A lot of people probably won’t like this, but personally I feel like Arch is a terrible OS from an average user’s perspective. It offers nothing notable of value to its users, while making sacrifices in critical areas.
Unstable as hell and constantly breaks for no reason. On top of that, it’s seriously insecure, as shown on exhibit A. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last.
Why not use Mint, Fedora, Zorin, Pop!_OS, or any of countless Linux distros that work perfectly and don’t suffer from Arch’s issues?
Note: I’m not an OS developer and mean no hate towards Arch devs or users. I’m simply speaking from a user experience perspective.
“Unstable as hell”, “breaks for no reasons”, “seriously insecure”, other distros “work perfectly”. I find this kind of uninformed hyperbole tiring, but probably entirely descriptive of your own user journey. Arch is intended for technical users, not “average users” (Whatever that means), and people should not be recommending that their uninitiated friends start their Linux journey there unless they’re prepared and capable of providing technical support. I used Fedora and Ubuntu for decades before moving to Arch a few years ago, and I’ve never loved an OS more than I love this one. But that’s my journey.
Arch is deliberately minimal making it a good base system in the same way Debian or Fedora is. It’s smaller, simpler, updates faster than the others and is far more configurable. It is however not built for the average user and most distros built on top of it that try to make it more “usable” are IMO pretty dangerous ideas. I think the only derivative i’ve tried that was good was SteamOS because they made it Atomic like nix or silverblue.
None of this really has to do with the AUR. That was always labelled as “use at your own risk”. And to their credit they caught and addressed the attack within a day of it happening. Still, hosting user PKGBUILDs and leaving it to individual users to audit them is not a secure solution, its just punting on the responsibility.
“More easily configurable” would be more accurate, because there’s less things that could get in your way. The system is designed to make it as simple as possible from a developers perspective.
Its the same config file designed in the exact same way. The only difference is on Arch the user may know how their system fits together but they very well may not.
Or maybe I can agree with “more configurable” if I shift my perspective of configuration to be taking a default and adding/removing. Because arch users will add a lot of things and pre configured distros wont need to add as many things and maybe that means more configuration is happening. Even though both users can theoretically add and remove the same amount.
My experience is arch is more stable than ubuntu. Broke once in the last 10 years, because of a bug in a package, fixed the system with manual upgrade from live usb in 1h.
AUR is not part of the archlinux repositories, it’s a community thing with mostly the same security problems every similar package manager has (npm, gems, etc.)
1-1, we did not learn anything except you don’t like arch.
AUR is supposed the last resort, after distro repos, building from source, Flatpak, and Appimage. Ubuntu’s equivalent to the AUR would be PPAs.
Personally, I have fewer problems gaming on Arch than any other I’ve tried.
Edit: Snap is bad for software freedom. I won’t touch Ubuntu anymore; if I use apt, I meant apt and not snap. Hijacking my command is Microsoft-style rug-pulling.
A lot of people probably won’t like this, but personally I feel like Arch is a terrible OS from an average user’s perspective. It offers nothing notable of value to its users, while making sacrifices in critical areas.
Unstable as hell and constantly breaks for no reason. On top of that, it’s seriously insecure, as shown on exhibit A. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last.
Why not use Mint, Fedora, Zorin, Pop!_OS, or any of countless Linux distros that work perfectly and don’t suffer from Arch’s issues?
Note: I’m not an OS developer and mean no hate towards Arch devs or users. I’m simply speaking from a user experience perspective.
“Unstable as hell”, “breaks for no reasons”, “seriously insecure”, other distros “work perfectly”. I find this kind of uninformed hyperbole tiring, but probably entirely descriptive of your own user journey. Arch is intended for technical users, not “average users” (Whatever that means), and people should not be recommending that their uninitiated friends start their Linux journey there unless they’re prepared and capable of providing technical support. I used Fedora and Ubuntu for decades before moving to Arch a few years ago, and I’ve never loved an OS more than I love this one. But that’s my journey.
Arch is deliberately minimal making it a good base system in the same way Debian or Fedora is. It’s smaller, simpler, updates faster than the others and is far more configurable. It is however not built for the average user and most distros built on top of it that try to make it more “usable” are IMO pretty dangerous ideas. I think the only derivative i’ve tried that was good was SteamOS because they made it Atomic like nix or silverblue.
None of this really has to do with the AUR. That was always labelled as “use at your own risk”. And to their credit they caught and addressed the attack within a day of it happening. Still, hosting user PKGBUILDs and leaving it to individual users to audit them is not a secure solution, its just punting on the responsibility.
How is it any more configurable than other distros?
“More easily configurable” would be more accurate, because there’s less things that could get in your way. The system is designed to make it as simple as possible from a developers perspective.
Get off my lawn!! …mumbles something incomprehensible about Slackware.
Its the same config file designed in the exact same way. The only difference is on Arch the user may know how their system fits together but they very well may not.
Or maybe I can agree with “more configurable” if I shift my perspective of configuration to be taking a default and adding/removing. Because arch users will add a lot of things and pre configured distros wont need to add as many things and maybe that means more configuration is happening. Even though both users can theoretically add and remove the same amount.
My experience is arch is more stable than ubuntu. Broke once in the last 10 years, because of a bug in a package, fixed the system with manual upgrade from live usb in 1h. AUR is not part of the archlinux repositories, it’s a community thing with mostly the same security problems every similar package manager has (npm, gems, etc.)
1-1, we did not learn anything except you don’t like arch.
You said Ubuntu three times. /s
AUR is supposed the last resort, after distro repos, building from source, Flatpak, and Appimage. Ubuntu’s equivalent to the AUR would be PPAs.
Personally, I have fewer problems gaming on Arch than any other I’ve tried.
Edit: Snap is bad for software freedom. I won’t touch Ubuntu anymore; if I use
apt, I meantaptand notsnap. Hijacking my command is Microsoft-style rug-pulling.He said Debian 3 times
I had heard that Ubuntu is an old African word for “can’t configure Debian”