into its own directory and only activates when you run a script. It doesn’t touch or interact with the main distributions beyond that. In multi-user install it installs a build daemon service, but that’s all. It doesn’t touch /usr, it’s all done via $PATH and friends.

zwekihoyy , 9 months ago

nix package manager works on all posix compliant os’ and doesn’t touch system directories. everything is stored in /nix/store and symlinked to ~/.nix-profile.

personally I run an arch build and then only use nix for my packages.

blackbrook , 9 months ago

I’d recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed instead. They originated the btrfs setup that lets you rollback in the grub menu, which has been copied by others. They are bleeding edge except that all packages go through an automated testing system before being rolled out so there’s much less breakage to start with.

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

How well does openSUSE Tumbleweed handle proprietary stuff like NVIDIA drivers?

AnUnusualRelic , 9 months ago

I’ve been using it on my main box for a few years with a 1070 and then a 2080 without issues. Not that it means anything. I’ve never really had issues with nVidia despite running Linux for 25+ years and having used a fair number of their cards, but according to the Internet I’m the only one on the planet. So YMMV.

blackbrook , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

There is definitely a caveat with nvidia. The nvidia repo is managed external to the main repos, so it is possible for a new kernel to drop in the system repo and the nvidia repo not yet be updated with a compatible driver.

I always wait a few days on such updates and watch the mailing lists for problems especially from nvidia users. So far I’ve only experienced problems due to prime wonkiness that required re-running a couple of prime commands. I haven’t had to use the boot-from-btrfs-snapshot yet, but it’s a nice security blanket.

Drug_Shareni , 9 months ago

From what I’ve seen it’s far from bleeding edge. A few months ago I compared it to other rolling release distros and it was by far the most out of date.

blackbrook , 9 months ago

Tumbleweed? Could you have been looking at Leap?

Drug_Shareni , 9 months ago

There’s always a chance I messed up, but afaik it was tumbleweed. Although I was looking for some programming and niche packages, not something popular like Firefox.

virtualbriefcase , 9 months ago

My 2c would be yes only if you’re specifically seeking out the bleeding edge and don’t mind or enjoy doing the neccesary tinkering.

Alsp you have time in between now and a re-install I’d highly recommended trying to do you’re day to day stuff in an Arch VM for a bit and see if it works for you.

noddy , 9 months ago

I’ve been using arch for many years now. I’ve used various distros every once in a while, but I always come back to arch. When arch break it is probably a single package that is causing the issue, and there is likely a forum post explaining how to fix it already when you have an issue. However if I manage to break ubuntu for example, I always have a bad time getting the system back up without a reinstall. I haven’t tried using BTRFS for snapshots yet, but I usually format my drive to BTRFS for new systems/reinstalls now, so I have the opportunity at least. Don’t know if snapshots would have made a difference for the GRUB issue that happened though. Thankfully it didn’t affect me as I use systemd-boot instead.

I also use Gnome, vscode and firefox. Don’t know about matlab but there is a wiki page and an aur package, so I think it should work. For gnome if you use extensions, I recommend installing them from the aur, instead of from the web browser, as you won’t need to manually update them. For vscode, there is an aur package for the official version from microsoft, but there is also a FOSS version on the main repo (though some extensions may not work/be available out of the box on that one).

One issue arch users may get after a while is the hard drive filling with cached packages. Pacman doesn’t delete old packages from the cache automatically, so if you never clear the cache, you will get a copy of every version of every package you’ve ever installed in the cache. I’ve made it a habit now every once in a while I’ll clear the cache, after an update and I’ve confirmed the system works after the update. There’s a command “paccache” from the “pacman-contrib” package that’s convenient for clearing cached packages.

throwawayish , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Last year I upgraded to an Inspiron 15 7510 with i7-11800H and RTX3050. Since purchasing this laptop I’ve used Manjaro, Debian 11, Pop OS, Void Linux, Fedora Silverblue (37 & 38) and now Debian 12.

