Honestly I'm gonna go against what people usually say and say that Arch is better to start with than Ubuntu, as long as you're not afraid of command line or editing txt files. Whether it's Arch or Ubuntu, as a noob you're going to be doing a lot of wiki reading and copying and pasting of commands.
Personally though, a big difference between the two I found is that after a couple of years of copying and pasting commands in Ubuntu, I still didn't really understand anything about how Linux works behind the scenes. Whereas Arch had me feeling like I too could be a sysadmin, if I felt like it, within a week.
And maybe things are different these days with Ubuntu, it's been a few years, but I find that Arch has a way more enthusiastic and helpful user base. And the Arch wiki is practically a bible. Whereas searching for problems and solutions in Ubuntu can feel a bit like searching for problems and solutions in Windows, where you'll probably get copy pasted generic solutions or someone telling you to restart your PC.
Arch as a first distro is an interesting choice.
But likely fr better than my first distro, Slackware.
I had known about the Church of the Subgenius and then heard that there was a Linux distro based on that...
At the time, the wikis were not really up to the task...
These days I run Mint on my writing laptop, and unfortunately am back to Windows on my gaming rig.
But might swap back to Gaurda for gaming...
I feel like with the Arch distributions like EndeavourOS and CachyOS it's a lot easier nowadays.
I agree with you for a hobby OS. Like if somebody wants to learn and knows generally how to back up what they don't want to lose, Arch is invaluable! I'm currently enjoying EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop for how newb-friendly the community is.
If someone just wants a working machine that allows them to dabble if they're feeling it, Mint is good for that. Not everyone's gotta be a sysadmin right?
I personally feel like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great balance though.
It works, yet it rolls, and you can still mess around if you want. Although it's sometimes frustrating when it does things differently than Arch or Ubuntu and the advice is scant... But I guess that's it's own learning experience!
I occasionally make a project out of learning things like compiling software, but it doesn't demand too much maintenance when I just need to get stuff done.
Thata how i learnt. Arch + i3. Broke it a couple times, but learnt alot
Same here! College friends spent hours late night helping me install and configure Arch + i3 on an old MacBook, going crazy trying to get wifi working. Great memories
Same. Time Shift was a god send in those first few months. But that was the only way I was going to learn...
Thank God they didn't try to install open BSD
I've been playing with Bazzite
Bazzite is so good, especially on the Steam Deck. I did run with Arch for awhile, but ended up switching back to Bazzite when I realized that all I ended up doing was recreating Bazzite in Arch. KDE 6 with all the gaming essentials pre-configured is just so nice.
As someone who currently uses Windows 10 w/ NVIDIA hardware and a destain for W11, I'm definitely liking Bazzite.
Apparently though DirectX games don't perform as well as well compared to Windows though. At least heard from an ROG Ally Bazzite vs windows comparison I saw on YouTube
I switched from Windows to Mint this week and I'm also that derpy dragon
Heh. I just went from a Chromebook to mint.
Honestly baffled by the basics. Currently youtubing how to mount a NFS share from (on?) my NAS.
Not 100% sure if there's an easy-mode for this one but just a friendly reminder to copy fstab to
fstab.oldorfstab.backupso you can revert to it if something doesn't go right. :)
Are you me?! Also just migrated to Mint, and I'm really impressed. Good level of polish, and stuff just works out of the box.
Currently still have it on dual boot, I'll give it a week or two and I don't need Windows in that time I'll move it to my main M2 SSD and ditch M$
So... actually (put on fedora hat) it's a GREAT way to learn!
What I do NOT recommend though is distro hopping with your data and your daily life setup. Namely the safest to learn is main system is stable, easy to setup and fix, you're comfortable with even if you are not "proud" to claim it on Lemmy BUT the weird stuff you do on the side, it's on a dedicate harddrive (ideally not even partition, just so that you can even mess that up) and you go LinuxFromScratch of whatever rock your boat knowing your data is safe and if you fuck up you can still go on with your day.
This is great advice. Heed this advice, people.
Know what? I'll add to it. In Windows a power user will often end up screwing around in the registry or system files or whatever to crowbar it into doing what they want it to do...
But if you're opening a root shell or file-explorer screwing around outside your
/homefolder, digging around in/? On your daily use machine?STOP. ☠️
- FACT:
PeopleSystems have died and data has been irrecoverably lost by going into this cave. - There's probably a much less dangerous way to accomplish whatever you're trying to do!!
- You shouldn't be poking around things and exploring a working system as ROOT! This is by design!
GO. NO. FURTHER!
