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Comment by jkot | Hacker News Reader

I find this post sort of like "I want Arch to turn into Ubuntu".

Arch is easier to use than Gentoo, LFS or Rawhide Fedora.

The Arch Wiki is pretty useful even for non-Arch users. Try to install Linux on some new or exotic hardware, Arch is very likely to be first at search results.

And it is elite, since it is more likely to be used by linux or OS developers (some way as fedora etc)..

Anyway, I think better way to learn Unix is FreeBSD (better documentation). And my main system is Ubuntu :-)

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> The Arch wiki is pretty useful even for non-Arch users. Try to install Linux on some new or exotic hardware, Arch is very likely to be first on search result.

Yup, especially on new laptops. When I first got my XPS 13 the arch wiki had a bunch of useful information on what I needed to do to get the hardware to work correctly before the next Fedora release supported it. Built a patched kernel package and off to the races I went.

I just gave up today trying to install arch on my new-ish '13 laptop because of a UEFI debacle. The instructions were not clear about how to install the bootloader and UEFI partition.

At one point it says make a fat32 partition, but after that it never says what to do with it, or where to mount it. The instructions don't go in series, each section is its own novel, with branches at each level.

earlier, it says "pick one of these 3 UEFI bootloaders" but never follows up with how to make each one work.

I'm in no way whatsoever afraid of the command line (I run ubuntu every day ), but man I wish it had a graphical or at least curses-based installer. linux mint installs in under 3 minutes, including UEFI and full-disk encryption.

I definitely agree the articles related to bootloaders can be very hard to read

If you want to use GRUB and UEFI, my recommendation is follow the headings up until the end of Installation

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#UEFI_systems

Then you just need to generate the config

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#Generate_the_main_...

The partition you're referring to is explained here

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/EFI_System_Partition

Yes, I think the author misses the point, which is that Arch is a mentality not a distro. I built my system from scratch and configured it that way, without any scripts to guide my install or anything else, and now I know Linux and its ecosystem better than ever. The only "Arch" things about my Arch anymore are Pacman and a handful of other tiny things which make life on the bleeding edge more convenient. The idea is to stay as close to upstream as possible while being nearly pure GNU/Linux without the duct tape and bailing wire which holds most distros together shoddily. About every day I'm glad I went this way and I thank myself for doing it every time an otherwise aggrivating experience becomes pleasant by virtue of ironically not using the 'convenience' methods usually provided by inflexible GUIs and scripts which attempt to predict every possible configuration. It's hard to develop for the world when you live in Beverly Hills, I think. I wouldn't call it a community either, so much as a hackerspace.

If you want to build your system from scratch, there is LFS.

Indeed, I installed arch for first time in a Raspberry and the wiki was the perfect guide for setting everything up and installing just the packages I needed, no more. A much more lightweight and neat option than the typical Raspbian distro.

Used by developers? Last time I checked they didn't even ship debuginfo packages in their repos (makepkg can handle it, but you'll have to do everything yourself; someone will need to step up and volunteer until this can happen distro-wide I'd wager)...

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