The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Trans Fat 41g]

Speaking of Linux Mint. How time flies, LMDE 7 is going to be ready this summer. Felt like version 6 came out just yesterday.

 

[Betonhaus]

Speaking of Linux Mint. How time flies, LMDE 7 is going to be ready this summer. Felt like version 6 came out just yesterday.

It can't come out until Trixie becomes the stable version, after that I haven't heard anything about them adding new features yet.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Arch outright despises my time

If the time it takes to install your system is all you care about for some reason. I would think you would love installing arch manually. If you actually know what you are doing you can literally boot into a new install in less than 5 minutes. You can see true autistic arch users speed running it, and booting into the new install in less than 2.

Not sure what you are doing where installing your OS is the most important measure of how good it is though.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

It can't come out until Trixie becomes the stable version, after that I haven't heard anything about them adding new features yet.

Yes, and Trixie comes out this year, hopefully meeting the May target.

Linux Mint Debian Edition releases seem to happen a month or two after a stable release.

 

[Slav Power]

Not sure what you are doing where installing your OS is the most important measure of how good it is though.

Because Arch is the only Linux distro that refuses to have a guided installer, and boasts it as a feature, not a detriment, while also boasting about actual positives for the average user like the AUR and the freshness of the packages over other distros. All of which ceases to matter to the average user when you're told to do manually what every other distro does for you in an easy way, just to get you to a working environment to install what you need and start using your computer.

Which, by the way, will be a big deterrent to Linux adoption when you tell people to install Arch, since it's rolling release guarantees better video game support, especially with Valve now officially contributing to Arch, and I know people make such recommendations in the wild, when what they encounter is not a guided installer like Calamares or Ubiquity, but some ass backwards "type out these commands one by one or use this script that's actually not as good so you should type out the commands" retardation. People just want to install an OS, not go through a course of how Linux works under the hood. If they want that, LFS is a thing.

Tell me a single advantage the average user has with Arch's manual installation over a guided installation like in Debian or Mint. There are none, and Arch's elitism of their oh so special manual installation process is elitist, pointless gatekeeping that no other distro does, nor is it necessary for Arch to run well.

Also, Gentoo is not an argument. Gentoo is designed to compile the packages yourself. Arch's packages are all precompiled, and it's manual installation process could be replicated with a script that'd end with an identical installation where those disclaimers on archinstall page wouldn't be needed.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

Because Arch is the only Linux distro that refuses to have a guided installer,

I think Arch does have a TUI guided installer. Gentoo allows you to install binary packages officially now too, and it can be used as a binary only distro. Actually, this was always the case if you use Gentoo with a binhost.

Arch's elitism of their oh so special manual installation process is elitist, pointless gatekeeping

It's not even elitist. Arch is made by volunteers with limited resources. They don't have to appeal to everyone, and since there are distros that exist that do - there is no reason to really complain. Again, there's nothing stopping you from making an installer for Arch (many people have because everything is open source) if you don't like their ways.

 

[Yandex Captcha Solver]

Because Arch is the only Linux distro that refuses to have a guided installer

It's had a guided installer for over a year now, baked into the official ISO. Run archinstall.

 

[DavidS877]

Tell me a single advantage the average user has with Arch's manual installation over a guided installation like in Debian or Mint. There are none, and Arch's elitism of their oh so special manual installation process is elitist, pointless gatekeeping that no other distro does, nor is it necessary for Arch to run well.

As someone who has compiled kernels and loaded them onto floppies and then copied binaries over one at a time and the needed libraries, and then copied a shell script over as /sbin/init. I personally have no desire to build my own shit any more. Give me a nice installer, let me select a few options and wander off and come back to a working system.

 

[Slav Power]

It's had a guided installer for over a year now, baked into the official ISO. Run archinstall.

