Is Arch Linux hard?

Arch Linux Tux · 2025-02-03 14:59:37

Awebb wrote:

Arch Linux Tux wrote:
I think it's best to start out with an easy distribution like MINT or Kubuntu.
But yeah for someone wanting to learn linux Arch Linux is the easiest way (on a hard journey)!
This doesn't make any sense. Is it hard or not? What is actually preferable and why?

It does make sense as it is formulated as a paradox on purpose. Just read it twice.

On Arch Linux the extensive documentation is preferable as you can learn a lot about linux from it.
Further its attribute to be highly configurable enables for a long learning journey naturally!
So by using Arch Linux you learn about Linux more than on beginner distributions like Kubuntu...

They say the hard way was easier.

Last edited by Arch Linux Tux (2025-02-07 19:41:26)

sleek69 · 2025-03-20 22:04:04

Arch is only "hard" if you haven't installed a linux distro before and aren't familiar with the options available at installation.

666threesixes666 · 2025-05-01 14:43:59

sekret wrote:

I'd find distros like debian or derivatives much harder, because what if I want to install some small software within the package manager but that software isn't provided in the official repos? In arch, it's super easy to create a package! So it's super easy to install everything the way it's supposed to be.
After many many years with arch this is the biggest reason to stick with arch. I'd love to give other distros a try, e.g. because they are more secure or because they are based on musl instead of glibc, but then I always think: What if I want a piece of software they don't provide?

hi im from the gentoo community, im starting to toy with the idea of arch since funtoo buckled and folded into macaronios. how to get a piece of software is you compile it! you manually satisfy dependencies and compile the package. LFS and BLFS have manual compilation instructions to get you familiar with it. when you're good enough with manual compiling you can then run more difficult distributions like slackware. debian is a cake walk, you just install the dev packages of the dependencies of the target package you're compiling. if you don't add prefix=/usr it will place binaries in /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin so you can keep locally compiled packages separate from distro official stuff.

gentoo has the ability to tune every package for all sub-architecture optimizations to squeeze all performance out of the chip which can be significant in compute cluster settings.

gefyrotos · 2025-05-12 18:45:47

For a Linux newbie like me It's harder than most other popular distros but that's a consequence of the focus of the project and I don't find that bad. It's a hobbyist/enthusiast distro and I appreciate that, it's why I switched over from Fedora.

That said, with LLMs today you can figure things out a lot faster. They help me a ton when trying to understand or configure what something does. They're not a replacement for man pages and forums but rather a complementary tool.
To give you an idea, figuring out Arch today with their help is a lot easier for me than figuring out Ubuntu ten years ago when I tried tinkering with it. The information is out there in forums and wikis but shifting through all that information and fitting everything together can be extremely time consuming.

In any case though, after figuring out how to install Arch, setting up a DE, a firewall, Octopi, an AUR helper and a pacdiff pacman hook there isn't really anything harder than any other distro. At least in my limited experience thus far.

Last edited by gefyrotos (2025-05-12 18:49:55)

gehenna14 · 2025-05-21 11:50:13

Arch is hard if you can't read and follow instructions
If you can read and follow instructions (and are familiar with Linux on a very basic level) it is very easy to install but you should know what you want on your system too
I can install arch in maybe half an hour and then I spend the next 2 hours installing what I want/need onto the base system and reading ArchWiki articles.
And I am someone who struggles to properly follow instructions and says dumb crap without thinking, so if it isn't hard for me it shouldn't be hard for anyone with an IQ above 100.

maintain_class · 2025-07-02 11:11:46

"Arch is only hard, if you don't know what you're doing"

gnuvet · 2025-08-05 16:11:16

I was introduced to linux in 2010 with an Ubuntu live CD. Then I changed many distros. I would say Slackware is more harder than Arch. Arch is strong with a wiki and pacman and AUR/yay.

LunarEdge · 2025-08-31 06:59:46

The way I see it, Arch has been much easier to use than other distros. I can understand the install could be challenging if you don't have a background in computers and / or understand the fundamentals of what's going on, but now that Archinstall is available, I have to say, that argument is dated.

I've found Arch to have by far the best documentation, it's clear, concise and very easy to pinpoint issues.