A distro-hopper. Noted.

I need to reinstall soon since I’ve stuffed up my NVIDIA drivers trying to install CUDA and didn’t realise that they changed the default swap size to 1GB.

Prefers starting from scratch instead of fixing. Noted.

I use this laptop for everything - development in C/C++, dart/flutter, nodejs and sometimes PHP. I occasionally play games on it through Proton and sometimes need to re-encode videos using Handbrake. I need some amount of reliability since I also use this for University.

General-use and reliable. Noted.

I’ve previously been against trying Arch due to instability issues such as the recent GRUB thing.

Understandable, but not entirely justified.

But I have been reading about BTRFS and snapshots which make me think I can have an up to date system and reliability (by rebooting into a snapshot).

Fair.

What’s everyone’s perspective on this, is there anything major I should keep an eye on?

It is almost common knowledge at this point that this approach has serious merits. That’s why we find it on a myriad of rolling release distros. From Manjaro to Garuda, from SpiralLinux to Siduction. Heck, even Nobara -which is not strictly a rolling release distro- has it. I wouldn’t even use/recommend a rolling release distro if not for (GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper. But, while by itself it is already very powerful. It still benefits a lot from testing. Which, when utilized by openSUSE in particular, manages to elevate their Tumbleweed to a very high standard. So much so, that it has rightfully earned to be named the stable rolling release distro. But not all distros are as rigorous in their testing… if at all…

Should also note I use GNOME, vscode, Firefox and will need MATLAB to be installed, if there is anything to do with those that is problematic on Arch?

Nah, that’s absolutely fine. Noted.

Should I give Arch a shot?

So there are some glaring issues here:

• You’ve set some parameters and asked us if Arch satisfies. Which it does, but so do a lot of other distros. Which seems to tell me that this will become yet another chapter of your distro-hopper-phase. Which -to be clear- happens to be totally fine. I’d even argue that it’s preferable to do it sooner rather than later. Though the mindset of a distro-hopper might deter you from being satiated…
• As previously alluded, Arch is yet another distro that satisfies your needs. You didn’t mention what attracted you towards it, nor why you’d prefer it specifically over all the other available options.
• Btrfs snapshots, while powerful, are not 100% fail-safe. Sure, nothing actually is as a random SSD crash might loom around the corner. And I’d be one of the first to tell you that using Btrfs snapshots to rollback to is an exponentially better experience than without. But we’re still able to improve upon it (mathematically speaking) infinitely times, to be more precise; some systems allow us to decrease the complexity from uncountably infinite amount of states (which therefore become “unknown states”) to countably infinite or (better yet) finite amount of states (which therefore actually become “known states”). The reduction of complexity that this offers and its implications to system reliability are far more impactful than the simple use of Btrfs snapshots.

---

Consider answering the following questions:

• Are you a distro-hopper? Or did you have very legit reasons to switch distros? If so, would you mind telling us why you changed distros?
  • Would it be fair to assume that it boils down to "I messed up, but instead of repairing I will opt for reinstalling."
    • If so, is this something you want to work on (eventually) or doesn’t it bother you at all?
• Why Arch?
• Would you like to setup Btrfs yourself? Or would you prefer your distro to do it for you? Or don’t you actually mind regardless?

dino , 9 months ago

So many words for so little info. Why are you stealing my time?

throwawayish , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

OP was relatively verbose so I act accordingly. Don’t feel compelled to read larger pieces if you’re sensitive to wasting your time. I don’t recall forcing you to read it, so it’s entirely on you. While information density might have suffered, “little info” is too harsh. Though, as long as there’s even one sentence of ‘original’ information (compared to all the other comments) a piece of writing of that length is worth reading IMO. Though, thinking otherwise is definitely justifiable.

dino , 9 months ago

Though, as long as there’s even one sentence of ‘original’ information […] a piece of writing of that length is worth reading IMO

No. You are just confirming it.

throwawayish , 9 months ago

What exactly am I confirming? Apologies, if I sound obtuse*.

s20 , 9 months ago

It’s like 700 words, dude. It’s shorter than a 6th grade book report.

dino , 9 months ago

But the book report probably has some useful info…

s20 , 9 months ago

Did it? That’s not how I remember book reports.