These sorts of shenanigans are why you play around in virtual machines. :)
--Sincerely: Someone who manually deleted his writable in-use BTRFS snapshot when trying to free up space, thinking it was an orphan file that the system tools didn't detect, rendering his system unbootable and unrecoverable, forcing a complete reinstall. (I found this is analogous to the infamously dangerous "rm -rf /" , or thinking you're deleting an old Windows restore point but somehow wiping
C:\)If you don't know what "3-2-1 backup" means. Now's the time to look that up!
- FACT:
Everyone is a bit lost at first... That's the first step to becoming an expert.
Great that you're trying to learn something new!
Everyone's welcome to the party pal
I started messing with Linux, then became a developer. Whatever draws your interest!
So the next step is to take up farming?
You say that, but try getting help on StackExchange when you clearly don't know what you're doing.
Stackx might not be the best place for Linux help. Can be a pretty unforgiving place.
Lemmy is a lot more friendly and people will try to help you out, even if you don't know what your doing.
The first step to being really good at something is being willing to be really bad at something while you practice.
'Suckin' at somethin is the first step being sorta good at something' - Jake the dog
After over a decade of using it exclusively at home and partially at work I still googled how to add users to a group last week.
Well yeah. You barely use groups on a personal machine - maybe once and done for audio and VMs, depending on what distro you use - and at work you'd automate that shit, probably have it centralised.
I try to remember commands backwards by how they look(<command> <flags> <arguments>), if they are short, have capital letters and so on... Is that weird? If I give up I open the history file or my good ol' cheat sheet.
You need https://starship.rs/
Was it "groupadd" or "addgroup"...? I can never remember xD
usermod -aG group usermnemonic: user mod append groupgroupdel,groupadd
userdel,adduser
😆I ask AI for that
I'm old (not much, though) but back in my day it happened the same thing with people like me. Only that instead Arch+Hyprland it was Compiz Fusion+Beryl because the cube and the flames was the tits.
Also I just happen to be a graphic designer so hopefully this post of yours helps into letting die that idea that Linux is only for devs and sysadmins.
Conpiz fusion!.. I've created so many problems for myself trying to run it on ATI at the time.
Totally worth it :D
I switched from Windows to Linux last year, after switching from Linux to Windows back in 2007 or so. I was happy to find that not only is the wobbly window effect still available, it's available out-of-the-box on KDE without installing any other software. It has the cube effect and magic lamp effect when minimizing/unminimizing windows too.
It's also interesting that AMD went from having the worst Linux graphics driver (fglrx) to the best one. I have some graphical issues with my work PC and laptop (with Nvidia GPUs) that I don't have with my personal laptop (with AMD GPU).
I have a coworker who went from windows only to "i want to try self host a bunch of stuff"
Ran into lots of learning curves and problems
Conclusion? "Linux sucks! Too difficult!"
Everything I selfhost was easily setup with a simple compose file and various env files for each resource. What the heck was he trying to setup? I haven't used Windows in a long time, but I doubt they have anything as easy as a declarative file like compose.
Technically difficult thing is technically difficult, let's blame John Linux for not making a big red "host server" button.
Man. THANK YOU.
I'm all for welcoming and teaching everyone, but I'm getting real tired of all the "Linux will never catch on because grandma can't instantly VM-passthrough her NVIDIA card and remote in with Wireguard" or "changing the wallpaper requires terminal-ninja skills" rhetoric.
Some common things could use simpler on-ramps but people act like mega-corpo
you're-too-dumb-let-us-do-it-for-you-ification is some kind of "good thing" for tech adoption , when the strategy is really to create dependent customers without a fundamental understanding of how anything works.
Skill issue.
A more accurate Conclusion: "Just learn sincerely"
Oh well at least I know when something is over my head.
I started with Manjaro. Unfucking that system has taught me more than any "stable" distro could. It's all a matter of determination.
Welcome to the party.
It's funny that they claim to be more stable than vanilla Arch because of their own repositories. My Manjaro installation broke itself very frequently after half a year of use. My Endeavour now is much more stable and reliable.
Endeavour is just freaking lovely. The community is really chill and welcoming, too.
Also all the ethereal purple space aesthetic is rad. We gotta get them some proper artwork haha. (Some of it seems generated)
I ditched kubuntu for endeavor on my htpc because it was more stable.
😆 I gave up as soon as I lost my GUI
I tried like three times to daily drive linux before it finally stuck.
Three steps for me.
- Linux on a laptop
- Dual boot on my main pc.
- Full switch done in spite after windows nuked my linux partition.
Haha nice! Similar journey! My step 3 was when Win10 kept BSODing my games, and then being more subtly broken when I booted it up.
"Okay, I'll just 'refresh this PC'." I said.
"Can't." Said Win10.
"Why not?" Says I.
