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I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a lot of little small utilities that make life better on wayland. Also, it's quite easy to install th

I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a lot of little small utilities that make life better on wayland. Also, it's quite easy to install the latest version of golang and rust, etc. Pros: Documentation is excellent. Better than even Gentoo or Ubuntu's docs. Cons: Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that could improve the user experience. I get the same sort of 'I suffered, therefore you must suffer, learn to RTFM noob' elitism that I saw with slackware 20 years ago. I'm a grizzled vet, I can figure this stuff out, but it doesn't help your average technically literate joe. Updates seem to break for odd reasons. I had to uninstall nodejs to be able to do a system update. Why? There should be some sort of automated way to address this.

pxeboot 4y ago
There actually is an optional installer included with the official installation media now [1]. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  This must be new, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
  - Macha 4y ago
    The previous installer was deprecated in 2012, so a 10 year period of no installer.
- benbristow 4y ago
  Quite a good video about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtWWLN3wGNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtWWLN3wGNE Used it to create a dual boot on my main machine and works a charm.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    Sounds like the installer is not ready for regular users yet.
    - benbristow 4y ago
      That was a few months ago, there's been improvements since.
mkopec 4y ago
Arch actually now has an installer script built into the installation ISO.
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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zdragnar 4y ago
For me, Manjaro has been a fantastic base on top of Arch to start with- installer, desktop configured for the flavor you pick, and things Just Work out of the box, including the usual suspects like wifi, media keys (speakers, backlight, etc). My only real complaint was that I wanted to do a fairly extensive change to the sway configs, and tracking down where they put all the config files took a bit of time.
- oblak 4y ago
  But with Manjaro you don't have to personally babysit every computer in the house. Imagine not having your wife and/or child mad after the occasional update breaks things and they're helpless because they simply refuse to get intimate with the OS their own computer! What kind of world would that be?
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Well, the wife has a chromebook, and the kid is moved out on her own and pretty much only uses a phone anyway, so it's a pretty nice world, to be honest :) At some point I'm tempted to get a fat server going so I can do my dev work remotely to it using a super light weight / long battery life laptop, but that's a complication too far at the moment.
    - CRConrad 4y ago
      > At some point I'm tempted to get a fat server going so I can do my dev work remotely to it using a super light weight / long battery life laptop, but that's a complication too far at the moment. A setup like that would be quite cool -- if it weren't for one problem: All the "super light weight / long battery life" laptops have tiny (= max 13-14 inch) screens; there don't seem to be any 16(or more!)-inch ones. OK, just the bigger screen and housing means a machine like that couldn't be as super light weight as a smaller one, but they could still be quite light weight... Only machines like that don't seem to exist. Or does anybody know of some?
xxpor 4y ago
There're some Arch-derived distros that are basically just Arch + some choices made for you + an installer, like https://endeavouros.com/ https://endeavouros.com/
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  This is exactly what I'm running :^)
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Should have scrolled down before replying. I agree endeavour is excellent.
- kingaillas 4y ago
  Another vote for Endeavour. I already run Ubuntu on my NUC, and when I was looking around to install on my former gamebox (i.e. computer with a graphics card unlike NUC with onboard graphics only) I wanted something with good steam/nvidia integration. It came down to either Pop! OS or Endeavor... because while I develop software I also want to play games without futzing around too much. Very happy with Endeavour: pacman or yay for nearly everything, no hassle graphics drivers updates (system always suggests a reboot after and I always do that).
5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
I think you misunderstood the point of the distribution. There's no installer because Arch developers have no need of one. They're creating the distribution for themselves, and if you find it useful (I do), that's great. There's no expectation that an "average technically literate joe" is going to use it because he's not in its target group.
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  Arch isn't some small LFS niche distro anymore. At a certain point, you have to embrace at least some small amount of usability, or at least not reject PRs to add it. I found it quite embarrassing when one of the most popular distros out there had a worse installer than deb or slack from 20 years ago. That's not 'oops we forgot', it's not 'it was never really a priority' that's blatant user hostile elitism.
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    actually no you don't have to go change your project's philosophy bc different ppl start using it and demand different stuff. this is the kind of attitude that makes ppl hate maintaining FOSS anything.
  - evh 4y ago
    > blatant user hostile elitism ...and that's a feature. There's nothing wrong with Arch doing its thing, there's always Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Manjaro/whatever - and Gentoo for those with taste.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    It's "maintaining an installer is a tedious chore I don't want to do as my hobby." Not elitism, eventually they did attract someone who wanted to maintain an installer as their hobby and now they have archinstall.
  - ratorx 4y ago
    Any decent installer is non-trivial code and you cannot expect unpaid volunteers to write or maintain code that they don’t want to write or maintain. I don’t see what the size of the distro has to do with it. Regardless of size, if there are users who have the time commitment and knowledge necessary to get commit rights and build and maintain an installer (as there is now), then it will have one. Otherwise it will not. There’s no user hostility necessary for this sequence of events to happen.
Skunkleton 4y ago
