Comment by Sevaris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sevaris | Hacker News Reader

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Manjaro is install and go. Arch Linux is ... well, if you haven't done it before, you're going to waste at least an hour going through the awful documentation trying to piece together what the installation flow is supposed to be. The beginner's guide was scrapped and the replacement is awful. So if you're new, it's going to be painful. And if you aren't new, it's still painful if you just want to install your OS and get working on things that actually have anything to do with things that interest you. You like Arch Linux, fine. But don't pretend everybody wants to install and configure everything manually, then mess around with whatever seems to be not working because the moons aren't aligned just right that day. I'm tired of Arch Linux. I'm tired of all the tinkering. I'm tired of the additional cognitive load of all the things I have to make sure is configured right. I already waste hours of my day just getting tooling to work for whatever god awful language I have to work with that day. I just want things to work. Manjaro just works.

I think what you're describing is decision fatigue, which is the hard part of your first Arch install.

It can get really technical really quickly, and you end up making decisions almost randomly if you have shallow or no knowledge of a subject.

It's like ending up at the voting booth, and knowing what president you want, but then your momentum fades and you want to vote along party lines and get out.

I wonder for example, how many people are technically prepared to choose EFI vs BIOS boot, and if they want a bootloader, which one.

I think the thing to keep in mind is that by making the decision, even the wrong one, you build up a valuable pattern in your mind and you are growing.

That said, it's harder on arch to do more involved things like encrypted boot, selinux or virtualization. But when you do it, you can consider yourself a post hole digger.

I agree that installation requires more learning than other distros, but once you get past that I don't understand the problem. I think Arch "just works", too, and I don't see how Manjaro could be better in that regard considering it is closely related to Arch. BTW, you do know you don't ever need to reinstall Arch (on a single machine)?

EDIT:

> I'm tired of all the tinkering. I'm tired of the additional cognitive load of all the things I have to make sure is configured right. I already waste hours of my day just getting tooling to work for whatever god awful language I have to work with that day. I just want things to work. Manjaro just works.

I definitely understand that, but I feel that if I went to Manjaro or Debian or whatever the added complexity would make debugging much more annoying.

> BTW, you do know you don't ever need to reinstall Arch (on a single machine)?

People say this, but I've found plenty of reason to reinstall Arch (none of it necessarily having to do with Arch, and more trying different distros out of curiosity and Arch remaining my main distro). I always have these discussions with Arch veterans who seem so incredulous about my frustrations with Arch. And I sort of chalk it down to the fact that I ended up installing Arch anew more often than once a year and the last time you or some other vet installed Arch was years ago. I think there's a fundamental disconnect between Arch vets and beginners (or even intermediates), which is clearly shown by the scrapping of the excellent beginner's guide.

> scrapping of the excellent beginner's guide

I gather that you simply want something more opinionated than Arch, and that is OK, even the BSDs have a more opinionated install procedure than Arch.

But FTR scrapping the "Beginner's guide" was done for really good reasons: it duplicated the content of other Wiki articles, which is a maintainability nightmare, and was too opinionated for Arch. All the content should still be accessible by wiki links to other Arch wiki articles.

> I gather that you simply want something more opinionated than Arch, and that is OK, even the BSDs have a more opinionated install procedure than Arch.

Yes, this is why I emphasized the "install and go" aspect of Manjaro. It requires a certain amount of "opinionatedness" by the maintainers, which of course isn't a priority for Arch, which is also fine.

I saw and understood the reasons for scrapping the beginner's guide. I still disagreed with it. All I saw was that the Arch community was unwilling to provide for beginners. Yes, it's a lot of effort and it is to a degree duplication, but it's duplication in the same way that Simple Wikipedia is a duplication of Wikipedia. It sort of is, but it sort of isn't.

It's duplicated effort, definitely, and if you don't prioritize onboarding beginners, then it's also wasted effort. But as somebody who personally used the guide a lot, as somebody who takes no pleasure in scouring through 5 different 30 page long wiki pages to find an answer to something trivial, the documentation as is simply isn't an adequate replacement for the beginner's guide. I've accepted that the Arch community has decided that it's the best solution, but I won't stop criticizing them in discussions like this for sacrificing such a great resource just because we happen to have different priorities.

Sorry, I can't agree about scrapping "Beginners guide".

Ubuntu gave me simple install. Once I've started tinkering it become broken. Following Installation guide and Beginners guide I got stable system with internet connection without Gnome toolbar widget. I could build on top of it.

These days I stick with Arch because of fresh packages, rolling release, makepkg and AUR. Just looking at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_interface is enough to stick with wifi-menu / wpa_supplicant.

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