Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with?

Re:Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with? by swalladge on Monday May 29, 2017 @08:37AM (#14438786)

It depends on how you define beginner. If you're careful, and follow the installation guide on the wiki, you should be fine. Often people recommend installing distros in virtual machines to get a feel for the process. However, if it's an older laptop as you said and not your primary machine, then you can always just go for it and if something goes wrong, you can format the drive and start again.

By the way, setting up wireless in the install process usually only consists of running wifi-menu, and a WM is as simple as `pacman -S i3` (or which ever wm you want) and launching it from the DM or .xinitrc. ;)

Another advantage of starting from a bare install like arch, or a trimmed down version of another distro, is that you get a feel for how the system is held together (what software is installed, how the disks are partitioned, etc.). Sometimes comes in handy if you need to debug something!

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Re:Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with? by bananicorn on Monday May 29, 2017 @10:12AM (#14439158)

Now I'm armed with two sticks - one with the official Arch distro, and one with manjaro, in case I don't manage to get regular arch working. I'll probably stick to the first distro I can get running with i3, working wireless and gcc, so arch probably has a good chance to be my final choice (if I like pacman)

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Re:Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with? by macawfish on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @09:36PM (#14449907)

You might also try "Arch-Anywhere". It's got a very nice install script, and is minimal. You'll end up with a very basic installation of Arch, probably similar to the one you'd get with a more manual installation. This is how I got started using Arch, and I've learned more about Linux than I ever would have been able to with Ubuntu or Debian.

https://arch-anywhere.org/

Arch has turned out, surprisingly to be much easier to maintain, since things are well documented and consistent.

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Re:Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with? by majewsky on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @06:07AM (#14451384)

> Arch has turned out, surprisingly to be much easier to maintain, since things are well documented and consistent.

Agreed. I've moved all my private servers [1] to Arch, despite everyone warning that it will break all the time, and I've never experienced any sort of breakage (except when I did stupid things myself).

[1] Currently, there are three: one physical machine as a homeserver, and two VPS for public services.

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Re:Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with? by jackstraw- on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @09:35PM (#14449904)

If your first installs are going to be gcc and i3, then I think you should give the standard Arch install a shot. It takes a basic understanding of what's happening during the install process, and I'm guessing if you're kicking off with i3 then you're comfortable with things like partitioning and configuring a window manager. If that's the case, installing Arch will teach you things that an Ubuntu install definitely won't, and you get a fresh clean minimal install too.

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Re:Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with? by Lunatic666 on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @09:42PM (#14449925)

There is a community distro of Manjaro which already includes i3: https://sourceforge.net/projects/manjaro-i3/

It was a big help to get more into i3. It also includes a lot of helper scripts. I used them in the beginning to get things done and later switched over to the "real" commands. inst -> pacman is an example for that.

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