I would like to defend arch here. In my experience, Arch's main focus is on upholding a simple consistent architecture. There are tools that do something like the bare minimum required work, and then excellent documentation so that the end user can correctly perform the remaining required work manually (or via their own scripts). As a result, there are certain features that will probably never be implemented. For example, if you wait too long between upgrades, your signing keys will be out of date. The solution is to upgrade the "archlinux-keyring" package first. Should pacman automatically do this? It would be nice, but it would also introduce a special case into pacman. Would that special case be abused to do unexpected things? Another example is installers. Writing a basic installer for a single machine is easy. Writing an installer that covers any machine is very hard. Writing an installer that covers any machine with any configuration the user might want is impossible. Put another way, everyone likes that Arch has up to date packages and an excellent wiki. Would either of these exist if there was a bunch of extra complexity that needed to be integrated? Is there any need for an excellent wiki if installers automatically resolve all your problems?
- arccy 4y ago
  also, keys: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.org/thread/GZ4TANWQMKONQNPDVK4Y6I6FGOGYKQ36/ https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > Another example is installers. Writing a basic installer for a single machine is easy. Writing an installer that covers any machine is very hard. Writing an installer that covers any machine with any configuration the user might want is impossible. This is a cop out. An installer doesn't need to cover every option a user might want. An installer only covering popular options/configurations is only a problem if the installer is the only way to install the system. If it's just an option itself during the install there's no issue. The weird corner case can still be handled manually while more common options can be handled by an installer.
  - chrsig 4y ago
sophacles 4y ago
> Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that could improve the user experience This just changed! The archinstall package is included on install media now and is not considered experimental (according to the wiki page history, that happened on 2022-07-08). https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall
- Macha 4y ago
  Huh, it took a while for the wiki to be updated to reflect that. The official announcement was on april 1st, 2021 (the date was almost certainly a joke of how unexpected it was to people now following its development, but the release was no joke): https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installer/ https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installe...
- rthomas6 4y ago
  Welp, looks like I'm switching back from Manjaro for my next Linux install.
- boomfunky 4y ago
  I recently adopted Arch onto my laptop and didn't even realize 'archinstall' wasn't always a thing. I looked up a traditional Arch installation and think I might have skipped it had the installer not been present when I was distro hopping.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Yes, it does a quite decent job of getting you up and running with a bootloader and disk encryption all configured. From there, you can just bootstrap the rest. But that was the main reason for me to pick Manjaro half a year ago.
xfalcox 4y ago
> I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a lot of little small utilities that make life better on wayland. Same for me after more than a decade on Ubuntu. Switched to Manjaro Sway so I could have a better life in Wayland.
loudmax 4y ago
I don't know that it's elitism so much as not an interesting problem to solve. Like a lot of software, it's straightforward to automate the easy parts of an installer. But for it to work reliably, you have to account for so many corner cases and that it can become tedious and take a lot of dedication to get right. I think most Arch maintainers would rather spend their time working on Pacman or system stability issues that benefit themselves rather than new users. I think most people who want easy access to Arch just go with Manjaro, which is close enough and gives you access to the AUR.
- twelvedogs 4y ago
  Endeavour os lets you install barbones arch if you untick enough checkboxes in the installer, I tried manjaro but they put on too much extra stuff
wooque 4y ago
Arch has installer since April 2021 https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installer/ https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installe...
RealStickman_ 4y ago
> Updates seem to break for odd reasons. I had to uninstall nodejs to be able to do a system update. Why? There should be some sort of automated way to address this. That usually happens when a package depends on a specific version of a dependency, with e newer (major) version in the repo. It should only be an issue if you're using AUR packages or other package management systems. Official packages are updated for new dependencies afaik.
- setuids 4y ago
  For the most part that does seem to be the case. Though I have had problems with Qbittorrent and qt6 not playing nicely unless i hold back qt6. Seems to be resolved now
cycomanic 4y ago
If you want an installer and some utilities to make life a bit easier while staying on arch I can recommend endeavouros. It is really just vanilla arch with an installer and some convenience packages.
collegeburner 4y ago
i am in favor of gatekeeping out ppl who are completely unwilling to go read the extremely helpful and well maintained wiki. it helps maintain a better atmosphere and keeps the forums clean(er) of the same 10 noob questions that everyone asks without looking for prior responses.
adamdusty 4y ago
As a Linux noob i actually picked arch because it doesn't have an installer. Just installing arch I learned a lot about how computers work and how much is actually done by other operating systems like windows. I just followed the installation article in the wiki and didn't have any issues I couldn't solve. There are plenty of nicer distros for people that just want to use Linux. In my field of work RTFM is pretty standard so I don't mind it in the arch community.
- adastra22 4y ago
  You should try Linux from Scratch.
  - coldpie 4y ago
    Seconded. It's a terrible end-user experience, but a fascinating and extremely educational project for a developer/sysadmin.
z3t4 4y ago
Installers often get configured for the average user, and the average user doesn't exist. Also remember to do a full system backup before you upgrade!
maurodec 4y ago
The thing is that it used to have an installer that was removed at some point. It was a simple menu that just covered the basics and would leave you with a working system withing minutes. I don't know why it was ever removed.

