I’ve found two things to be true after moving to Arch:
-
The users on forums and other help boards are actually quite willing to link directly to the thing you should have read before starting a new thread and are generally polite about it.
-
The Arch Wiki is really that good, so you should read it.
-
reading comprehension is a very useful day to day skill.
I think zoomies just want to watch a video. I’m not trying to just insult them but I’ve had so many times people linking and recommending guide videos that are 15 minute long and full of dumb filler shit when an article would’ve been much better and quicker.
I really dislike video tutorials. Just let me read a manual or the readme of a git repository.
“You want to actually read documentation? Hokay.”
*links to Discord*
arch and gentoo wikis are really, really good.
In all honesty, I use the arch manual to troubleshoot all distros. It is well written and has the info you need and no more.
My steps for looking up something are usually
- Check the arch wiki
- Check the gentoo wiki
- Search for something related to my own distro
- Search for anything else
- Cry
I used to have a t-shirt that said RTFM, so useful as a linux tech😃. If someone asked something, I’d just point at the shirt jokingly and tell them where the documentation was
Gotta admin the Arch Linux wiki is an impressive piece of work since long.
Unlike the Nixos wiki which is utterly useless. Yes, I know why. Yes, I know they want to make a new better one.
PSA: it stands for Read The FINE Manual
Now canonically switched to “read the friendly manual” which I find more patronizing
Read the Fucking Manual
You know liquid nitrogen cooling can get you some insane cinebench scores, but you can’t just pop a liquid nitrogen cooler in your PC and expect to boost your framerates. You need to disable so many safety things and if you don’t know why they were there in the first place you’re going to permanently damage your CPU.
Archlinux is that but for software and because it’s software there’s no physical barrier to entry. Arch is powerful, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you’re better off with fedora or debian’s hand holding.
Besides the installer, in what ways do Debian and Fedora hold your hand?
- They come with apps like gnome software as standard, so you never interact with apt/rpm, flatpak or (barf) snap if you don’t want to. You might not even know which you’re installing.
- They come with all sorts of configuration utilities like networkd (In my gentoo days I used wpa_supplicant directly and had no desktop integration with the wifi configuration. I was kinda stupid lol. Don’t use a distro to impress people kids), gui tools to manage your users and groups and something called “firewall configuration” which I don’t know the package for but is preinstalled on my fedora kinoite machine. (They are available in the arch repos, but unless you know what you’re looking for you wouldn’t think to install them.)
- CUPS is preinstalled. If you don’t use an “unbloated to the point of madness” distro like arch or gentoo you’ve probably never heard of CUPS or interacted with it directly, but it’s the backbone of the linux (and macos) printing stack. In other words, printing should work out of the box wheras on arch that involves a trip to the arch wiki.
- Integration packages are preinstalled. Things like the daemon that allows youtube videos in firefox tabs to be controlled by the play button on your keyboard if it has one.
- Polkit is preinstalled, which allows applications to ask for sudo privileges and shows a popup box to the user asking their password. This is something you need to install manually on arch and gentoo, assuming you want that functionality and wouldn’t prefer to just only allow privilege escalation via sudo.
- Most packages which ship with systemd services on debian (eg apache2, snapd, docker) enable that service by default. On arch this is usually not the case.
- 3rd party debian and fedora repos ship binaries so once you’ve added them to your config they function identically to core packages. Most AUR packages have to be compiled from source either manually or through a helper like yay. (Note: there aren’t any helpers in the base system so you have to do at least one AUR build by hand before you get that part of the tech tree)
- Even bash auto-completion is an extra package on arch. No really, open a terminal on debian and then type
ls --
then double press tab. It should suggest valid arguments. This isn’t a thing on arch unless you install thebash-completion
package