Vamp898 · 2025-09-02 13:38:43

At my work place, i am the one responsible for training youngsters who want to get into IT.

They do a GNU/Linux basics course first learning the concepts of virtual terminal, access rights, file system on UNIX Systems and so on, you know, the basics.

The next thing they do is build LFS and yes. People who never used Linux before and just recently learned the bare basics to move around a linux system are going to learn LFS. At my work place, all systems are Gentoo machines so as soon they finished building the LFS, they ""upgrade"" it to Gentoo and then continue using Gentoo and learn how things like Webservers work and so on.

And by this experience i can tell you, no distribution is hard when you know how it works. To know how it works, you have to learn it.

So if Arch is hard depends on "Did you learn how to use it". If you did not, its hard. If you did, its not. Its as simple as that.

But i teached several people who never used Linux in their live before on how to use it by letting them built LFS and i can tell you, its not that hard. As long you have the capability to read documentation and someone who answers your questions that arise while doing so, its a 1-week job. All new trainees have to build LFS in 1 week.

For me personally, Arch is insanely easy and simple. It is the distro i fire up when i do not want any work and an "Just works" system. Like my mobile PC that i only use every few months when i need a mobile system, that one runs Archlinux because i have to do almost no maintenance on it. It just works.

But as soon it gets to AUR, Archlinux is going to get cumbersome. While most other systems like Gentoo and FreeBSD have easy tools that integrate such stuff into the core system, AUR feels very much like an afterthought attachment and using anything in AUR feels like a workaround.

AUR is complex and complicated for all the wrong reasons. You open the documentation and you get recommended 20 tools to easily use it all with their advantages and disadvantages and AUR is just a giant mess. As long you do not need anything from AUR, Archlinux is insanely simple.

As soon you need just one package from AUR, it gets very painful and workaroundy. I assume that is where Archlinux looses the most newbies.

I personally also think the documentation is way too cumbersome at times.

"I want a tool that does X"

99% in the Linux world use Tool Y for that job, but Archlinux will act like there are 20 tools which are all equally used and all have a good reason why you should check out their 100 page documentation and test all of them to find, which best fits your need. Its an exaggeration but if 99% in the Linux world use Tool Y for job X, the documentation should clearly state that, focus on that tool and maybe then provide an appendix explaining other tools and not act like the other tools are as important.

But i get and understand why they do it. Sure, 1% of people do not want to use BASH, lets show them 20 shells they might use instead. Its actually a cool thing but most users just want to know how to use BASH and not learn 20 alternatives on the way doing so.

But again, i am exaggerating^^ its not that bad but the FreeBSD documentation for example is significantly better than the Archlinux documentation too a certain extend. If there is someone new to Linux, he is completely lost with the Arch Documentation.

"You need a bootloader to continue. Here are 20 bootloaders. Only 1 will really work, all the others are experimental hack-fest but find that out on your own". Just tell them to install grub and be done, please. Yes, its not the whole picture, but people who need the documentation to install archlinux are obviously not in the position to judge which is the best bootloader for them. They are most likely first time users and people who know what grub is and know they do not want it, are fine with a side note and a link to alterantives.

So Archlinux is insanely easy and simple if you have existing GNU/Linux knowledge and know how GNU/Linux Systems are built/setup, but if you're an newby, the documentation is as cryptic as being written in a foreign language.

But i personally prefer the "Learn how it works from the basics" approach. So installing something like Mint and then stripping it down takes way more time and is more confusing than starting with Arch and building it up because then you know what you did and why you did it. Find out what others did and why they did it is much more complicated and cumbersome.

Last edited by Vamp898 (2025-09-02 14:02:52)

seth · 2025-09-02 15:05:11

AUR is complex and complicated for all the wrong reasons. You open the documentation and you get recommended 20 tools to easily use it all with their advantages and disadvantages and AUR is just a giant mess.

aur clone zen-browser-bin # local aur functions, this oneliner just spares me to enter the complete git path when cloning the package
cd /tmp/AUR/zen-browser-bin # could warp me there but that feels wrong
moar PKGBUILD # moar is an alias for a pimped less, mandatory step
makepkg -si
zen-browser # looks very interesting indeed

No weird 3rd party tools involved.

