I left 10 years ago and decided to come back to see if things have improved.
It’s 90% there, but there are still too many bugs and quirks that think I I’m going to go back to Windows.
I started my reintroduction to Linux using Mint. Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible and the “start menu” would lose its relative aspect ratio and my 4k monitor would display a 400x200 pixel start menu. Also, when trying to install apps using flatpak, the results was convoluted. I am trying to install tailscale. Why are there so many results? Which one do I need? Maybe this one?.. Nope, not that. How do I uninstall it? Installing apps was a chore and I couldn’t get anything to run correctly.
Switched over to Pop OS which is what I’m using to post this. Oh man, its so much better than Mint. Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way. Just 2 options for Tailscale with descriptions on which one fits me better.
But there are so many quirks. The multitouch trackpad is great. The 4 finger workspace swap is amazing. 2 finger “back” button works great too. Except it doesn’t translate to anything else. Firefox/Chome/Edge doesn’t recognize the back gestures. So, I spent 30 minutes looking for a solution which led me to touchegg, which is available in the Pop Store. But after trying to install it, it freezes my computer. No worries, try again. Freeze again. Arg… that’s annoying. Whatever, my mouse back button works. I’ll live without the touchpad feature.
Install all my productivity programs (zoom, slack, office, etc) for some reason it takes forever to install these and there is a constant lag between installs that persists across all apps. Where is the progress on all the apps I selected to install? Why must I research the app to see if its done or frozen. Whatever, I only need to do this once.
I start working on my new system and I don’t really notice much of a difference between working on my Win11 machine vs Pop OS since most of my work is on a browser. After a few hours of working, I walk away for a few hours. I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either. I hard reset the system and lose some work that wasn’t on the browser. I’m super annoyed now. I spend the next hour trying to figure out how to fix my sleep issue and have yet to figure it out.
I’m running these OSs on a Dell Precision i7 with an NVIDIA dedicated card and 32gb of ram. Should I give up or is there another distro that is more turnkey?
So Arch? I see so many negative comments for Arch that I fear using it.
I’ll give it a try.
Thank you.
Arch for a newcomer? Are you a masochist?
Go for EndeavourOS if you want to use Arch with a lot of legwork done.
I’d really recommend something like Fedora before trying to touch Arch. Arch is pretty much only one step removed from Gentoo, the difference being you don’t compile everything from source, but installing it is still a process of building the entire OS from the ground up. There is no GUI installer, you’re going to be in a terminal window punching in dozens of commands while the installation guide is up on your phone or a nearby computer. There is no real standard pathway to “a setup that works fine for most people”. The wiki is very noncommittal in many areas to the point of inflicting decision paralysis and wasting a lot of your time if you try to approach it as a Linux newbie, as well as throwing so many links at you that it can be hard to tell which links mean “you need to click this and follow the instructions” or “here’s background information on this thing we just told you to do that you only need to know if you’re curious”.
When I tried to install Arch, following the directions as precisely as I could understand them, I couldn’t get networking to function when booted into the OS, it only worked when I was running the USB installation environment. The default pacstrap you’re given doesn’t include the same networking packages as the installation environment, so any newbie just trying to follow the guide is expected to chase down nests of links and hyper-detailed wiki pages to figure out which networking packages they need, try to get them installed, figure out how they’re supposed to be configured, and in my case, still fail to connect to the internet. Also not included by default are the packages that download manuals for all the commands you’ll be learning to use, or a text editor which you need to edit config files, and editing config files is the only way to configure most of the system when you’re in a terminal. I hit so many stumbling blocks and started over so many times it felt like a hazing. Gave up after a full day of trying to figure out the networking problem and having no new ideas the next day.
Fedora (KDE Plasma/Wayland) worked really well out of the box with a proper GUI installer, I just had to do little configuration stuff like adding additional flatpak sources or learning how the console package manager works (
dnf), and also to ignore any instruction that ever tells you to rundnf autoremove. Simple stuff like installing a web browser and basic apps was about as quick to set up as on Windows. The most trouble I actually had was with Discord - it would be freshly installed, briefly work, then on the next launch say that an update is available and demand I manually update it, with options to download an Ubuntu/Debian installer or a tar.gz (aka “figure it out yourself”) which never seemed to take. I ended up looking for alternatives that weren’t just using it in my regular web browser and discovering WebCord, which I’ve been very pleased with from a privacy perspective.I agree with this, for anyone at even a beginner level fredora is pretty great! I’ve used it many times for hosting servers, it’s pretty reliable and isn’t going away any time soon
Don’t do it. If you’re having issues figuring out stuff by yourself don’t install Arch Linux. If you are already frustrated using an OS like Pop it will be much worse on Arch.
Arch is for advanced users that they know what they’re doing in order to shape as much as they want their installation.
I would recommend some beginner friendly distro but still with wayland preconfigured.
And avoid the lesser-known, niche and old distros because of support and bugs. I’ve suggested Fedora because is what I use and I find it good enough for a newbie, but maybe even Debian could be good (I’m not sure if Debian has wayland as default).