I used linux intermittently in the last 15 or so years, migrating from early Ubuntu versions, to Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Debian, etc. And decided to give Arch a try just recently; with all the memes around its high entry point, I was really expecting to struggle for a long time to set it up just as I want.
Disclaimer: your mileage may vary. I’ve been using some sort of unix CLI since the time I learned to pee standing (last year?), and in case of Arch this prerequisite makes the whole process a lot simpler.
Learning curve
The installation process itself was quite simple. Perhaps the most complicated part was the disk partitioning and setting up the bootloader, as I’ve never done it myself. But then again — on any other OS you kind of have to do the same, except maybe through the GUI and not CLI.
One thing you quickly learn when using Arch — is you always should consult their wiki. Actually, “consult” is an understatement; let me put it this way, on the hierarchy of usefulness: there’s reddit, then stackexchange, then random “how-to” websites, then your logic, and then there is the Arch wiki. Exactly in that order, since your logic may betray you, but not the Wiki. Jokes aside though, they’ve somehow managed to document every minute detail, with specific troubleshooting for almost any combination of hardware out there. This is incredible, and as a person who also spends a lot of time writing documentations — hats off to the devs and the community.
Once you learn how the daemons work, how pacman and AUR packages work — the rest is actually quite similar to any other OS. Except that Arch, even with a bloated DE is frigging fast and eats very little battery. I actually use CLI package installation also in Windows (winget) or MacOS (brew), so learning to use another package manager was not too steep.
Drivers
The main caveats actually come when you want specific drivers for your specific hardware. For instance, the out-of-the-box drivers for my laptop speakers were horrible, with the sound seemingly coming from someone’s redacted (never checked, perhaps it was). But that could quickly be tweaked with the “pipewire/easyeffects” with custom profiles which you may find on the web.
GPU drivers were not really that much of an issue for me (if I actually read the wiki properly). Enabling GPU acceleration in some of the apps (like Blender) required the AMD HIP toolkit installed (they have Arch support) with some minor tweaks in the Blender configs. Similarly, the camera, mic and bluetooth drivers were available as AURs or even native pacman packages.
Caveats
Caveats that come with Arch are actually shared among almost all linux distros (or more specifically — DEs). Support of Wayland, while improving gradually over the years (with a great leap forward in Plasma 6), still sucks majestically. Luckily, for many of the most popular apps (slack, zoom), there are third-party AUR packages supporting Wayland natively (I spent a lot of time looking for exactly that on Debian with no success)! All of the apps I needed I actually found with the Wayland support in AURs, but, again, your mileage may vary.
Takeaways
I’d say if you just bought a fresh out-of-store laptop with no data on it to worry about — you should definitely give Arch a try, even if you’re a beginner. Once you fail a couple of times (like I did), you’ll not only learn a lot more about the behind-the-scenes working of your own computer, but will end up having one of the fastest and efficient OS-es out there, which you will now be able to configure to your exact liking.
Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to really daily-drive Linux (and this Arch experiment is no exception). Don’t get me wrong: I love linux and the idea of having independent open-source and infinitely customizable OS. But unfortunately I professionally rely on some of the apps, that have no viable alternatives for Linux (PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, Proton Drive).
PS. “but what about GIMP, or Krita, or Inkscape, or OpenOffice, or using rsync for cloud storage, or <YOUR_FAVORITE_TOOL>?” you may ask. Trust me, I tried it all. Every last presentation, raster/vector graphics software out there. Regardless of how much I hate Adobe, their software is top tier, and until GIMP becomes the Blender of graphic design, I can’t really rely use it for most of my purposes :(
I never really understood the desire for Arch
Edit: more like the desires of Arch people
- Community-driven distro
- Bleeding edge software
- Rolling release instead of point release
- Amazing software availability
- Highly customizable
- Documentation and community support
There are other distros with the same points, they’re not unique, save for the wiki. A lot of users of other distros refer to the Arch wiki. The AUR is much celebrated but I personally found it annoying having to carefully vet every package and having moved to another distro I don’t miss it.