And this does have useful information.

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

I might be a distro hopper. Every distro just niggles me after a while, Silverblue wasn’t flexible enough, didn’t like GNOME 3.38 on Debian 11 after using 4x on Manjaro. Manjaro was buggy and had poor reputation. I didn’t like Pop Shell, however, there was good support for Optimus laptops on Pop OS. Before Debian 12 I gave Ubuntu another go and it kept crashing. Main problem with Debian 12 is Firefox ESR which doesn’t work with some sites I need and that the packages will be significantly out of date within a year.

I thought Arch because it is almost always up to date and seems to be widely recommended.

It’s not like I haven’t tried fixing the issue, I just don’t know what to do outside of uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers or waiting for NVIDIA to provide a repo for Debian 12 for CUDA. As for the swap I would rather have a partition for it than have some combination of swapfiles and swap.

I had a go at installing Arch today in a VM using archinstall and set up BTRFS with Timeshift and grub-btrfs and it all seemed fairly straightforward.

throwawayish , 9 months ago

Thanks for answering! Much appreciated!

I might be a distro hopper. Every distro just niggles me after a while

Perhaps you’ve yet to find the one 😜. Your criticism to the different distros is fair though.

I thought Arch because it is almost always up to date and seems to be widely recommended.

Yup, it’s by far the most popular rolling release distro. Though, I’d argue that openSUSE Tumleweed -while not as popular- is definitely worth checking out as well. They’re, however, quite different from one another. Arch offers a blank canvas, while openSUSE Tumbleweed is relatively opinionated; though it does offer excellent defaults. You would have to make up your own mind whichever ‘style’ of maintaining a distro suits you best.

I had a go at installing Arch today in a VM using archinstall and set up BTRFS with Timeshift and grub-btrfs and it all seemed fairly straightforward.

Well, that sure does sound promising!

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

Thanks for taking the time to read my comments, really appreciate it! I’ve had a bit of a look into Tumbleweed and it sounds like it’s similar to Fedora in how it handles packaging of proprietary software which I found pretty annoying, but I could be wrong.

throwawayish , 9 months ago

I’ve had a bit of a look into Tumbleweed and it sounds like it’s similar to Fedora in how it handles packaging of proprietary software which I found pretty annoying, but I could be wrong.

It’s true that Arch is leaner towards proprietary software if that’s what you mean. An example of this is how the Nvidia drivers are just found within repos for Arch (thus enabled by default), while on both Fedora and openSUSE it’s not found in the official repos. Both have made it easier over the years to somehow include options and whatnot within the installer to ease Nvidia users in, but the experience on Arch is definitely smoother.

Furthermore, Fedora is indeed (kinda) hardcore on FOSS, similarly to Debian. While Arch simply doesn’t care in most cases. My relatively short endeavor to find out where openSUSE fits in seems to point towards openSUSE leaning closer to Debian and Fedora.

What’s perhaps important to note is that in all cases there are third party repos that can easily be enabled to acquire proprietary software.

hottari , 9 months ago

Arch is bound to break every once in a while, that’s just the deal you get with a rolling release distro. If stability is all you want, you can go with the BTRFS snapshots and hope to heavens this setup doesn’t break or use something stable like Debian or Fedora.

original_ish_name , 9 months ago

Everything is bound to break every once in a while, that’s just the deal with software that updates

KrankyKong , 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

hottari , 9 months ago

Disagree. Arch is not stable at all, couldn’t be even if you wanted it to be.

Bugs and regressions get introduced upstream all the time, these have a tendency to slip from testing into the main repos.

Case in point, a recent glib2 update was causing NetworkManager to coredump sporadically.

