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

Chakra?

[mhh91]

How is this different from Chakra?

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.

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.