Arch Linux For Newbies? Manjaro Is Here!

Penurious Penguin writes "Well within the top ten Linux distros, Arch Linux has a strong following for sure. But with an installation process requiring a little more involvement than the average distro, not every prospective user is ready to embrace the Arch Way, and understandably so. This is where Manjaro steps in. With a 100% compatibility with Arch, uncompromising adherence to principia KISS and a pre-configured Xfce, — or alternatively available GNOME & KDE — those who've been hesitating to explore Arch now have a few less excuses. And a little side-note for those still bitter about the lack of package-signing: You'll be glad to know that Arch fully implemented package-signing in June of 2012."

Comments

love Arch

[robot5x]

just here to say - for me, arch is what turned linux into a curiosity I tinkered with occasionally into the foundation of my home network and daily productivity.
Being short on time for the last 6 months, I've kept 4 machines right up to date with the latest packages through some fairly major changes (filesystem and udev, off the top of my head) by doing little more than invoking pacman every now and then.
When I get some time, I know I can get my hands dirty using abs if I so choose. Arch is beautiful.

Re:love Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

Its very neat, right until you get bitten by the bleeding edge software updates.

I've had my system rendered unbootable or at least without working wifi or graphics drivers a few times after updating.
Its a nice linux distro with a russian roulette feature built-in

Re:love Arch

[mister_playboy]

Have you used the AUR? I find compiling on Arch is way easier than it was on Ubuntu.

The PKGBUILD system means only one person has to figure out the compile process and then they can easily share it with everyone. If it doesn't work on your system, you can often open it in a text editor and tweak it to find something that works.

Sometimes it takes a bit of effort, but learning to help yourself is the whole point of Arch.

Re:love Arch

[VortexCortex]

Its very neat, right until you get bitten by the bleeding edge software updates.

I've had my system rendered unbootable or at least without working wifi or graphics drivers a few times after updating. Its a nice linux distro with a russian roulette feature built-in

This is why I dual boot. Linux and Linux.

Re:love Arch

[shimage]

Hmm. I use yaourt. "yaourt -S package_name" and it just installs what you want, period. "yaourt -Syua" updates everything, including your aur packages. I have something like 50 packages from aur installed, and I don't have any problems. Day-to-day, it has taken almost no effort on my part for the last 5 years. There were some big updates that took some care to do correctly (udev and filesystem come to mind), but most distros have things like that and arch's documentation is always great.

Re:love Arch

[spongman]

without working wifi drivers

what, you mean there are working wifi drivers? ;)

Re:love Arch

[hobarrera]

Please don't recommend yaourt on public places like this. It has serious security issues, and you'll just make new users start using it on their first day. If you must recomend an AUR helper, it'd better be packer.

In any case, the point of not including an AUR helper ni arch, is because AUR is unsupported, and any user can upload anything there. Users are advised to review the PKGBUILD before building it (it might just say "rm -rf /").

Re:love Arch

[bzipitidoo]

I've tried a lot of distros (Slackware, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Gentoo, Zenwalk, Voyage, Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva, Knoppix, Puppy, Damn Small, Vector, Tiny Core), and am currently using Arch. Arch gets me the closest to current software, without having to spend too much time on updates, and offers a variety of desktop environments and graphics drivers. If the open graphics drivers ever achieve good 3D acceleration, Arch will have them by the next day or 2. When Firefox or kernel.org release updates, Arch is among the 1st to have them packaged. Arch used to be missing some important features, such as 32bit support on 64bit machines, and package signing, but these have been remedied.

I abandoned Gentoo when I saw for myself that compiling everything took too much time. A typical package is updated perhaps 4 times a year, there are about 1000 packages in a typical installation, and an average compile and install time is 10 minutes per package. That means roughly 11 updates every day, for a total of nearly 2 hours per day spent on updating. The killer package was gcc. Use old version of gcc to compile new version, then use newly compiled new version to compile gcc again. Plus, ought to recompile every package on the system when a new gcc comes out, but hardly anyone was that crazy. Worst was when there was some problem that manifested at the end of this lengthy process, and you had to start over after fixing it, if you could. Even Gentoo backed away from the worst pains of updating from source code, offering these different "levels" (level 1, 2 and 3 as I recall), in which some precompiled packages were provided.

I started with Slackware because there wasn't anything else, and stuck with it for a long time. Biggest problem with Slackware was the long delay between updates, and then when an update did come, having it be easier to start all over with a fresh install rather than try to update. Unavoidable, perhaps, for something major such as the change from libc5 and a.out to libc6 and ELF, but shouldn't always be necessary.

Ubuntu tends towards the heavy side. It's not so good for old computers and small hard drives. I could get an i586 version of Arch installed in a 1.6G partition on a 133MHz Pentium with 96M RAM, and have a desktop environment and browser. (Last time I tried it, Firefox 3.5 was current. Can't update to Firefox 4 or later, those take too much memory.) However, so far I prefer Ubuntu over Arch for ARM devices.

