kasdeya
kasdeya
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I love how Arch can just be like “oh btw I’m missing this extremely basic functionality because you didn’t explicitly tell me to install the package that includes it. how were you supposed to know to install the package? the fun part is you weren’t”
“how are you supposed to figure out that this problem means you need a package, and the exact name of the package to install? idk try googling for 20-30 minutes and maybe a random website will help you”
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still not sure if I hate Arch in particular or Linux in general but I certainly hate something about this situation and it’s mostly the smug assumption that every single user has learned this shitty-ass distro so deeply that they just Know every single package in the entire repo by heart, when the only way to browse the repo is through arcane bullshit commands like pacman -Ss that often dump thousands of unfilterable lines to my terminal
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if you can’t learn everything you need in order to use a piece of software by:
- following a tutorial
- then, reading the documentation as-needed
that software is a piece of shit. straight in the garbage. light the garbage on fire. go directly to hell
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FoolishOwl
foolishowl@social.coop@kasdeya The little I've tried Arch, I thought the point of it was having to work out how and why other distros packaged things as they did so you could make your own choices.
Which I could see the appeal of, as a next level of DIY, but I found in practice I was just looking up docs so I could do things the way Debian did them, so it wasn't the level I wanted to be on.
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@kasdeya yeah, it gets talked about like it's a universal ideal, but like realistically arch is mostly a good fit for hobbyists who *want* to spend a bunch of time tweaking and building up their system from bare-bones
like, we liked it because it felt like an invitation to learn more, but we were coming into arch having spent five years customizing, breaking, and troubleshooting ubuntu before that — we already had opinions on what our desktop environment needed or didn't need, and we were eager to fill gaps in our knowledge by building something half-finished and living with it for a few months
but in actuality that's less of an invitation and more of a requirement with arch
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tempest
tempest@social.treehouse.systemsShow content
@kasdeya this is also why we don't recommend nixos as a general use distro — it's in a similar spot of "most useful if you already have strong opinions and also a willingness to do a bunch of maintenance work"
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@tempest that extremely makes sense tbh
I’ve been thinking about trying a different distro instead of Arch. someone recommended Linux Mint and I can’t remember who that was, but apparently it’s a lot more user-friendly. but with that said, I also don’t want to put in even more work on installing and configuring a whole new distro and learning its quirks too lol. but I might do that if Arch keeps annoying me or if it suddenly breaks itself again
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@kasdeya yeah mint is a very reasonable out-of-install experience, and cinnamon is a pretty good desktop environment yeah
we've helped two friends install and do minor tweaks to it in the last few months (neither of which are programmers) and so far as we've heard it's worked out pretty well. it's also the distro our mom has been using for a few years (though she can always bug our dad for immediate troubleshooting if needed)
we've also heard good things about fedora, but don't have as much familiarity with it as we've not needed to support it in any capacity since our college job
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i eat beees 
ieatbeees@tech.lgbt
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@kasdeya at least on fedora/redhat-derived distros you have dnf search, which is good if you know roughly what you're looking for but not the exact package name
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@foolishowl @kasdeya yes. In my experience, Arch works when you disagree with how other distros do things because Arch let's you do a variety setups to your liking. Though it requires you to read up documentation and Google stuff and read the Arch Wiki a lot... Just to setup, run and maintain your system. Because you have the job of that maintenance. While just going with the way another distro does things that leaves you with just you custom configurations and your specific applications tends to be a nicer experience.
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