Yes, I know. And I mentioned how it's shit. You can't do a manual partitioning for dual booting like you can with any Debian derivative, it's either wipe the entire partition or experience errors and be left with an unfinished installation you have to now clean up manually. It's hidden away behind a command and it's still all TUI that's somewhat unintuitive to use, even though you could at the very least copy Calamares in TUI. On top of all that, you will be treated as an exception when you use archinstall whenever you encounter issues with Arch in their communities, so in a way, you using the guided installer makes you a second class citizen. Also worth noting, Arch used to have a better installer script, but then they've abandoned it, told everyone to eat shit and use the guide, until someone bothered to make a worse script that is archinstall.

Arch is elitist. If it was a normal distro, you'd boot it up, you'd get a boot menu, and have a selection: GUI install and TUI install. One for 99% of people and one for 1% of die-hard Arch fans. Because once you get Arch installed, it's like any other distro, much like plain Debian. But they purposefully make the process to get there unnecessarily complicated and difficult for no real benefit while refusing to be like every other distro and have a graphical guided installer with gparted for manual dual boot partitioning, something I did plenty of times when playing with Linux, but is impossible to do on archinstall. I tried doing it manually once under a VM, and it wouldn't set up the bootloader properly, but if I did it with Debian, I'd have GRUB ready to go, and I'd take me less time to go through the guided installer than it took me to fruitlessly dual boot Arch. Again, why is it that every other distro had it figured out for years but Arch refuses to do the same?

Relevant Terry clip:

Arch's installation process is for idiots. The only distro that pulls this shit on you.

Arch is made by volunteers with limited resources.

So is Debian, and they have the installation process figured out. Not an argument. Most of Linux is made by volunteers, and oddly enough, a ton of those volunteers accomplish what Arch does.

 

[Zeftax]

Tell me a single advantage the average user has with Arch's manual installation over a guided installation like in Debian or Mint

It is certainly not for everyone, thankfully people have choices and can use whatever suits them. I prefer the arch way because you have real control and knowledge of what you set up and how, and, especially for the (interested) newbies it teaches them the basics of how to even work with linux. I like it that way, but I do mostly recommend mint (and sometimes zorin for gaming) to people because I know they do not care. Not because of some elitism, we just have different priorities, there are a load of things I don't want to even hear about that they like to do.

Relevant Terry clip:

I think just doing what you want without having to set up a bunch of needles shit (some of it behind your back) is the more simple option by the way.

 

[Slav Power]

It is certainly not for everyone, thankfully people have choices and can use whatever suits them. I prefer the arch way because you have real control and knowledge of what you set up and how, and, especially for the (interested) newbies it teaches them the basics of how to even work with linux.

You know what's a better distro for teaching Linux to newbies? Debian. Get them to install it without a DE and finish up the rest through the command line. No one, and I mean no one, needs to know how you install your OS to know how to work with it. I have no idea how Windows installs, yet I know all the intricacies of it just fine.

It's a nonsensical argument, since you only install Linux once, but you will constantly work with it afterwards, so learning how to work with Linux in the command line AFTER it's been installed is more beneficial to know how it gets installed. Where by the way, the Arch installation process only applies to Arch, every other distro will use different packages and methods during installation, so it's useless knowledge either way. Learning basics like how to navigate the FHS is more beneficial to a newbie and it's knowledge they'll find useful that'll carry over to every other distro, but you get essentially none of it when installing Arch. You only learn how Arch is installed.

 

[nut butter]

but you get essentially none of it when installing Arch. You only learn how Arch is installed.

I actually wish I could see what an abortion of an Arch install you managed to cook up that's got you sperging about the Arch install process to this point. It's not that hard to install Arch, the wiki is just guiding you through all the steps in any other Linux guided installation, except instead of clicking on your timezone or disk settings you type them into the command line.