pxeboot 4y ago

There actually is an optional installer included with the official installation media now [1]. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
This must be new, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
- Macha 4y ago
  The previous installer was deprecated in 2012, so a 10 year period of no installer.
benbristow 4y ago
Quite a good video about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtWWLN3wGNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtWWLN3wGNE Used it to create a dual boot on my main machine and works a charm.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  Sounds like the installer is not ready for regular users yet.
  - benbristow 4y ago
    That was a few months ago, there's been improvements since.

mkopec 4y ago

Arch actually now has an installer script built into the installation ISO.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zdragnar 4y ago

For me, Manjaro has been a fantastic base on top of Arch to start with- installer, desktop configured for the flavor you pick, and things Just Work out of the box, including the usual suspects like wifi, media keys (speakers, backlight, etc). My only real complaint was that I wanted to do a fairly extensive change to the sway configs, and tracking down where they put all the config files took a bit of time.

oblak 4y ago
But with Manjaro you don't have to personally babysit every computer in the house. Imagine not having your wife and/or child mad after the occasional update breaks things and they're helpless because they simply refuse to get intimate with the OS their own computer! What kind of world would that be?
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Well, the wife has a chromebook, and the kid is moved out on her own and pretty much only uses a phone anyway, so it's a pretty nice world, to be honest :) At some point I'm tempted to get a fat server going so I can do my dev work remotely to it using a super light weight / long battery life laptop, but that's a complication too far at the moment.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > At some point I'm tempted to get a fat server going so I can do my dev work remotely to it using a super light weight / long battery life laptop, but that's a complication too far at the moment. A setup like that would be quite cool -- if it weren't for one problem: All the "super light weight / long battery life" laptops have tiny (= max 13-14 inch) screens; there don't seem to be any 16(or more!)-inch ones. OK, just the bigger screen and housing means a machine like that couldn't be as super light weight as a smaller one, but they could still be quite light weight... Only machines like that don't seem to exist. Or does anybody know of some?