"Lol-idk" says Win10 with an indifferent shrug.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed runs all my creative artwork tasks AND all my games run beautifully. Just pointed Steam to the folder and it handled everything automagically.
Game doesn't crash anymore on the same hardware, BTW.
Tumbleweed my beloved. ❤️
My steps:
- Think about dual-booting
- Try to install Nobara as dual-boot
- Fuck up Windows install
- Too lazy to reinstall Windows 5.???
- Now own Steam Deck, have old ThinkPad and PC running Fedora
Not dissimilar - my three steps.
- Ran away from vista.
- Get a job at Microsoft and figured I should learn how to use a core product again (Windows 10).
- Dual boot for years (you never know when you will need to wake up the windows for some random task), until Win 11 and recall...
Me too. My final reason to not go back to windows was that I realized I didn't actually really care for the games I played with restrictive anti cheat and was only playing them because they were popular.
Now I just play games that I consciously acknowledge I'm enjoying playing, and that has been great for mental health as well.
This is the way.
I've been playing with Linux for almost 20 years and only wiped my windows partition maybe 2 years ago. I figured I can run a windows VM on my Proxmox rig, but I haven't had the need to yet (probably helps that I'm not big into gaming).
We are not all devs/sysadmins. For a long time thought I didn't really know what I was doing, until one day someone had an issue running an old game and I looked at the error and could tell them how to fix it by editing the launch script.
Congratulations. Your a system admin. For real.
I've interviewed candidates for system admin jobs who had less exposure to managing Linux then this story.
Last Sunday I groggily ran an update on my EOS install, which promptly borked Plasma. Rolled back via timeshift which then destroyed my bootloader. Fired up a live USB, reinstalled the bootloader, peace was restored to the galaxy.
I'll be honest, the existential dread of losing a sunday to reinstalling my system was at the forefront of my mind most of the morning, but the sweet relief of booting into my system after all was said and done was fantastic.
Been using Linux for several decades now. I've always been able to throw in a floppy or a CD, or now a thumbdrive and just boot up and easily fix what's wrong. Plus it's rare to even have to do that. The times I've used Windows, when things go wrong, if it's not a simple fix, best you can do is format and reinstall. I have friends who are so numb to that. But they figure, they might as well since they'll just have have to format Windows and reinstall anyways because, Windows gets slower over time. I have one friend who had it on his calendar to just monthly reinstall Windows. I've never once thought, wow Linux is getting slow, let me format and reinstall. I mean, how can that even be an acceptable solution to anybody. Sure, if things just went sideways so badly and everything is corrupted, but that would be one hell of an extreme exception.
I'm an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh... twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that's what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.
Is nobara really more familiar territory than arch? I'd never heard of it before. Arch may not always hold your hand, but it's extremely well documented.
Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it's quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody's hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.
I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu's star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don't have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday's hiccup) Nobara was much closer to "it just works" out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.
I just use Linux mint because it looks nice and is user friendly and I'm mostly Linux illiterate. But I'm learning between that and SteamOS on my steam deck.
No shame in it.
At least you watched a video first, I just install shit and hope for the best lol
Same, a 15 minute video is way too long. I would rather spend 15 hours debugging
Same, a 15 minute video is way too long. I would rather spend 15 hours debugging
I want that on a shirt...but if I buy the shirt, I'm afraid of the burn when my life partner will probably set the shit out for me to wear on certain weekends...
The OG route. I started in 1995/96 and it was all groping around in the dark and hoping to find a helpful book at Borders.
Imo being a nerdy Linux enthusiast is pretty cool :3
(I use Arch btw)
Psssst. Lots of devs and sysadmins act like they know a lot more than they do. The more you seek to learn, the more you will realize the breadth of this gap.
There are untouchable wizards of knowledge who nobody knows. There are dipshit idiots who should have never been given sudo on their own network let alone for a fortune 500's domain controllers.
You'll never be the best. If you put in any effort, you'll never be the worst.
Don't worry, the road runs both ways.
Started using Linux in high school because Red Hat had a star trek game I liked. Now I'm a Sysadmin/Sysarch.
I'll give him a week, I'll give him 11 minutes
11 minutes to what?
I feel seen.
Thats how its done aww yeah
If you've got the drive to learn, there's no better way to learn than by doing, and there's a lot of doing in Arch, especially on your first couple of installs. Welcome to the club.
Yeah may I recommend using something simpler than arch. I would recommend Linux mint if u want something that's not gonna break every 15minutes and give u headache.
Thanks, I am liking the challenge at the moment.
This is how I feel a lot of times. But I did at least have the sense to go for Endeavour rather than straight to Arch (and prior to that, Manjaro and Ubuntu).
I went mint->manjaro->openSuseTW->Arch->endeavourOS
😄
