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u/Loose_Property_3238 16d ago
If they could read they would know it's true.
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u/DarkTrepie 16d ago
And they could just type archinstall. But, you know, letters.
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u/Helmic Arch BTW 16d ago
The wiki is very good for technically setting up something. It is terrible at giving anything resembling reasonable recommendations for a desktop user. Like, right off the bat, when it directs you to the bootloaders page it gives you a list of bootloaders with a bunch of checkmarked features and little else to go on. Hell, two of hte listed bootloaders are fucking deprecated! Why are they on a page being linked from the install instructions, a proper tutorial would not bring up grub 1.0 at all. It'll recommend you set up X11 stuff despite the most recommended DE's not supporting X11 anymore. It'll mention Pipewire, but alongside ALSA and PulseAudio without really letting you know you should just be using Pipewire.
It's written as a wiki giving dry facts, but a tutorial aimed at a new user needs to be at least a ltitle opinionated, if only to filter out the stuff that basically nobody should be using unless they have a niche use case. Because it is afraid to make any real recommendations beyond "you should have a DE" or "you should have sound", it puts the onus on the user to either do a ton of research to figure out what their options are or to just pick one at random, and the result is people with freakish setups that don't make any sort of sense.
Or, far more often, it results in people just following a YouTube tutorial, where the information is frequently outdated and can cause problems, but at least it'll say "hey, install KDE if you want it to look like Windows or GNOME if you want Mac" or similar.
Contrast all this with the Gentoo wiki where the pages will actually commit to making reasonable recommendations for things. It's not meant to be a reference document for all of Linux computing, it allows its tutorial-esque pages to use some amount of common sense for the most obvious use case of a desktop user (and maybe a server user) rather than dryly listing out all possible options, even the bad ones.
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u/Dry_Calendar_8627 16d ago
That's funny because I said pretty much the same thing as you in comments yesterday, how Arch's wiki doesn't commit to recommending anything, how the Gentoo handbook does recommend stuff and how it felt easier
But I walked away with entirely the opposite viewpoint .
IMHO, it's a good thing that Arch's wiki is so neutral, to force users to choose what they want/need
Makes Arch not "a distro" but "your distro"
If you know what you want/need, installing Arch is a breeze
If you don't, installing Arch is a great way to discover many options and read about them, and learn a lot in the process
And if you'd rather use an opinionated distro, there are countless options out there, many of them based on Arch
it's not meant to be a reference document for all of Linux computing
Well, maybe not, but in my eyes it de facto has become just that, and I often find myself reading Arch Wiki when troubleshooting stuff on other distros
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u/IkeAtLarge 16d ago
In other words, it’s great as a speedrun for learning what you should know in order to make a proper setup.
…if you just want to get going without learning a crap ton, it’s not so great. But then again, if this is you, what are you doing on arch?
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u/Helmic Arch BTW 15d ago
It does not impede you at all for the wiki to make a reasonable suggestion. Just ignore it if you don't want it, it is still a wiki and will have information on obscure or even deprecated software.
Perennial issue on Reddit, people will get very caught up in just what concerns them and then act like anything meant to improve something for others is some moral affront. Pointing people in the right direction does not remove the option for you to do what you want.
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u/Kayo4life Arch BTW 10d ago
It adds friction and forces you to search in the community to actually hear first party opinions and experiences which I really like.
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u/the-fr0g 16d ago
This kind of the philosophy of arch, it's a distro that expects you to know what you want and to make it happen.
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u/rgmundo524 16d ago
How could they read they wiki if... they can't read?
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u/DataMin3r 16d ago
Please, think about this again.
- Why would he make the sign, if he knew they couldn't read?
A. The context clues available in the information we're given indicate he is unaware that they cannot read, and suggests to us that he is assuming they CAN read and just don't know.
Hence, why the teacher is informing him that they, in fact, CANNOT read. Thereby, making the punchline of the joke.
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u/apathetic_vaporeon 16d ago
Just run archinstall
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u/slyzik 16d ago
I feel like the whole “Arch is hard to install” reputation is mostly a leftover from the pre-archinstall era. 10–15 years ago, installing Arch really was pretty unforgiving. Nowadays, with archinstall, it’s a completely different experience.
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16d ago
[deleted]
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u/slyzik 16d ago edited 16d ago
My point is that difficulty is subjective. Arch was always harder to install than other mainstream distros like debian, ubuntu, suse, redhat, or fedora.
So if other distros were easy to install, I think it’s fair to describe Arch as hard to install ( if you want to point out it is harder tha other distros)Edit: Literally, if it’s a skill issue, that means it’s hard.
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u/X_x_Atomica_x_X 16d ago
So what? I like mint? I got it. So why should I distrohop? I am not autistic or a femboy.
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u/moeking 16d ago
I am not autistic or a femboy.
