if you want to try Linux don’t use Arch it’s a trap. I’ve heard Linux Mint is good instead

also make one big partition don’t have a separate /home partition

@kasdeya yeah separating /home is basically only helpful if you're planning to change distros a lot . . . also yes arch is the noob trap of linux

@tempest yeah I honestly thought that 32 GB for my / would be plenty of space but it all filled up so fast T_T I’m still going to have to resize it at some point probably but I have time to do that now thanks to you 💙

@kasdeya oh you use Arch for non-educational purposes, thats why you rant so much, ahh

@kasdeya this is solid advice wish somebody told me sooner

people think keeping a separate home partition let's your switch or upgrade distros without losing your config. what happens in practice your is that your home folder rots over time with thousands of config files silently created by applications from who knows when.

this is especially bad for gnome and kde whose config files are a mess and they keep changing the format all the time...

@kasdeya
i don’t think this is true anymore. one, cinnamon is still in the middle of the wayland transition and in my experience using it can lead to worse performance in some games if that’s your interest. at least, that’s the only hypothesis i’ve got for the large handful of people i know who’ve gotten far better performance on arch than on mint.

two, Arch is really not unstable. don’t get me wrong- installing it is still a bitch, but once it’s installed and you have a desktop up, it’s nearly plug-and-play. I’ve been responsible for helping a good few people transition to Linux, and i’ve tried Mint, Fedora KDE after i found that Mint hampers performance in games, KDE Neon after i found out that Fedora KDE has copious Nvidia issues, but then that had issues with Snap and with some things people needed being unavailable in Discover… and after those people went to other people, those people set them up with Arch. No further issues.

It’s the basis for SteamOS, a commercial system for a reason- it’s a bitch to install, but if you can use Arch, use Arch. Get help installing it from someone who knows what they’re doing. It works. I fell for the fearmongering of “ARCH IS HARD AND SCARY” for so long, but the moment you’re done with the install script, it’s genuinely the most stable experience you’re going to get, and that’s why Valve themselves use it.

Granted, this discussion won’t matter even a bit once SteamOS is open release, because that’ll be the “Noobs, install this” distro.

@kasdeya Actually no- i won’t mislead, it requires a couple steps after install specifically to get Flathub working. just pointing it out since i feel like the “pacman can only be used in terminal” thing will come up.

(which, not to be snobby, but that hasn’t exactly been an issue either, everyone i’ve shown how to use linux so far has done just fine with pacman or apt- granted, these are people who wanted to switch, and were willing to put in the thought, so it won’t be true of everyone, but still.)

@celestia @kasdeya Is the home config rotting all that important doe, my home is a mess that I've been keeping for 4 years but I haven't had any problems with things working weird, also been a kde user for one of those years i think

What am tryina say is that the common person who doesn't know or care about dotfiles won't suffer much? Maybe it's a "it works on my machine" argument, idk

@kasdeya

Granted, none of this is to say that Arch is a choice that should be made lightly, because at bare minimum it requires a support friend available. But the “noobs should never ever use Arch” thing is genuinely just dated at this point, and it’s going to- and, for the people i’ve helped, has- led to worse experience with other distros.

It honestly might be worth some noobs holding off entirely ‘til SteamOS, or if they’re switching for the sake of Windows 10 EoL, Linux Mint is a reasonable enough middle transition ‘til SteamOS is open release. I don’t think it’s completely idea, but it’s never outright broken like Fedora has, and doesnt have the usability issues Ubuntu/Neon have.

Overall though, Arch is already the stablest experience- if not always the simplest- most people can have, and once SteamOS comes out Arch is just going to be the future of desktop Linux. period.

@buncube the main problem that I’m having with Arch is pacman. it’s a pain to look up the specific command-line flags that I have to use to do anything. if I wait too long between updates then I get a pretty arcane error message about GPG keys and I have to go to someone for help so they can find the weird pacman command that fixes it. if I get one letter wrong then I can break stuff. also there’s some blog somewhere and I can never remember where it is, but I have to read it every time I update things or stuff might get silently broken (which happened to me in the past). idk it just sucks for me to use - there are so many secret footguns that can bork things if I don’t memorize a bunch of weird rules (and Arch never bothered to tell me about the footguns or the rules - my friends had to let me know)

also installing Arch in the first place is very technical and very error-prone, even with the install script. I don’t know if a beginner could manage it (I was able to on a virtual machine after a fair bit of trial-and-error, but even then it took several hours)

I’ve heard that Linux Mint is a distro that “just works”, though I’ve never tried it. so assuming that’s the case it sounds a lot better than my experience with Arch

@buncube also omg I had no idea that Flathub existed, and I wish that Arch had done something to proactively tell me that it did - or maybe even had it preinstalled

@kasdeya @buncube
My (absolutely limited and very personal) experience in years of distro hopping is that a functional Arch (-ish) environment is more versatile and less error prone than many presumed easier distros.

Yes, it’s hard to set up (it’s been worse) but once you’re fine with your initial setup, you’ll be able to do more stuff than in other distros without hitting some wall of unsupported things.

The issues? For me, two. First, Pacman is uselessly obscure. Second, it’s true that you can break stuff easily. Maybe upgrading too often or too rarely.

I now use a Debian machine and an arch one. I suffer more on the first.

@kasdeya Strange, i’ve never had these issues. Granted i update more frequently- at least every couple weeks, usually more often- but i only use four flags, -S, -Ss, -Rns, and -Syu and i never have issues

Granted, that’s not an excuse, “it works for me” is stupid, but maybe the issue with keys and whatnot is a mirror thing or something?

I definitely dont expect a beginner to manage archinstall lmao, my point is more just that when you have the right help, it’s the most stable option

@kasdeya Flathub is the SOLE THING powering the SteamOS app ecosystem, since it’s an immutable distro, and it’s incredibly popular on pretty much every distro, i’m surprised you didnt already know about it :p

@kasdeya @buncube mint is pretty damn good about proactively telling you about things :3

@CIMB4 that sounds amazing. I definitely want to try it at some point, since Arch is being a pain in the ass lol