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Comment by ac29 | Hacker News Reader

As a long time Arch user, what's the attraction to these spinoffs?

Seems to me they are mainly pitching being easier to install, but the Arch installer (or lack thereof) is perfectly fine in my opinion. You get the benefit of understanding a little better how your system is installed as well.

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I've done many full Arch installs (but never antegros), but it's always the little things that I forget to do, then look into what's the new best way to do it, then fall down the ricing rabbit hole. Although it's fun it's also nice just to have a full system installed with no fuss. Ubuntu is fine for that, but I inevitably get the itch for something different. These spin offs let me cheat into a full setup desktop that works great from day one. No more 'I forgot to Auto Mount USB drives' or whatever. Plus it's fun to see how someone else sets it up and get some fresh ideas.

My $.02: As others have noted, there is some level of intimidation that contributed to me using Antergos. That being said, I did a reinstall a few months ago and decided I would do it "for real" this time. I followed the Arch wiki for each step, learned a huge amount about the way the OS installs, the drive partitioning works, and made it to the bootloader step. And that's where I ran into issues.

Once I rebooted, I couldn't get the bootloader to load arch. I spent about two days trying different methods from the Arch Wiki before I decided that a) I had learned a huge amount and b) I didn't need the "geek cred" that came with a vanilla install of Arch.

I went back to Antergos and am quite happy. I manually build packages from AUR, read the wiki when I need to setup something and am happy with it.

I use i3 currently, so perhaps I'll give the install another go, but I may just switch to Manjaro.

Happy to hear any tips, though!

The bootloader is the part I dread EVERY time I set up a new Arch install (basically every couple of years) I have to relearn it every stinking time! I'm using rEFInd these days so that either helps or hurts the cause.

At least for Antergos its a super fast way to get a "real" Arch install.

Sure I know the process of creating partition tables, formatting drives, bootstrapping wireless and what not, setting up system time, adding a bunch of services I want, etc. But for anyone that likes the Arch release process (and thus isn't interested in Manjaro) and AUR it was a place to point them without the massive learning curve because nowadays it generally just works.

As a moderately technical user, I’ve run Arch VMs for school work for the past 3 years, but when it came time for me to dual boot my laptop, I really didn’t want to have to be as hands-on involved with a device I actually use frequently. I picked Manjaro instead so I can still enjoy the rolling release cycle but with an already working system out of the box.

One reason is that I learned how to install a system that way with Gentoo 15 years ago and I don't need to learn it again now. It's still a slow process even when you know what you're doing (though I still usually do it the slow way)

One counterpoint to this is (back when I used Arch), I found Arch to be the fastest-to-install distro if you already knew how to do it.

No need to wait 2 minutes to boot a graphical installer that doesn't let you pick what packages you want (this is significant if you don't have Australian internet speeds), or forces you to set up your partitions in a certain way, and so on. You just partition your disk, pacstrap, chroot, run a few setup commands and reboot.

The last time I installed arch I had a working system in 15 minutes -- other distributions took 40 minutes to bootstrap and reboot so I could start configuring them (mostly because of how long it took to download the 3000 packages I didn't need).

Obviously there is a level of "it only takes 3 commands to install gentoo" here, but I personally long for the minimalism you get from Arch's no-bs installation.

I, too learned how to Linux with Gentoo ~20 years ago, and while that semi-from-scratch approach still appeals to me, Arch 2019 is not Gentoo 2002.

I find myself doing an Arch install once a year or so, and I'd say it takes about 20 minutes to get to my prefered desktop from completely un-initialized hardware - I remember Gentoo taking days!

The complexity of installing Gentoo is the same as Arch, the only thing that slow downs the process for Gentoo was compiling all the packages. 2002 CPU speeds wasn't helping either.

I'm an Arch user who come from Manjaro. Arch Linux seems kinda scary beast to begin with, especially when you are newbie in the Linux world.

There is a huge difference between having good GUI for both installation and management (Manjaro) and having text-based Wiki for everything (Arch). I did not need to read anything when I install Manjaro, though it it true that I learned a lot after I switched to Arch. Not everyone want to experience pain of learning at the beginning. Also, Manjaro provides GUI that let you switch different versions of Kernel and GPU drivers with a few click.

Lastly Manjaro has complete Desktop Environments for Gnome, KDE, and Xfce. These DEs have pretty cool tricks and packages alongside with their default packages. They are something hard to figure out when you use Arch.

As another Arch user, you get a working quasi-Arch on your home theater system in something like half an hour. Arch is great if you want to do anything interesting, but for a PC that is just supposed to run youtube and mpv, it is not supposed to do anything interesting.

> is perfectly fine in my opinion

Well I guess we are all not you. Different people have different opinions and use cases.

desktop preconfig. I found fonts and similar to be a pain to make nice, so here you go

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