I know this is satire but Arch is like the worst distro for a newbie...
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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Not for a newbie who wants to learn. Arch is actually not difficult at all, just time consuming. If you do a manual install, you have to read about every step and make choices.
Thats how you learn your system. After install, you know exactly what files you modified and where they are if you want to make further changes.
I think it's a beautiful system. Its not for people who just want a windows replacement though. It's for people who wants to know their system.
People don't realize the power that comes from actually knowing how your system works. It's the same as learning any skill. It gives a feeling of confidence and comfort.
Mint and Zorin have been flawless for me.
Installing Mint on my laptop actually fixed a longstanding issue with the speakers. They were working fine for ages on Wibdows, then some reason they just stopped working. Windows could not detect any speakers. It was to a point that I assumed hardware failure, and opened the laptop and traced the audio output to identify a blown sm cap or something, then gave up. It wasn't until I installed Mint and it made a startup noise that I was like "wtf" because I thought it would never speak again. Turns out windows was just borked.
Installing Zorin on an old thinkcentre desktop just worked perfectly, despite my deep suspicion. I got it set up to meet my workflow perfectly in less time than I would have spent reinstalling windows and getting it dialed in just the way I like.
Is Arch "better"? Maybe, to some people. Could I make it work? It's possible? Instead of tweaking arch to meet my requirements, could I rather spend my free time gardening or patting the cat? Absolutely.
I can use most any operating system. I can even enjoy most of them. Understand the “why” of it and even Apple has amazing answers to “we solved X by doing Y.”
Then there’s windows. It does things differently than everyone else, which does have merit in theory. But if you have had decades to prove your point and still haven’t….maybe you’re just fucking wrong.
They had us in the first 83%.
I agree with 1,2 and 3 but I don't really understand the remaining 2,
I've never across the 6 systems I've had, had windows brick an install to the point it no longer can restore/recover itself without me doing something really wrong (usually something stupid on the Linux partition). it's way of handling updates and upgrades is actually something I miss on my current system, with windows if it failed the update it rolled itself back, on Debian I gotta roll a snapshot,which isn't hard but takes longer and is manual.
I've also never had an issue with the UI not looking uniform, or at least anything worse than anything not Apple.
Every time I've come across this it's because windows restore points have been disabled for some reason, or the only restore point happens to be from when it was first installed. Other times it's been when there are 2 hard drives installed and it somehow shits the bed and installs the bootloader to one and the os to the other, or upgrades to one disk but leaves a half valid install on the other, then boots the old install. Generally getting confused about multiple disks
I once accidentally bricked a windows install by replacing the system font with another font, while calling it the same. The system crashed on boot, and apparently the recovery menu also uses the same file, because it instantly crashed too. Had to do a complete reinstall of that one...
On the UI not being uniform, you may not have noticed, but it's awful. They've fixed some stuff, but there was a point with win11 when 40% of the apps were light theme when you had dark theme. Even to this day, you have a complete mix of icons from different generations of windows in different menus (hell, there are still win95 icons in some places, and you can still set them up as folder icons). Some apps, despite rendering with the modern w11 style, clearly have the structure from decades ago (in fact, to this day, you can find menus from windows 3.11 in windows 11, and it also comes with the dialer app hidden in System32). Context menus are also another incredibly inconsistent thing, and for the longest time, win11 had 3 types of context menu styles that were used seemingly at random (some of the context menus also rendered in light mode even when the system-wide dark mode was enabled)
I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That's why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it's been like that for a decade.
They're just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.
I once found a dialog that default searched for a:/ in a windows 98 style popup. Pretty sure it was early windows 10
Might just be tired but the twist at the end 100% got me lmao
I love the obligatory inclusiom of "I use Arch btw."
#2 gave it away because you'd have to royally screw something up in Arch to get KDE to lag like that lol.
It might be minimalist but it's not unperformant out of box.
The only time i had issues with KDE when i was using a PC with 384 MB RAM (plasma 4)
I wouldnt blame that on kde
I'm sitting here reading these comments as the low-end Dell laptop I just picked up for software testing is booting up and updating Windows. For logistic reasons, had to pick one up today, so had the pleasure of dealing with Best Buy sales staff 🙄
From powering it up, it's been 1.5 hours with updates and multiple restarts. Half of it was spent showing a progress indicator with a carousel slideshow of all the great AI tools I have no interest in using. Then it insisted on signing in with a Microsoft cloud account.
It's been eons since I actually ran a fresh copy of Windows. Amazed people still put up with all this nonsense.
Seriously, dealing with Windows OOBE is like walking through a used car lot.
"Decline offer" "Decline offer" "Not right now" <hey, we need to update! See you in 30 minutes!> "Remind me in three days" "Turn off cloud backup" "Yes, I'm really sure" "Decline offer" "Share minimum telemetry" (oh, you thought you could turn that off? Lol. Lmao, even)
I don't know how anyone finds that mess easier than linux.
You made it sound easy. The "share minimum telemetry" step requires you to click 6 different toggles and then an accept button. It's even worse in win10, where you have to select the correct 6 checkboxes out of 12, and some of them are half hidden because they don't fit in the screen at VGA resolution. The Windows OOBE comes straight from hell, as a punishment to humanity for making sand think.
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Tldr I use Arch btw
Man that subreddit is a trip. Really funny to actively hate FOSS on ideological grounds because you just love corporations and markets so much.
There’s one here on Lemmy too. I got banned this morning for sharing this post lol.
Here’s a post from it defending Telemetry of all things.
Man that madthumbs guy is really trying to make that a thing and it's kind of sad and lonely that he's off by himself pretending he has a community...
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I love this copypasta, I love my linux, I hate my windows. But let's be honest with ourselves for a second and completely ignore the punchline of this meme.
Those ARE valid criticisms of linux distros. Arch is not for casuals so you should be aware what you're getting into before stepping in, however your everyday-consumer-facing distros like Mint are still far from providing a fully comfortable day to day experience.
Again, I love my Mint, I'm never going back to windows, I'm a technical person and I had to use AI to help me run my nonograms game without it injecting cocaine into my CPU.
Mint was providing a comfy day to day experience 15 years ago. I never can figure out why everyone says it's so hard.
I'd wager it's due to the user's catalogue of knowledge being effectively reset, even the deepest of users of windows has years of working around the (many) issues. Swap to a new OS, the knowledge doesn't always transfer.
It's not hard, it's just different.
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The performance comments were a dead giveaway.
Nobody's complaints with setting Linux up are that it runs slowly.
It may not run much of anything until you sort out your drivers properly, but it will do everything incorrectly LIGHTNING fast, compared to Windows.
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The most obvious bait to be was 1 hour install time. Windows 11 took 2 hours to install, CachyOS took like 5 minutes. I imagine Arch is similar, there is simply no way. Lol
They added a feature to archinstall that times your install and tells you how much it took. My record is 3 minutes, and it wasn't even on a super powerful gaming computer or anything (it was a lenovo ideapad 5 laptop)
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