xxpor 4y ago

There're some Arch-derived distros that are basically just Arch + some choices made for you + an installer, like https://endeavouros.com/ https://endeavouros.com/

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
This is exactly what I'm running :^)
cycomanic 4y ago
Should have scrolled down before replying. I agree endeavour is excellent.
kingaillas 4y ago
Another vote for Endeavour. I already run Ubuntu on my NUC, and when I was looking around to install on my former gamebox (i.e. computer with a graphics card unlike NUC with onboard graphics only) I wanted something with good steam/nvidia integration. It came down to either Pop! OS or Endeavor... because while I develop software I also want to play games without futzing around too much. Very happy with Endeavour: pacman or yay for nearly everything, no hassle graphics drivers updates (system always suggests a reboot after and I always do that).

5e92cb50239222b 4y ago

I think you misunderstood the point of the distribution. There's no installer because Arch developers have no need of one. They're creating the distribution for themselves, and if you find it useful (I do), that's great. There's no expectation that an "average technically literate joe" is going to use it because he's not in its target group.

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
Arch isn't some small LFS niche distro anymore. At a certain point, you have to embrace at least some small amount of usability, or at least not reject PRs to add it. I found it quite embarrassing when one of the most popular distros out there had a worse installer than deb or slack from 20 years ago. That's not 'oops we forgot', it's not 'it was never really a priority' that's blatant user hostile elitism.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  actually no you don't have to go change your project's philosophy bc different ppl start using it and demand different stuff. this is the kind of attitude that makes ppl hate maintaining FOSS anything.
- evh 4y ago
  > blatant user hostile elitism ...and that's a feature. There's nothing wrong with Arch doing its thing, there's always Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Manjaro/whatever - and Gentoo for those with taste.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  It's "maintaining an installer is a tedious chore I don't want to do as my hobby." Not elitism, eventually they did attract someone who wanted to maintain an installer as their hobby and now they have archinstall.
- ratorx 4y ago
  Any decent installer is non-trivial code and you cannot expect unpaid volunteers to write or maintain code that they don’t want to write or maintain. I don’t see what the size of the distro has to do with it. Regardless of size, if there are users who have the time commitment and knowledge necessary to get commit rights and build and maintain an installer (as there is now), then it will have one. Otherwise it will not. There’s no user hostility necessary for this sequence of events to happen.

Skunkleton 4y ago

I would like to defend arch here. In my experience, Arch's main focus is on upholding a simple consistent architecture. There are tools that do something like the bare minimum required work, and then excellent documentation so that the end user can correctly perform the remaining required work manually (or via their own scripts). As a result, there are certain features that will probably never be implemented. For example, if you wait too long between upgrades, your signing keys will be out of date. The solution is to upgrade the "archlinux-keyring" package first. Should pacman automatically do this? It would be nice, but it would also introduce a special case into pacman. Would that special case be abused to do unexpected things? Another example is installers. Writing a basic installer for a single machine is easy. Writing an installer that covers any machine is very hard. Writing an installer that covers any machine with any configuration the user might want is impossible. Put another way, everyone likes that Arch has up to date packages and an excellent wiki. Would either of these exist if there was a bunch of extra complexity that needed to be integrated? Is there any need for an excellent wiki if installers automatically resolve all your problems?

