Arch is simple, but not easy.
Other distros might be easy, but not simple
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Language is beautiful.
But not simple. Or easy...
...beautiful is language.
Feisty one you are
I mean, have you seen archinstall? its pretty easy and straightforward. Unless you have a phobia against terminal screens.
At this point it's easier / more comfortable than a windows install. No waiting between steps, no unnecessary options, easier disk layouts.
honestly, I've had arch on all my machines for 5y now. the install was simple, as long as you followed instructions to the letter.
the rolling release is beautiful. i never ever have to go through the install again
Used Arch for a few years as well. Recommending it to newcomers who do not specifically ask for a learning experience is just vile.
Specifying intent in the meme would've been too much text in my opinion though. In general I think unless specified one shouldn't expect newcomers to be into learning tech, but into ease of use.
The worst part about "simple" is defining what that means for the person. Depending on what they mean, there are a lot of different answers.
(And a good chunk of those are just Debian with different branding).
As others have said, EndeavourOS is pretty damn easy too. Personally I'll stick to Arch for desktop, deb stable for servers/lxc's, and deb sid for mostly screwing around and sending some reports in so stable can be stable.
everything is simple once you know how to do it. i think a lot of the arch recommenders likely donβt realize how difficult some of these things can be the first time. itβs the same with any kind of specialized knowledge i think. itβs one of the reasons why teaching can be difficult. but the arch community has been super helpful in my experience
Another thing that I hadn't really thought about before reading another comment in this thread is that the arch wiki install guide (and other pages) are written with the assumption that you want to understand what you're doing. And I think for many people that's just not the case. Which is fair enough, not everyone enjoys tinkering with software. Just like I'm currently paying someone to build my new pc for me because I really don't enjoy doing that. But there have been a few places within the arch install process where I had to research some background info to know what to optimally do for my use case instead of taking a guess and hoping it works out. And that's quite a barrier, I see people struggle with similar things all the time at work. If any research is required beyond what your step by step guide is telling them, many people will give up.
It's a general problem with the community in my experience. People keep saying it's "simple", then whip 3 terminal commands out of their pocket nobody without extensive knowledge would understand (or be able to tell if they do something wrong). They just don't realize how much knowledge they possess in comparison, and/or how little others are interested in gaining said knowledge (not because they're ignorant, but simply because they got other priorities in life).
The community really needs an "injection of normies" for some people to wake up from their elitism trip.
People keep saying it's "simple", then whip 3 terminal commands out of their pocket nobody without extensive knowledge would understand
People do the same thing for all Linux distributions though. You'll see people telling you to run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade like you'll see people telling you to run pacman -Syu.
Not arguing that Arch is easy, just that this specifically doesn't feel like a counter argument.
Why not just direct them to Gentoo?
For some reason archinstall never worked for me. EndeavourOS is a joy to use. (i know it's a separate distro but besides branding and installing, there's no difference at all)
Separate distro
Purple Arch πΏ
Pretty much, lol (with a GUI installer too). I like how it looks so I think that's a good thing x)
EndeavourOS represent! πͺπ Much easier install plus some pretty sick wallpapers, all without being hostile to users like ~~Windows is~~ some proprietary operating systems.
some pretty sick wallpapers
The actual state of Linux distributions.
You'd like to think people just do this to assholes, but the number of innocent noobs that get recommended Arch is too damn high.
Valve over here puttin' everybody on Arch
of innocent noobs
Don't know about you, but I only recommend arch when someone says they want the most costumisable distro. No matter if they just mean the DE, if they are too dumb to realise the difference between a DE and a distro, they shouldn't be on Linux anyway.
Recommending someone Arch who is a newbie is just dirty. At least recommended EndeavourOS or something.
EndeavourOS is even worse.
It will install, and work, but then after one update it will just Brick because the newbie didn't read the Patch notes from the arch RSS feed.
That's a flaw with pacman and I'll die on that hill. If it's critical for someone to read the Arch News file before updates and pacman supports pre install hooks it should be recording what time you last installed updates and checking for updates to the news file since then and printing them or giving you the link to it and saying "THERE IS AN UPDATE TO THE NEWS FILE, PLEASE READ BEFORE CONTINUING."
Arch is a pain in the ass distro. Don't recommend Arch or Arch based stuff.
You can build a custom system with any base distro. You can install Debian or Fedora "Arch style"