Sure, 1% of people do not want to use BASH

pacman -Syu zsh # you can thank me later

most users just want to know how to use BASH

https://ryanstutorials.net/bash-scripting-tutorial/ - I don't think this is covered in the archlinux wiki at all.

Vamp898 · 2025-09-02 15:12:23

seth wrote:

AUR is complex and complicated for all the wrong reasons. You open the documentation and you get recommended 20 tools to easily use it all with their advantages and disadvantages and AUR is just a giant mess.
aur clone zen-browser-bin # local aur functions, this oneliner just spares me to enter the complete git path when cloning the package
cd /tmp/AUR/zen-browser-bin # could warp me there but that feels wrong
moar PKGBUILD # moar is an alias for a pimped less, mandatory step
makepkg -si
zen-browser # looks very interesting indeed
No weird 3rd party tools involved.
Sure, 1% of people do not want to use BASH
pacman -Syu zsh # you can thank me later
most users just want to know how to use BASH
https://ryanstutorials.net/bash-scripting-tutorial/ - I don't think this is covered in the archlinux wiki at all.

As long the package has no other dependencies in AUR, otherwise you are checking out 20 (i use that number often recently) repositories and either have to start writing scripts managing all those git repos (you usually want updates) or use a 3rd party tool.

Almost all packages i use from AUR have dependencies in AUR and checking out tons of repos and updating them on a frequency base and rebuilding them is insane. Every other Distro that has a similar build system has a better solution for this scenario, the best example is Gentoo. Their AUR is called GURU

eselect repository enable guru
emerge -av labwc

_That_ is simple. And if Gentoo is simple compared to Arch, something is wrong^^ it gets updated with emerge --sync and it just overlays the existing main repo and extends it and you build packages the same way as you would with the main repository. It basically blends together and gets transparent.

Also AUR is kinda messy. More than 1/5 of the packages in AUR _never_ got updated and from my personal experience, roughly 1/2 of AUR, if not more, doesn't even build and is just broken. From a pure user perspective, from everything that exists in Archlinux, AUR has the worst usability.

And yes, i know, its optional but even Anki (Everyone who is learning a foreign language is using Anki) is in AUR. I do not know one single Archlinux User who does not need packages from AUR. I would understand if it would be used solely for some obscure packages and stuff or closed-source garbage, but even the tools to manage AUR are in AUR.

Last edited by Vamp898 (2025-09-02 15:32:19)

seth · 2025-09-02 19:01:08

Neither anki nor anki-bin require depend on further AUR packages…

For gentoo it's slightly different because there's no process difference, the AUR requires you to build packages (in doubt from source), the repos are just download and extract.
idk how GURU relates to the gentoo repos, but if the recipes there are vetted, there's really no difference at all and if they're not, the process actually would better not be that simple.

The main, important and critical difference between the AUR and the repos is that the repos are benign until proven different and the AUR is malign until proven different.
That's the single most issue w/ the various pacman wrapping AUR helpers - they happily gloss over the fact that you cannot just install stuff from the AUR and expect that to not be a virus (see recent incidents), because it's user-to-user.
It is NOT a weird extension of the archlinux distribution, but a service for users to share their own PKGBUILD with each other.
Repeat after me: THE AUR IS NOT PART OF ARCHLINUX!

Other than that there're countless 3rd party repos and if you decide to trust the maintainer of one, you can add that to your pacman.conf and use packages from there just the same.

I'll also point out that you're complaining that arch offers too many alternatives (because it's a DYI distro) but then turn around and complain that there's not enough stuff in the repos, make up your mind

Arch Linux

#26 2025-02-03 14:59:37

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#27 2025-03-20 22:04:04

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#28 2025-05-01 14:43:59

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#29 2025-05-12 18:45:47

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#30 2025-05-21 11:50:13

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#31 2025-07-02 11:11:46

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#32 2025-08-05 16:11:16

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#33 2025-08-31 06:59:46

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#34 2025-09-02 13:38:43

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#35 2025-09-02 15:05:11

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#36 2025-09-02 15:12:23

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

#37 2025-09-02 19:01:08

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

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