To the point above, if you do know the steps to install arch from the wiki, you basically know how to fix issues like you're WM fucking up in another distro, and how to reinstall/set it up from the command line. I remember when Linus deleted his WM in that famous "using Linux for a month" challenge, and thinking that it was weird someone told him it was so hard to reinstall his desktop that he might as well reinstall the whole OS from scratch. Maybe it would have been for him, I don't know the details of that specific PopOS desktop bug and what all it deleted, but I'd at least be confident enough to give fixing my own install a try, and I'd probably have a pretty good chance even if I hadn't used Linux very much and just (successfully) installed Arch a few times.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

So is Debian, and they have the installation process figured out. Not an argument

It is considering its volunteers that determine what their priorities ought to be. Not random people on the internet who don't help the project. You could make your own distro if you're upset about how Arch project managers run their distro (like many people have dozens of times since there are dozens of Arch based distros). Again, that's how Linux works. It's why Debian exists in the first place. Complaining isn't going to get you anywhere. Especially when the issue you're complaining about is utterly pointless considering there are plenty of spin offs of Arch with guided, graphical installers you could easily use.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Because Arch is the only Linux distro that refuses to have a guided installer, and boasts it as a feature, not a detriment, while also boasting about actual positives for the average user like the AUR and the freshness of the packages over other distros. All of which ceases to matter to the average user when you're told to do manually what every other distro does for you in an easy way, just to get you to a working environment to install what you need and start using your computer.

Which, by the way, will be a big deterrent to Linux adoption when you tell people to install Arch, since it's rolling release guarantees better video game support, especially with Valve now officially contributing to Arch, and I know people make such recommendations in the wild, when what they encounter is not a guided installer like Calamares or Ubiquity, but some ass backwards "type out these commands one by one or use this script that's actually not as good so you should type out the commands" retardation. People just want to install an OS, not go through a course of how Linux works under the hood. If they want that, LFS is a thing.

Tell me a single advantage the average user has with Arch's manual installation over a guided installation like in Debian or Mint. There are none, and Arch's elitism of their oh so special manual installation process is elitist, pointless gatekeeping that no other distro does, nor is it necessary for Arch to run well.

Also, Gentoo is not an argument. Gentoo is designed to compile the packages yourself. Arch's packages are all precompiled, and it's manual installation process could be replicated with a script that'd end with an identical installation where those disclaimers on archinstall page wouldn't be needed.

there are idk how many arch based distros now, most are basically arch with the calemares installer. For people that want arch, and can't figure out how fdisk works. It's not hard to basically have arch.

It's the reason free software is great. If you want a niggerfied arch, well you have a lot of choices.

That said. I've ran the archinstall quite a few times the worst case scenario, it did fail. I just ran it a second time, and it finished fine.

I've also done a good bit of manual install's at this point, and if you just know how it works. It doesn't take any extra time, and I have a lot more freedom. If you are reading through the arch wiki to learn how, sure it might take a bit. In the end, I don't feel like knowing what is going on, at least a little bit, will hurt you. It can be helpful down the line, even if you aren't using arch.

Like when the stable distributions do update to a new release, and you have a bunch of shit on your system. If you somehow end up with a non bootable system, knowing how to install a bootloader, or update one is a big help.

Relevant Terry clip:

To me it's the opposite. A tty installation is as simple as it gets. A gui, with a bunch of added stuff is complexity. It's the reason I like arch. I have a simplified system. It doesn't have all the extra bullshit. I have a working base system, I add just the programs I want on top. It has a fast, and to me, easy to use package manager. I get up to date software without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. I like it that way. In my opinion, arch tends to work best that way. Not installing everything under the sun, though you can if you want, but just having the things you actually use.

 

[Local Trash Enthusiast]

>because Arch is the only Linux distro that refuses to have a guided installer

Not even close to true. For example Chimera Linix, a non-GNU Linux-BSD hybrid OS has no installer, supports a ton of architectures and has an installation process so vague Ive been completely filtered, lol.

https://chimera-linux.org/docs/installation

Its a fun distribution though! Its lean as hell. Its Alpine based iirc.

 

[Zeftax]

Specific examples of things considered harmful and not welcome:

• Far-right and adjacent movements, tankies, putinists and other equivalent authoritarian chuddery
• Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
• Complaining about SJWs
• Loud anti-systemd nonsense, dogmatic suckless/”minimalism”, cat-v, cryptocurrencies and other sketchy religious movements
• etc.

