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Thanks for the detailed response. I just don't know myself. I'm sure me looking at the issue through the lens of my old ass perceptions (yea I'm old) is a facto

Thanks for the detailed response. I just don't know myself. I'm sure me looking at the issue through the lens of my old ass perceptions (yea I'm old) is a factor. I read the guide in the article and other stuff online about Arch and it seems to involve a significant amount of manual work. I came from an era when there was no other option. You just had to do it. It seems to me that much of setting up Arch involves reading guides and copypasta. Things that other distros just do. If your into the whole old school thing, to me, there's better options. If you want to put in work and do some cool stuff to learn, there's better options. I'm not hating on Arch, I just don't exactly get it. If Arch is what got you into the whole Linux/open-source thing than more power to you. Don't take it as an a attack. :)

Zancarius 9y ago
There's nothing wrong with preferences. It's why I don't care much for Debian-based distributions (Debian/Ubuntu make some weird choices, IMO, some for historical reasons and some because it's just the way they do things). Although I will counter that Arch is substantially less "manual work" than certain other popular distros, like Gentoo! Likewise, much of the Arch wiki centers on third party software--and sometimes more advanced installation options like mdadm, etc. (Although I will concede that the latter is much easier to configure under Ubuntu during installation; the difference is that under more manual distros, you're essentially forced to learn the tool at an earlier stage.) To be honest, I don't think it's a matter of "better" options for learning/manual installations as much as there are different options (Gentoo is more manual; LFS would be "better" in terms of understanding ground-up distributions). Please don't take me as being contrarian! I just happen to really like Arch. I'm also fond of Gentoo and FreeBSD, and begrudgingly use Ubuntu for situations its better suited for, because sometimes you don't want to upgrade to the newest version of a package (Arch's recent OpenSSL bump from 1.0.2 to 1.2.x can cause some issues). Anyway, I appreciate your opinions! Everyone's different and has different preferences for different reasons (past experiences, patience levels, familiarity, etc)--and that's a good thing! Arch certainly isn't for everyone, but I think it fills the rolling release without long build cycles (with just the defaults, please) niche quite well. However, I still recommend Ubuntu for newcomers or for people who simply don't want the headache!
- Zancarius 9y ago
  Addendum: Just caught my typo above thanks to another poster. The above should read: "OpenSSL bump from 1.0.2 to 1.1.x." I apologize for having missed that.

Zancarius 9y ago

There's nothing wrong with preferences. It's why I don't care much for Debian-based distributions (Debian/Ubuntu make some weird choices, IMO, some for historical reasons and some because it's just the way they do things). Although I will counter that Arch is substantially less "manual work" than certain other popular distros, like Gentoo! Likewise, much of the Arch wiki centers on third party software--and sometimes more advanced installation options like mdadm, etc. (Although I will concede that the latter is much easier to configure under Ubuntu during installation; the difference is that under more manual distros, you're essentially forced to learn the tool at an earlier stage.) To be honest, I don't think it's a matter of "better" options for learning/manual installations as much as there are different options (Gentoo is more manual; LFS would be "better" in terms of understanding ground-up distributions). Please don't take me as being contrarian! I just happen to really like Arch. I'm also fond of Gentoo and FreeBSD, and begrudgingly use Ubuntu for situations its better suited for, because sometimes you don't want to upgrade to the newest version of a package (Arch's recent OpenSSL bump from 1.0.2 to 1.2.x can cause some issues). Anyway, I appreciate your opinions! Everyone's different and has different preferences for different reasons (past experiences, patience levels, familiarity, etc)--and that's a good thing! Arch certainly isn't for everyone, but I think it fills the rolling release without long build cycles (with just the defaults, please) niche quite well. However, I still recommend Ubuntu for newcomers or for people who simply don't want the headache!

Zancarius 9y ago
Addendum: Just caught my typo above thanks to another poster. The above should read: "OpenSSL bump from 1.0.2 to 1.1.x." I apologize for having missed that.