Arch Linux

Arch Linux Tux

Member

Registered: 2017-04-01

Posts: 36

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

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)

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I find every text with bold and italic emphasis easier to read

sleek69

Member

From: Cheshire, UK

Registered: 2025-03-20

Posts: 1

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

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

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"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." — Edsger W. Dijkstra
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666threesixes666

Member

Registered: 2015-01-08

Posts: 3

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

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

Member

From: Greece

Registered: 2025-05-05

Posts: 7

Website

Re: Is Arch Linux hard?

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 (Yesterday 18:49:55)