I’m a little bit underwhelmed, I thought that based off the fact so many people seem to make using this distro their personality I expected… well, more I guess?
Once the basic stuff is set-up, like wifi, a few basic packages, a desktop environment/window manager, and a bit of desktop environment and terminal customisation, then that’s it. Nothing special, just a Linux distribution with less default programs and occasionally having to look up how to install a hardware driver or something if you need to use bluetooth for the first time or something like that.
Am I missing something? How can I make using Arch Linux my personality when once it’s set up it’s just like any other computer?
What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?
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Arch is perfect, it’s like THE Linux. It’s not really opinionated about anything, it just helps you do it. Hell you can “pacman -S apt” and slowly become a debian
That’s the magic of it: latest software, rolling release, edit some config files, do anything you want, spend half your time tweakin’
People like Arch because to many it feels more truly like *your *system than other distributions.
It isn’t that Arch is in some way more customizable than other distros, rather it’s that if there is a package on your Arch system, its probably there because it was your choice to put it there in the first place, and so the system can feel more representative of you given it only contains the things you want or need and nothing more from the get go.
That’s like seeing the Otaku gang, deciding to give this Anime a go, watching Dragon Ball and asking “what’s so special about this?”.
Some people make some random thing their personality, others enjoy the same thing without making a big fuzz about it. Arch is great because of the wiki and the AUR, other distros have their own pros and cons.
anime waifus
Yes
You already announced you use Arch… So you’re doing good
Yup, that’s it.
Next, join us at !gentoo@lemm.ee spend a day or 2 setting everything up and compiling every package from scratch, rice your setup, and realize that even that is barely different from Ubuntu to use once you’ve actually got everything set up.
Maybe Linux From Scratch feels a bit more special, but I never got to the finish line with that one, even as a teen I had better things to do with my time lol
The graduation from Linux from Scratch is to be able to make your own mini-distro. I reckon anybody who gets that far is above petty feuds about the install process or packaging in this or that distro.
I’ve done it.
Don’t.
This amuses me, since I literally went from Gentoo to Arch because it felt like the same bleeding edge distro without having to wait for the compile time for half of the packages.
That said, I generally don’t recommend Arch (or Gentoo) to newbies. It’s great when it works, but the number of times I’ve had to troubleshoot some random dependency issue because I took more than a week to update my system would scare any newbie away. It’s a bit like the parable of the cobbler’s kids having the worst shoes, or the mechanic always driving a project car - when you have the skills to fix something, you’re willing to put up with a lot of bullshit that a normal person wouldn’t.
What exactly is it that people obsess over? The ricing?
Please refrain from using racist terms.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Of course! Thanks for being cool. It always sucks to learn a term you’ve been using has a shitty meaning you didn’t intend, and some people react to that realization quite poorly as we can see below lol
Please refrain from not shutting the fuck up. Here’s a good example of what everyone should do when being told to be upset about something because you say so.
Please enjoy your ban whenever a mod sees this.
Oh no, a minor inconvenience.
Always baffles me that people like this exist. Are you this abrasive to people in real life too?
they would probably be very quiet about it irl and post paragraphs about it later that day
It’s nice that you think I’ve got enough self control to wait for later in the day.
The moment the confrontation ends I’ll be writing my totally unbiased account of events on r/AITA so I can get immediate vindication.
Ricing comes from car customization. It’s only racist if you make it racist.
It’s like saying “bad driver”, it’s racist if you say “all Asians are bad drivers” or mysoginist if you say “all women are bad drivers” but “bad driver” by itself is none of that.
It comes from racist car customization slang, yes.
Linux distros differ only in their package managers, really.
And init systems, and C libraries, and the few that use something other than GNU.
Outside of the meme, the only people who make it their personality are generally younger and less experienced users who feel extremely empowered and proud by doing anything useful on the command line. Not like those users on Ubuntu (which they just switched from) who install stuff from a store like losers, nuh uh.
Before Arch you had the same type of people on Gentoo feeling superior because of use flags and watching hours of compiler output, after switching from Mandrake.
That’s basically it. Some Arch users are genuinely just picky about what they want on their system and desire to make their setup as minimal as possible. However, a lot of people who make it their personality just get a superiority complex over having something that’s less accessible to the average user.
Am I missing something?
Yep. You got meme’d – Arch is a distro like any other.
I’ve been using Debian for many years now. The hardest part about switching my desktop to arch (partly to try something different, partly for later kernel / tools) was not that arch is difficult, but that I need to type ‘sudo pacman -S’ instead of ‘sudo apt install’ to install new packages. It is functionally the same in my day to day use which is fantastic.
Use it as your daily driver and get really comfortable with it. After this, complain loudly when you see someone doing anything in a different way. Then say “I use Arch btw”
You have reached the pinnacle of Linux, every other distro you try from now on will seem bland. 🧗🏼