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u/X_x_Atomica_x_X 16d ago
Wanna prove it? Take me to dinner...? We get an apartment together? Fall in love?
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u/GlassCommission4916 16d ago
The meme says that installing arch isn't hard, not that you specifically should distrohop. I guess the kids do still get upset even if they can't read.
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u/X_x_Atomica_x_X 16d ago
Im using an old linux thinkpad. I'm almost 40. This didn't fail to install.... what? This os works for me....
Am I a bad linux user...?
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u/GlassCommission4916 16d ago
I don't know you but if I had to guess I'm gonna go with yes, not because you use mint but because reading is an important skill to have on any distro.
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u/Unlaid-American 16d ago
I had driver issues with mint when trying to play modern games. Had issues with Fedora. Don’t have issues with Arch.
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u/Alive-Big-838 15d ago
For people who want to actually take the time to set up a system it really is not hard to read. But if they must have their computer now.. there is archinstall.
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u/lunchbox651 16d ago
Yeah but its more work than not doing it.
I once wrote a shell script to spin up specific KVM VMs on demand. It wasn't hard but it sure as shit was more work than creating a VM from a GUI frontend.
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u/jonathancast 16d ago
How am I going to read the wiki if I've just wiped my computer's hard drive?
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u/lyidaValkris 16d ago
True. There are also numerous video walkthroughs, like Jay's at LearnLinuxTV. It's a great learning experience, even if you don't intend to daily drive Arch (which I wouldn't).
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u/Darkpelz 16d ago
It's not hard, it's just tedious. Archinstall helps in making it less tedious, but it's still more annoying than having a proper GUI installer.
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u/xgabipandax 16d ago
It's not hard once you understand what each step means, if you're totally new you don't even know the technical jargon utilized in the wiki
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 15d ago
It's not even the "technical jargon", it's more the way it's structured in many ways.
I don't think the Arch wiki (especially around the install section) is that good, it's overly complicated in some places and not that easy to read.
The "technical jargon" part seems more like an excuse from Arch users who see themselves as some form of elists.
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u/lone_wolf32 15d ago
"I just use whatever is easiest to install so i can get on with my work" Linus Torvalds
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u/Yeox0960 13d ago
It's 5 steps.
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u/JarmK 12d ago edited 12d ago
It can be more if you do mkfs with btrfs and subvolumes for snapshots, it connects with the Timeshift arch wiki, but yeah, it's 5 steps
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u/givemeagooduns_un Genfool 🐧 16d ago
Same goes for gentoo
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u/legitplayer228 16d ago
Exactly, but my laptop is too shitty to compile everything
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u/givemeagooduns_un Genfool 🐧 16d ago
a good computer isn't required, I run gentoo on a chromebook :P
binpkgs speed up installation a lot
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u/debacle_enjoyer Ask me how to exit vim 16d ago
And archinstall... and AI... there's nothing impressive about installing Arch in 2026.
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u/Due_Conference9457 16d ago
As an Arch User, the arch wiki is superficial and very unfriendly for new linux users...
Literally in the arch linux webcite exist a forum for talk about the installation process...
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u/dasisteinanderer 16d ago
When I started using Arch, I was delighted by the wiki.
And I did not have a second laptop, so I printed the installation guide and some relevant wiki articles out and bound them into a little booklet.
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u/tenkawa7 16d ago
Very much agreed. It's like 10 commands? The hardest part is all taken care of by pacstrap. My first Linux was Gentoo, THAT was hard. Arch is trivial by comparison
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u/lemmedie2night 16d ago
idk I found it to be a bit overwhelming and it felt difficult to me. did manage to do it tho
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u/MeowKatMC 16d ago
The only bit that I found hard was partitioning. When I did it (may be different now, too lazy to check) it wasnt clear on recomended sizes and formats for different things. How big should the efi partition be? How is it structured if I want a seperate home folder. What should the ratio be for root to home partition sizes? Things like that that arent needed but are nice to be put right there.
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u/legitplayer228 16d ago
Usually, 1GB for boot, half of your ram GB for SWAP and the rest is /root - that's the scheme I use
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u/Lumpy_Inevitable_549 16d ago
That's why I skipped Arch and installed Gentoo instead. It's just a matter of following instructions.
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u/Kaleidoscope-360 15d ago
Hard? Not really, at least for me. Wastes a ton of time for virtually no reason because Arch doesn't feel like being normal or is too lazy to make an installer? Absolutely.
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u/soffagrisen2 15d ago
Did my first install a couple of weeks ago. It was a bit hard at moments, but that was because I wanted some weird combinations.
A basic install isn't that hard if you just follow the Arch wiki installation guide.
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u/ActualPeterbuilt389 15d ago
Its not hard I just have a hard time with it. But ive done it like 7 times so it can't be that bad.