Not wanting bloat is now harmful lmao. Also, what is wrong with cat-v? I haven't heard of it before, tried looking it up and at a first glance it just looks like standard sperging not too different from anyone else that publically posts about IT.

 

[Lapsus of the bepsus]

To me it's the opposite. A tty installation is as simple as it gets. A gui, with a bunch of added stuff is complexity.

the NIGGER is deathly afraid of the command line. a WHITE MAN knows how to communicate with the machine using words, using a command line. it is the NIGGER who has to point and poke at pictures on the screen instead of reading and writing like an educated human bean
also lmao @ "the gol darned cli install is too complicated for me im a heckin retard yuh onah" and 5 seconds later "i want to do my dualboot partitioning setup manually and the installer is bad at it "

 

[Catter]

Because Arch is the only Linux distro that refuses to have a guided installer, and boasts it as a feature, not a detriment, while also boasting about actual positives for the average user like the AUR and the freshness of the packages over other distros. All of which ceases to matter to the average user when you're told to do manually what every other distro does for you in an easy way, just to get you to a working environment to install what you need and start using your computer.

arch has archinstall dough but it's shit

 

[WinRAR Free Trial]

Arch has probably the shittiest install process either way. Archfags simply cannot win.

 

[Slav Power]

Not wanting bloat is now harmful lmao

Minimalism is not for everyone, they're volunteers so they won't implement everything everyone wants, there are other distros if you don't want systemd etc etc.

the NIGGER is deathly afraid of the command line. a WHITE MAN knows how to communicate with the machine using words, using a command line. it is the NIGGER who has to point and poke at pictures on the screen instead of reading and writing like an educated human bean
also lmao @ "the gol darned cli install is too complicated for me im a heckin retard yuh onah" and 5 seconds later "i want to do my dualboot partitioning setup manually and the installer is bad at it "

I was this close to getting a working dual boot with Arch doing the manual install because archinstall simply cannot do it, but no matter what I did it refused to get a working UEFI boot partition despite following what the wiki said I should do. I manually partitioned the drive, formatted them and did all of it without destroying the Windows installation, since it was the only thing that archinstall couldn't do so I had to go the manual way. If every other distro can let you set up dual booting during the install, so should archinstall, instead of telling you to do it manually, then being mocked for being too stupid for Arch when something doesn't work.

I mean, thanks for confirming Arch is for elitists that overcomplicate shit for themselves just to feel superior I guess. As for the "I'm too stupid to use the command line" deflection:

I can use it both on Linux and Windows just fine, thank you very much. And yes, I do run a Proxmox box I SSH to instead of Windows Server, contrary to the popular belief I'm an overzealous Linux hater. Stop acting like it's some super esoteric gatekeep and a universal gotcha whenever someone criticizes Linux in any capacity.

arch has archinstall dough but it's shit

Yeah exactly, an afterthought and not a proper solution. It only works fine if you do a clean wipe install, and it misses some basic options like guided dual boot partitioning you can do when installing Debian derivatives. And even then, if it encounters any issue, it shits itself completely and leaves you with a broken install. Guess you should've been a galaxy brain and did it the Right Way™, or use a distro for toddlers! No we don't have to make archinstall better so that it can do what Debian's installer can, we'll just call you an idiot for expecting the installer would just work!

Again, it's retarded that they purposefully make installing Arch so complicated, because once you have a DE going you use it the exact same way as you would Debian, and it is a very nice distro by then, nicer than Debian since the packages are actually up to date, the default package selection is much better than on Debian, and even with those """bloated""" archinstall defaults you get a very lean base to build upon. It has all the markings of a great distro for intermediate users, all except for being able to just get it up and running as easily as any other distro.

But I guess Archfags need to relentlessly defend their unnecessarily difficult installation process and their half-assed installer or else they won't feel special in the Linux world.