Okay, I guess I’ve gotta play the crow here … Is Arch really such a bad choice for a beginner these days? Obviously building it the “proper” way would be a bad idea, but there are tons of Arch-based distros with GUI-installers. I currently run Garuda on both my personal devices and the install process really couldn’t have been easier, and almost everything worked out of the box. The stuff that needed tweaking was all minor and mostly related to this being my first foray into KDE in over a decade. Let’s face it - that’s a pretty high bar even on Windows systems these days.
Granted, the rolling release aspect means inevitably you’re gonna get a borked update that you have to revert, so that’s a stumbling point for a complete newbie. It’s not like that doesn’t sometimes happen on other distros though - or even Windows. On the other hand, the AUR means little or no manually compiling stuff. Plus, the best wiki in the community (even if you don’t use Arch). And gaming (at least on AMD) is rock solid.
Hell, I have a fifteen-year-old intern at my work (through his school). He’d had almost no exposure to Linux when he started with us, so as a learning project I had him set up Arch with Hyprland from the console. The little bugger did find the install script, but even then he had to learn a bunch of stuff and still had a running system in about an afternoon.
ANYWAY, I’m not saying that Arch should necessarily be the first distro for most beginners, just that it’s not as daunting as most people make it out to be.
Setting up a computer for Grandma? Mint.
Already something of a power-user in Windows? Depending on your use case, Arch is worth consideration.
Granted, the rolling release aspect means inevitably you’re gonna get a borked update that you have to revert, so that’s a stumbling point for a complete newbie. It’s not like that doesn’t sometimes happen on other distros though - or even Windows.
People post things like this constantly and I feel like I’m living on a different planet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Windows install needing to be reverted through no fault of the user.
I am a sysadmin and believe me when I say that happens. Mostly due to updates.
Within that updates that just plainly break things. E.g. deleting the users files. Or other updates which only break some PCs. (those are fun to diagnose) E.g. if the recovery partiton created by its own installer is suddenly to small. and I also had it more than a few times that Windows pulled in a driver “update” which broke things. One time it even tried to apply the wrong driver! I have now disabled all driver updates trough windows on all PCs I manage.
Rarely PCs also just suddenly refuse to boot, being caught in a recovery loop. After trying two times for hours to find the reason and only one success I don’t care anymore and just restore a working backup in that case. Mind that (nearly) all users do not have admin rights.
On Linux? I had it that release upgrades broke things, but only once several years ago on the PCs where I wait till the official release is made. On my own ones I am often to feature hungry to wait until after the beta, and I know I can fix things.
I had one 12 year old PC where X11+KDE got unstable after a release upgrade, thankfully a switch to Wayland solved this.
Besides that? Never had any issue I didn’t cause myself and never had a running system which suddenly broke.
Granted I do not administer as many Linux PCs as Windows ones. But there are a few, some of them also in the hands of users.
I’ve had more windows updates breaking stuff than I had arch updates breaking stuff, that’s for sure. I think it’s frankly laughable that a paid OS has problems such as that.
There are some updates that broke stuff on Windows. Like that one which broke all those HP printers for a lot of people.
The thing is that it is kind of impressive how little it happens seeing the sheer amount of users. And normally Microsoft is quite quick to release an other update to fix it.
Okay, I guess I’ve gotta play the crow here … Is Arch really such a bad choice for a beginner these days? Obviously building it the “proper” way would be a bad idea, but there are tons of Arch-based distros with GUI-installers. I currently run Garuda on both my personal devices and the install process really couldn’t have been easier, and almost everything worked out of the box. The stuff that needed tweaking was all minor and mostly related to this being my first foray into KDE in over a decade. Let’s face it - that’s a pretty high bar even on Windows systems these days.
Granted, the rolling release aspect means inevitably you’re gonna get a borked update that you have to revert, so that’s a stumbling point for a complete newbie. It’s not like that doesn’t sometimes happen on other distros though - or even Windows. On the other hand, the AUR means little or no manually compiling stuff. Plus, the best wiki in the community (even if you don’t use Arch). And gaming (at least on AMD) is rock solid.
Hell, I have a fifteen-year-old intern at my work (through his school). He’d had almost no exposure to Linux when he started with us, so as a learning project I had him set up Arch with Hyprland from the console. The little bugger did find the install script, but even then he had to learn a bunch of stuff and still had a running system in about an afternoon.
ANYWAY, I’m not saying that Arch should necessarily be the first distro for most beginners, just that it’s not as daunting as most people make it out to be.
Setting up a computer for Grandma? Mint.
Already something of a power-user in Windows? Depending on your use case, Arch is worth consideration.
I haven’t had an arch update break shit in almost a decade.
People post things like this constantly and I feel like I’m living on a different planet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Windows install needing to be reverted through no fault of the user.
I am a sysadmin and believe me when I say that happens. Mostly due to updates. Within that updates that just plainly break things. E.g. deleting the users files. Or other updates which only break some PCs. (those are fun to diagnose) E.g. if the recovery partiton created by its own installer is suddenly to small. and I also had it more than a few times that Windows pulled in a driver “update” which broke things. One time it even tried to apply the wrong driver! I have now disabled all driver updates trough windows on all PCs I manage. Rarely PCs also just suddenly refuse to boot, being caught in a recovery loop. After trying two times for hours to find the reason and only one success I don’t care anymore and just restore a working backup in that case. Mind that (nearly) all users do not have admin rights.
On Linux? I had it that release upgrades broke things, but only once several years ago on the PCs where I wait till the official release is made. On my own ones I am often to feature hungry to wait until after the beta, and I know I can fix things. I had one 12 year old PC where X11+KDE got unstable after a release upgrade, thankfully a switch to Wayland solved this. Besides that? Never had any issue I didn’t cause myself and never had a running system which suddenly broke. Granted I do not administer as many Linux PCs as Windows ones. But there are a few, some of them also in the hands of users.
I’ve had more windows updates breaking stuff than I had arch updates breaking stuff, that’s for sure. I think it’s frankly laughable that a paid OS has problems such as that.
I did bork Windows 10 after a big fall update
Also, sometimes Windows can stuck in an endless loop while updating, forcing user to force restart. Consequences may vary…
There are some updates that broke stuff on Windows. Like that one which broke all those HP printers for a lot of people.
The thing is that it is kind of impressive how little it happens seeing the sheer amount of users. And normally Microsoft is quite quick to release an other update to fix it.