arccy 4y ago
also, keys: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.org/thread/GZ4TANWQMKONQNPDVK4Y6I6FGOGYKQ36/ https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...
giantrobot 4y ago
> Another example is installers. Writing a basic installer for a single machine is easy. Writing an installer that covers any machine is very hard. Writing an installer that covers any machine with any configuration the user might want is impossible. This is a cop out. An installer doesn't need to cover every option a user might want. An installer only covering popular options/configurations is only a problem if the installer is the only way to install the system. If it's just an option itself during the install there's no issue. The weird corner case can still be handled manually while more common options can be handled by an installer.
- chrsig 4y ago

sophacles 4y ago

> Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that could improve the user experience This just changed! The archinstall package is included on install media now and is not considered experimental (according to the wiki page history, that happened on 2022-07-08). https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall

Macha 4y ago
Huh, it took a while for the wiki to be updated to reflect that. The official announcement was on april 1st, 2021 (the date was almost certainly a joke of how unexpected it was to people now following its development, but the release was no joke): https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installer/ https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installe...
rthomas6 4y ago
Welp, looks like I'm switching back from Manjaro for my next Linux install.
boomfunky 4y ago
I recently adopted Arch onto my laptop and didn't even realize 'archinstall' wasn't always a thing. I looked up a traditional Arch installation and think I might have skipped it had the installer not been present when I was distro hopping.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Yes, it does a quite decent job of getting you up and running with a bootloader and disk encryption all configured. From there, you can just bootstrap the rest. But that was the main reason for me to pick Manjaro half a year ago.

xfalcox 4y ago

> I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a lot of little small utilities that make life better on wayland. Same for me after more than a decade on Ubuntu. Switched to Manjaro Sway so I could have a better life in Wayland.

loudmax 4y ago

I don't know that it's elitism so much as not an interesting problem to solve. Like a lot of software, it's straightforward to automate the easy parts of an installer. But for it to work reliably, you have to account for so many corner cases and that it can become tedious and take a lot of dedication to get right. I think most Arch maintainers would rather spend their time working on Pacman or system stability issues that benefit themselves rather than new users. I think most people who want easy access to Arch just go with Manjaro, which is close enough and gives you access to the AUR.

twelvedogs 4y ago
Endeavour os lets you install barbones arch if you untick enough checkboxes in the installer, I tried manjaro but they put on too much extra stuff

wooque 4y ago

Arch has installer since April 2021 https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installer/ https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installe...

RealStickman_ 4y ago

> Updates seem to break for odd reasons. I had to uninstall nodejs to be able to do a system update. Why? There should be some sort of automated way to address this. That usually happens when a package depends on a specific version of a dependency, with e newer (major) version in the repo. It should only be an issue if you're using AUR packages or other package management systems. Official packages are updated for new dependencies afaik.

setuids 4y ago
For the most part that does seem to be the case. Though I have had problems with Qbittorrent and qt6 not playing nicely unless i hold back qt6. Seems to be resolved now

cycomanic 4y ago

If you want an installer and some utilities to make life a bit easier while staying on arch I can recommend endeavouros. It is really just vanilla arch with an installer and some convenience packages.

collegeburner 4y ago

i am in favor of gatekeeping out ppl who are completely unwilling to go read the extremely helpful and well maintained wiki. it helps maintain a better atmosphere and keeps the forums clean(er) of the same 10 noob questions that everyone asks without looking for prior responses.

adamdusty 4y ago

As a Linux noob i actually picked arch because it doesn't have an installer. Just installing arch I learned a lot about how computers work and how much is actually done by other operating systems like windows. I just followed the installation article in the wiki and didn't have any issues I couldn't solve. There are plenty of nicer distros for people that just want to use Linux. In my field of work RTFM is pretty standard so I don't mind it in the arch community.

adastra22 4y ago
You should try Linux from Scratch.
- coldpie 4y ago
  Seconded. It's a terrible end-user experience, but a fascinating and extremely educational project for a developer/sysadmin.

z3t4 4y ago

Installers often get configured for the average user, and the average user doesn't exist. Also remember to do a full system backup before you upgrade!

maurodec 4y ago

The thing is that it used to have an installer that was removed at some point. It was a simple menu that just covered the basics and would leave you with a working system withing minutes. I don't know why it was ever removed.