• Agent641@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I like to ask Linux people “Would you recommend Arch for a newbie?” Not because I have any intention of using Arch, but their answer to that question helps me judge the quality of their advice going forward.

    • CubitOom@infosec.pub
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      1 month ago

      I don’t recommend things based on if people are new to it or not. I recommend things based on if they read and are willing to learn or not.

      If you don’t read, arch is not a good distro for you.

    • craftrabbit@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      Honestly, if you are new to Linux and are making the switch because you enjoy customisation and tinkering, a manual Arch install is the way to go. It’s fun and you learn a lot, while still having a good OS.

      • makeshift0546@lemmy.today
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        1 month ago

        Guys stop this nonsense. I spent 2 hours in wpa_supplicant trying to fix Wi-Fi because I missed a package containing regional wpa shit.

        You all vastly under estimate how quickly a novice may be overwhelmed.

        • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
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          1 month ago

          I have multiple times partitioned the wrong drive. With a graphical installer.

          I now physically remove the SSDs I don’t want to partition.

      • treadful@lemmy.zip
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        1 month ago

        It’s still a bad place to start. Go try a curated experience or two before you try building a system from the ground up.

        That also means you’re less likely to end up with a final bloated system with 7 DEs, 16 shells, 4 file manager, and every piece of software installed that sounded cool because you wanted to try them all out.

        • craftrabbit@lemmy.zip
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          1 month ago

          Yeah fair enough actually. Doing something like Fedora -> Arch is probably smarter for beginners.

    • festnt@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      you can try it. i personally recommend you install it without the archinstall script once so that you learn a bit about how linux works, and if you dont want to learn so much stuff at once, either install it through archinstall or choose a different distro. you’re probably going to learn some stuff once something breaks, though that could take a while

      of course though, i’d only say that to someone who shows a lot of enthusiasm for linux. if they simply don’t want windows, i’d just recommend fedora

      • placebo@lemmy.zip
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        1 month ago

        I think it depends on how we define a newbie. No experience with linux at all? Hell, no. They’ll likely fail and never touch it again. Someone who understands some basics and really wants to learn? Go ahead.

        • festnt@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          eh if you’re REALLY interested in linux you can do it with no prior knowledge

          though i guess you can’t be that interested in linux without knowing anything…

    • bryndos@fedia.io
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      1 month ago

      I recommend it for learning/entertainment/passtime - I don’t see why anyone cant fuck with it on a vm or spare partition. Not for dependency though.

      But i generally recommend people strive for some degree of independence in most things, as a good fallback.

    • xylol@leminal.space
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      1 month ago

      I’d say no but you’ll probably end up there eventually. At least for me I went crunch bang++, popOS, fedora, arch, bazzite, cachyOS, now thinking about arch again