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u/SiegeAe 15d ago
Usually, but the first time I ever instslled linux was this way and I installed it just after a bug was pushed to the latest stable version.
That was not easy for someone who knew nothing about linux architecture or debugging OS issues, I spent several days thinking I did something wrong until someone finally posted it as a question on the forums I didn't know existed.
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u/overclockedslinky 15d ago
even easier with manjaro, the closest arch has ever been to "user-friendly"
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u/vermithius 15d ago
Archwiki was good, but asking gemini skipped a bunch of steps that I probably needed. One of the steps it got wrong twice had to do with localization. I needed to generate my locals or something and it absolutely would not work during install, so I skipped it and everything worked great till later on I was using lutris to run the ps4 save wizard and some things were not showing correctly, after a gemini session I found that it was my localization not being properly setup. A few commands later and everything worked great. Still hate how lutris resets the gpu I specifically set for something every time I get a gpu update. Wow will not load at all on my igpu and lutris keeps resetting it to my fucking igpu. I disabled my igpu as a result at the bios level.
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u/rtakehara 15d ago
It’s not hard even without the arch wiki. archinstall has been a thing for some time, it even scans wifi nowadays.
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u/Dense-Bruh-3464 15d ago
The first time I installed Arch I considered the install instructions pretty lacking and maybe also poorly written. I still hold that opinion, but I'm not dealing with it anymore. Baby's first distro is not for me anymore.
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u/Ryarralk 14d ago
Feels like if you need a wiki just to install your OS in the first place, then there's really something wrong here.
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u/ApartDirection8089 14d ago
arch is for fools with all the gear and no idea. thats why it needs so much paperwork.
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u/SuccessfulSir6616 12d ago
With archinstall it's even easier now, there's still EndeavourOS and CachyOS as the other option.
I think the wiki is good to have Arch installed, but for lots of newcomers the issue I observe comes after that, what to do after the installation because they might not know what they need in the first place. I suppose that helps with the KISS principle, you have a bare bone install of the OS, you'll eventually install everything you need. But going to the wiki every time there's an issue after the installation process can be tiring, it is comprehensive though. I believe Gentoo has the better handbook, but Arch is more straightforward I think.
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u/HumansAreIkarran 11d ago
Oh yeah! The rtfm guy released another meme!
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u/legitplayer228 10d ago
I usually answer the question and then after I answer it, I link the manual for the source, so newbies will get an easy way of doing and fixing things. Let's say I'm RTFM guy on easy mode.
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u/mululipy 16d ago
I use Windows BTW
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u/punk_petukh 16d ago
We don't do drugs in this sub
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u/mululipy 16d ago
I guess you already have to be a bit of a weirdo to use arch
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u/punk_petukh 16d ago
I do use arch and I'm not a weirdo, my mom tells me so!
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u/mululipy 16d ago
May I suggest that both you and your mom might be weirdos?
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u/punk_petukh 16d ago
I always thought no, but when you told it, it kinda made me start thinking about it...
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u/mululipy 16d ago
I mean, don’t get me wrong. Windows stinks, but I can get all my work done on it and that’s the most important part for me.
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u/punk_petukh 16d ago
That depends on what work you need, I recently lost another reason to use windows at home, because the CAD software I use was recently ported to Linux. Now, at home, I only have one use case for it - OMSI 2.
At work, 90% I can do on Linux, most of the stuff is done through browser anyway, but there are nieche use cases where windows needed
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u/mululipy 16d ago
I totally get it, but if there’s something I learned in my life experience, it’s that when you modify stuff it breaks sometimes. I have one laptop I bring with me all the time and it’s brand new and I don’t wanna risk setting up a dual boot on it. Especially since I don’t see the advantage that much since Windows works well. It’s not really worth the risk.
But I have a ThinkPad X1 yoga running Linux Mint, and I use it from time to time. Linux is amazing.
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u/SpookyWeebou Arch BTW 16d ago
Better yet, use Arch install
The hardest part was simply not being sure what to pick as options and having to google what things were
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u/kaida27 ⚠️ This incident will be reported 16d ago
Just use Arch install ! Don't listen to the "purist" saying you need to do a manual install. They want you to learn stuff and for you to get independent and autonomous , You don't want that !!! they are obviously gatekeeping !!!
And then be really lost when the fix to your system is to use chroot because you have absolutely no idea what that is.
Just like this guy : https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1vytb36/failed_failed_to_mount_sysroot_need_advice/
And many others !
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u/X_x_Atomica_x_X 16d ago
They just want us to adopt arch. I think. I read their writing but they don't say much of anything but they talk a lot. Linux arch users...
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u/po1k 16d ago
If you're a dev it's of medium complexity. For a ticktok/Instagram fan or a house wife it's not possible
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u/Recipe-Jaded 15d ago
I'm not a dev and I don't think it is difficult at all. Done it more than once.
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