And you have to always use downgrade. Example, the newer 6.5 kernels break thermald 2.5.4 for me, so I have to downgrade a step downwards.

Are these problems because of Arch? Not necessarily but the rolling release model has a role to play in these types of regressions & bugs.

An LTS type of distro will face other different types of bugs. Outdated software libraries/dependencies that are rendered incompatible etc.

But these are few and far between compared to rolling release where everything is in a constant state of change.

superkret , 9 months ago

I literally never had a visible bug on Arch, whereas my last Ubuntu install greeted me with an error message because some part of gnome crashed right on first boot.
I realize this is anecdotal, though.

drwankingstein , 9 months ago

one thing ill say. flutter via aur is kinda a pain, I would reccomend installing the flutter package, not flutter-git, then adding it to ignore-pkg in /etc/pacman.conf then letting flutter handle updates

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

Interesting, at the moment I’m using the snap package since that’s what’s officially supported, so I should probably stick to that (for simplicity)

drwankingstein , 9 months ago

I myself detest snap, avoiding them whenever possible, the manual install method is also officially supported which is more or less what the aur does

chocolatine , 9 months ago

P

myersguy , 9 months ago

I’ve previously been against trying Arch due to instability issues such as the recent GRUB thing.

But you used Manjaro? 😂

Go for it. If you use archinstall, it is incredibly simple to get up and running. The difficulty around Arch is quite overblown except perhaps when talking about people brand new to Linux. Even without archinstall, you are just following a guide in the wiki.

notTheCat , 9 months ago

is quite overblown

The wiki installation doesn’t go through repartitioning your drive (like splitting a partition into two and moving the content to a single part of them), I wouldn’t try that using the Arch ISO, no sir

Jean_Lurk_Picard , 9 months ago

Just use LVM

xchino , 9 months ago

wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide#Parti…

wiki.archlinux.org/title/Partition

Ashiette , 9 months ago

Yeah even for linux enthusiasts, without archinstall, it is hard. at first. Then once you know what is expected it is easy. But the first time setting it up correctly is frustrating. Particularly if you forget to install intel-ucode.

azvasKvklenko , 9 months ago

funnily enough when that happened I didn’t realize as I was on systemd-boot 😅

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

Some people don’t like to associate Manjaro with Arch since it has different repos and a bad reputation

myersguy , 9 months ago

The different repos and bad reputation was my point 😉

If you didn’t want to try Arch due to instability, Manjaro is a funny choice. I was mostly kidding, anyhow.

Alpharius , 9 months ago

If you want to learn arch linux for the sake of learning about how to manually configure Linux yourself why not. However if you have done a minimal install of void linux (without xfce and bundled) you are not going to learn much.

Arch Linux can be great if you really want to customize your setup and have fun doing so. Arch can be great if you enjoy having a unique looking environment with an extensive wiki to help you doing so. However it is not the “best” unlike arch fans would say, pacman can have issues updating your system using the AUR and not being careful can sometimes lead you to annihilating your own OS at times (though I have heard that recent updates try to fix that). Besides the full customization it doesn’t have much for it.

Gentoo is epitome of customization where you compile your OS and chose specific versions (even binaries) of what you want. Void Linux is really fast with the xbps package manager being nearly as fast as pacman and its unique init system which makes it book under 5 seconds using a SSD NVMe. Fedora, Debian and Pop OS are the most used because of how simple and stable they are, and having the largest amount of support from non FOSS developers.

So f you want to have fun customizing your stuff without having to compile everything: sure why not. Otherwise just try something else.

adam , 9 months ago

IMHO arch is way too overrated. It does include a lot of stuff in the repos that others don’t have, but the benefit end there in my opinion. My experience on fedora has been way better.

GustavoM , 9 months ago

You make it sound like its a paid distro – just go ahead and give it a shot. Worst case scenario – you’ll learn lots of new things and will give your brain a few extra, healthy braincells. :')

myogg , 9 months ago

It is paid for, with your time ;)