I think the main reason to choose Arch is it’s for tinkerers/hobbyists. Its community is very enthusiastic which is always nice, though many can become a bit obnoxious on forums.
yeah, i mean apart from people satisfying their masochistic desires and highlighting their moral superiority by using CLI (look mama, ima hacker), Arch is genuinely a great OS. and, honestly, like i argued in my post, not as “masochistic” to install as people paint it to be.
It seems to be geared toward people who want to constantly maintain there system. I’m surprised at the number of people who like to tinker and often break the OS they daily drive. I use Linux because it protects my freedom and is low maintenance.
I guess the benefit of Linux is freedom of choice
One of the simplest ways to safeguard against breakage is to have your /home on a separate partition. I realised I wouldn’t need to backup and reformat it from the beginning, I just need to wipe the root drive and reinstall again.
It’s made even easier by writing an installation script. Simply put, you can pipe a list of packages into packstrap and use a little convenience package for pulling a partition scheme out of a file.
I like to tinker and I’m aware that things will break so I have these tools that let me rebuild the system again in as short a time as possible.
It seems to be geared toward people who want to constantly maintain there system
That is where your assumptions are wrong. It is for people that know how and want control over their setup. But after the initial setup maintenance is no worst that any other distro - simpler even in the longer term. Just update your packages and very occasionally manually update a config somewhere or run an extra command before hand (I honestly cannot remember the last time I even needed to do that much…). Far easier than needing to reinstall or fix a whole bunch of broken things after a major system upgrade that happens every few years on other distros.
People that like to tinker and break their system can do that on any distro. That does not mean it is high maintenance, quite the opposite in fact as it is easier to fix as Arch is generally easier to fix when you do break something (so does attract people that do like to tinker). But leave it alone and it wont just randomly break every week like so many people seem to think it does.
yes, i think we can all agree at least on the last point: that developing forward as a community, any Linux is better than corporate OSs. not because they’re evil products of capitalist agenda (even though that’s the case), but because developing them allows you to have a choice, and also incentivizes large companies to meet these security and freedom standards.
I’m surprised at the number of people who like to tinker and often break the OS they daily drive.
People who don’t use Arch or a derivative (or have tried once but didn’t stay long enough to get comfortable with how it works) seem to think this happens much more than it does
I run the command “yay” once a day if I think of it, every few days if I don’t.
A little less often than that, whenever I think of it, I spend 5 minutes checking for pacnew files (admittedly THIS is potentially a pain compared to other distros, but EOS has a tool that makes it pretty easy)
That’s pretty much it.
Technically you should check the main Arch/EOS/Manjaro page before updating because in the rare event that manual intervention is required there will be instructions there. I usually don’t, and haven’t had a showstopper from it yet.
I can’t remember the last time it took me longer than download time + 5 minutes to upgrade my EOS system, and that includes the recent transition to Plasma 6.
I’ve been using some sort of unix CLI since the time I learned to pee standing (last year?)
Well, if you’re a woman that’s a huge thing, pee standing!
If you’re a man, pee sitting (at home/friends home), please… It makes cleaning very, very simpler and the bathroom doesn’t smell like public restroom
My Linux usage was: Ubuntu, then Arch, then I got tired of it and took a break from Linux. I found Fedora KDE in 2017 and been using it ever since. Only reinstalled once to switch to btrfs and it went surprisingly smooth.
I like Arch, and I love the wiki, but I appreciate sane defaults and ease of use. I’d rather optimize down than pull features out of repos.
Another distro I’d check would be Suse, or one of the immutables, starting with the Fedora KDE one. When I have time for it.
Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to really daily-drive Linux (and this Arch experiment is no exception). Don’t get me wrong: I love linux and the idea of having independent open-source and infinitely customizable OS. But unfortunately I professionally rely on some of the apps, that have no viable alternatives for Linux (PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, Proton Drive).
There are viable alternatives for Linux as you mentioned. But non are going to just be drop-in replacements for those tools. There are a lot of graphics design tools out there now that are just as powerful as Photoshop for what most people need. But the big issue is they are different in just enough ways that it can be a challenge to switch to them once you are used to the way Photoshop and the other windows only tools work. This is just something you are going to have to get over if you want to try Linux longer term.
But it can be far too much to switch all at once and with a completely new OS as well. So don’t. Instead start using these tools and alternative on your Windows install now. Start trying out different ones (there are a lot, both open and closed source), and giving each a decent attempt to use. Start out with smaller side projects so you don’t interrupt your main workflows and slowly over time start learning and getting used to the different way these other tools work. If you make some effort to do that while on Windows then the next time you try out Linux they wont seem as bad. But if you keep sticking with Windows only software on Windows you are going to find the same issue every time you try to switch.
agree, yes, especially the ProtonDrive configured through rsync: i really need it to be reliable, since i often travel and absolutely need my documents synced automatically with my PC. even in the early versions of ProtonDrive windows/mac app, it was often not syncing, and i would find myself on the road need to download a few gigs worth of slides and pdfs.
PS. “but what about GIMP, or Krita, or Inkscape, or OpenOffice, or using rsync for cloud storage, or <YOUR_FAVORITE_TOOL>?” you may ask. Trust me, I tried it all. Every last presentation, raster/vector graphics software out there. Regardless of how much I hate Adobe, their software is top tier, and until GIMP becomes the Blender of graphic design, I can’t really rely use it for most of my purposes :(
The Trust me, I tried it all. and mentioning OpenOffice in one paragraph doesn’t feel quite right. OpenOffice is obsolete. Instead there is ONLYOFFICE and LibreOffice as open source choices for Linux users, available as Flatpak, Snap and probably AppImage.
OpenOffice released a new version last December.
https://openoffice.apache.org/blog/announcing-apache-openoffice-4-1-15.html
Apache, please just stop whatever you are doing. Rewrite your webserver in Rust or something.
Nobody should use OpenOffice. It is just an an ancient version of LibreOffice at this point.
The name OpenOffice is much better. Many people every year probably get pulled into OpenOffice without realizing what it is. I hate that Apache is just sitting on that codes and pretending it is still active.
Some people say that OnlyOffice has the best Microsoft Office interoperability. If LibreOffice is not good enough, maybe give OnlyOffice a try.
like i mentioned above in the comment, i really meant to say OnlyOffice (but i also tried Libre, and a bunch of others)
Okay. Your Arch Linux review ends with naming your favorite options which include Proton, Microsoft and Adobe. As you don’t seem to mind using closed source software, did you have a look at WPS Office (Some Linux distributions include this), SoftMaker Office (Available for Linux and Android), Zoho Office ?
As for The GIMP (People have complained about its project name, but developers refused any changes) : From what I read Krita and Inkscape seem more promising. Krita has David Revoy as open source advocate, vocal on Mastodon : https://www.davidrevoy.com
I used WPS, it was worse than Libre from the usability, plus quite bloated with all sorts of stuff (luckily, I don’t have to pay for the Office, and will never actually do that willingly). Haven’t used the other two, however, will have a look, thanks!
Both GIMP and Krita are very nice and decent, just not powerful enough for many things I need photoshop for. Inkscape is actually much closer to Illustrator (not as powerful, but still), so that might be the only one with the “getting used to it” issue.
Actually, one other thing I should have mentioned, is that I also transited from using Premiere Pro to Kdenlive (and sometimes even Blender for very light video editing). Kdenlive is an amazing success story for KDE, hope that happens to Krita as well.
PS. The name GIMP sounds amazing! Love it, they should never change it )
