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Comment by tehnub | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anyone is incapable of installing Arch, unless unwilling means incapable (or if that person is in a situation where they're prevented from installing it). Here's the installation guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide. If you're a total newcomer to linux, you have to be willing to spend say, six hours, slowly going through the installation, carefully reading the guide, sometimes going back a step. If you're someone who's installed a distro before, it'll probably take less than 45 minutes. Unwilling is not incapable. The only prerequisites for installing Arch are a desire to use Arch and the good sense to Google "Arch installation guide".

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That's exactly their point. Arch is my personal distro of choice for a number of reasons, but to go to someone, even if they're interested in it, and say "it's a great distribution! Here's an entire manual just on getting it installed, it only takes six hours!" will turn away all but the most curious of individuals. I personally do think it's a worthwhile endeavor, and not as hard as people say, but the first time you do it, it can seem like a Herculean task.

I agree with you on all that, but regarding your first point, they shouldn’t have said capable, but rather “willing.” I think people are too quick to say “oh, I could never do that” when in reality they could, or could at least get pretty damn close to it.

It’s an extremely good point. I went Linux for the first time in about 20 years recently. It was a raspberry pi and Manjaro had a 64 bit distro. It was a great experience, easy to get going, and made me fall in love with pacman and the aur, so I now use arch on everything.

Maybe there are better than Manjaro arch based starter distros, but for getting someone into Linux, my experience with Manjaro was great.

It's also worth adding that, as someone who's generally competent and has been bootstrapping/administrating linux computers for years, I recently burned most of a full day trying to get Arch on my laptop before giving up.

When the manual doesn't work (The most recent installer ISO I was using had versions of some commands where what the wiki said to do wasn't a valid flag) you're really gonna have a bad time. Especially when, as is seemingly often the case, you don't realize that the command you ran didn't do everything it needed to until 4-5 commands later when something entirely different fails.

You're being overly optimistic. I wasted half a day trying to dual boot arch alongside my existing windows 10 install on a dell xps 9700 a few months after it got released in 2020. I could not even get a DE working because of some issue with my dGPU driver. I had my fair share of driver issues with manjaro as well but it was much easier to get going than arch despite the rich wiki.

I can imagine it's easier to install on older~ hardware with no dual boot though.

It's easier to install on hardware that doesn't have Nvidia GPU

> Here's the installation guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide

You don't have to bother with even that nowadays (except maybe to connect to wifi before installation). Arch ISOs nowadays come with an easy, self-explanatory TUI installer with which you can install it just as easily as you would install Ubuntu.

I used it for the first time last year on a work laptop, and had zero problems installing it. The documentation is great and very clear. Took me a couple of hours to get everything up and running, I think.

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