I'm still searching for better desktop environments. I'm using LXDE with Openbox, and it's okay but not great. PCManFM is still buggy. Openbox has features ("roll up/down", aka "shade", and "un/decorate") that are useless and confusing to casual users, but which cannot be turned off. Saving of sessions doesn't work. And light though LXDE is, it still takes about 100M RAM. No big deal on a modern PC with 2G or more of RAM, but crippling for an old box with only 256M. On such a machine, I go with just a window manager (usually IceWM), and forget the environment.

Re:love Arch

[jpate]

# pacman -S arch-wiki-docs

This is good news

[supertall]

As someone who has been interested in Arch but turned off by the laborious installation (call me lazy but I just have better things to do), this might just do the trick.

Chakra?

[mhh91]

How is this different from Chakra?

Re:Chakra?

[usagimaru]

Chakra is no longer based on Arch Linux and is focused on keeping a pure Qt/KDE workspace. They've implemented things like bundles so you can install GTK apps without "contaminating" the system.
This project is more trying to be what Sabayon is for Gentoo. They're keeping compatibility and streamlining the install experience.

Re:Chakra?

[christurkel]

Looks like the founder of Chakra Linux moved to this project.

Re:Chakra?

[VortexCortex]

So subtle you were, that I almost missed the challenge!

Since when is a question informative?

Since the age of the quest.

It's not like this is some kind of Zen koan.

Indeed. To be like something, a thing must not be that something.

Dumb fucking neckbeards.

Ah! Smart abstinent prepubescents!

Have I passed the test, or has it passed me?

Can it be made friendlier and stay true to Arch?

[mister_playboy]

One of the main points of installing Arch is that it forces you to learn about how your system is built.

While some people have reported problems with Arch's rolling updates, I have had zero troubles in my 6 months of using it. When something pops up that requires you to do anything more than "sudo pacman -Syu", you can always find the solution on the forum announcements.

It's absolutely true that I would not bother to spend the time setting up an Arch install for someone else. I gave a friend a Kubuntu install and I was surprised to see how much stuff was buggy on it compared to my own KDE Arch. So maybe there is a niche for this, but I am not at all convinced that things can be made "user-friendly" without them also becoming non-transparent.

newbie

[PixetaledPikachu]

It's a newbier version of a newbie bistro :D

Re:newbie

[kaizokuace]

The Newbie Bistro, on 4th and Wilshire right? Good biscotti.

Re:Don't think Manjaro gets the idea of Lightweigh

[nzac]

I think that you're missing the point of the distro.

No they are not clear. Still can't tell if they newbie in the arch or linux sense.
My initial understanding was that they wanted to help you skip the install, which is not fun without prior knowledge and the beginners instructions were a little out of date.

Installing user-space programs that most will never use does not fit the arch way. They appear to want to make Debian with an "arch core", which provides none of benefits of arch as the core arch utilities are only average.

Re:"a few less excuses"

[Gaygirlie]

In traditional English "less" is about amount whereas "fewer" is about count, ie. the correct sentence fragment would be "fewer excuses." You can have less water, but you can't have fewer water, for example. However, "less" is these days used as a substitute for "fewer" in many cases in American English so whether or not the traditional way matters anymore is subject to debate.

Re:What's the selling point?

[twelveeighty]

That's what I like about Arch. It's not trying to "sell" / offer ANYTHING. They (or I) don't give a flying f*** about getting more users on the distro. You either like it or don't. If you don't then move along, nothing to see. It's by far the least "preachy" of the distros I've used; and it doesn't pretend to be the replacement for Windows for grandpa either.

Re:Can it be made friendlier and stay true to Arch

[marsu_k]

Well, I've been using Arch since... had to actually login into the forum to see how long, since 2004. At some point I when I was finally able to use Linux at work, I told myself I should use a more "professional" distribution, as I'm partial to KDE I tried OpenSUSE. That didn't last long, it was a really buggy and generally unpleasant experience, I promptly returned to Arch. In my experience, given how bleeding edge Arch is, it's really amazingly stable. Yes, every now and then the updates require some manual intervention, but if pacman refuses to upgrade for some reason, check the home page instead of forcing the upgrade and you should be fine.

Having said that, the rolling release system also means you have to go with the flow - you don't need to upgrade daily, or weekly even, but still every now and then. My MythTV backend (which I've retired since I found I really don't watch that much tv) was on Arch, and was pretty much unattended for a few years. Trying to upgrade that box simply didn't work. Mind you, it worked fine for what it was intended to do, and probably still would should I turn it on, so as such there was no need to upgrade.

Why is "easy to install" for "newbies"?

[Gordonjcp]

I'd consider myself a pretty experienced Linux user, having been using it since it came on two HD floppies. I use Ubuntu, and keep hearing people going on about "oh Ubuntu is for n00bs, only n00bs use it, use $other_distro because you get more control of what gets installed".

I don't care about controlling what gets installed. I want to take a bare OS-less machine and have it up and running with the minimum of hassle. If I'm spending time watching pages and pages of compiler output scroll past, I'm not having fun and I'm wasting time - and more importantly, I'm not getting *real paying work done*.

So, fine, if you want to *play* then stick with distros that take two hours to install to a basic command prompt and ask you all kinds of pointless questions about how you want /opt/srv/lib/ formatted. If you actually want to get stuff done and learn about Linux, stick to the "easy to install" distros.