Maybe have a look at manjaro, it is based on arch, but comes prepackaged, so you can just boot up the luve image and install, if everything works.

Big ones are: shadiness with funding, letting their SSL certs expire 4 times, and the fact that their idea of stable isn't additional testing, but just letting the packages sit for a week.

There was also a recent kerfluffle not covered there where they shipped a broken kernel to Apple Sillicon users without contacting the Asahi devs: https://twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/1576356115746459648

The recommendation from the repo, EndeavourOS sounds interesting, though.

The link for the post is dead, but they've let their SSL cert expire multiple times. While it happened a few years ago, I find that a hard thing to come back from.

I love Arch for its simplicity and performance.

But it just wasn't productive for me to get everyday tasks done. I'm not advanced Linux user, occasionally I'd need hours to get seemingly simple stuff done.

For a hobby desktop, fine. For a work tool as a developer, I moved back to Ubuntu (though I have moments of regret every day).

You either have automation to make things easy to the user, but then it's no longer simple.

Or you require the user to do everything manually, but then it's no longer easy.

Perhaps with a focus on the audience (e.g. a web dev distro), it becomes viable to make sensible compromises on both (easiness & simplicity) that result in a good combination for the user.

Pop_os! is coming from the other direction, but I found I prefer using i3/sway instead as I had trouble configuring certain things about pop.

Only reason I've seen to use anything else is if doing a full desktop installation doesn't make sense, as the installer is largely geared around just installing most everything, or perhaps leaving out a category or two. Beyond that, the documentation is clear, and it's made as easy to use as makes sense without just hiding things behind a black box so that when things go wrong, they REALLY go wrong.

Nice to see some of these newer distros like Arch and Ubuntu are coming along though; choice is good.

One alternate approach I’ve seen is that of NixOS: everything is declaratively specified in a single place, so it’s easy to configure stuff, but also easy to see how everything works. I actually tried out NixOS before installing Arch on the aforementioned desktop box, and if it wasn’t for the sheer opaqueness of Nixpkgs I’d still be using it. On the other hand, I can hardly call Nix ‘simple’… as with everything, it’s all tradeoffs, I suppose.

IMO it combines the best of both worlds.

I'm going to try again with a different Ubuntu release as soon as I can find the patience. Where prior lessons have taught me to vandalise automatic update or it'll brick itself in the future.

Ease of use has not been the defining characteristic of Ubuntu.

We've seen many failures during upgrade, from both novice and advanced linux users, meanwhile one of our sysadmins accidentally upgraded Debian by two releases at once (From Debian 9 to 11) and it still "just worked"...

I run pure Debian stable everywhere I can in my personal life (laptops, desktops, servers). It's predictable and there's not a lot of planning at update OR upgrade time. Backup, push the button, reboot, done.

Just kidding, backups happen daily automatically, so it's just update and reboot.

With arch, sometimes it breaks (not that often), it always is quite clear what went wrong (pacman errors are limpid, logs are clear). You'll find the fix on the Arch Linux News, in the wiki or the forums. Bonus you probably know your system better and as a side effect be more efficient in fixing it.

You're describing endeavourOS. It's Arch, but with an installer that gets you a sane default desktop quickly.

It's what I use now that I'm too old to waste all that time it takes to get Arch running properly

I built a tool that does this, you can look through the code and see how I do it--it's just bash spaghetti. Download a Debian live ISO (or use my tool to create an Arch-like minimal live USB) and you can install it however you want.

https://github.com/candiddev/forge

* [1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

As a novice, if I am stuck somewhere the odds that I find the answer in the Arch Wiki or can ask an Arch enthusiasts and get an answer is orders of magnitude higher than the equivalent sources for Debian.

Honest question: why days?

I have installed arch multiple times in the past decade and I don’t remember anything exceptionally out of the ordinary. You just follow the step-by-step instruction and you are good to go.

It’s all fairly standard: boot on a live cd, get internet, format the disk, mount, arch provides a script to install the base and another to change the root and it’s vanilla Linux config from there.

Edit: Hmm, I guess how to configure a vanilla Linux might be quite complex for someone who has no idea of how to do that. I might have answered my own question actually.

The same thing happened to me the first few times I installed Gentoo. Could I have migrated the first install to what I wanted at and had at the end? Sure, if I had the knowledge I didn't have at the time.

Because I was a total novice. I barely even knew what a partition was, let alone anything else. Now, of course, I find it much simpler.

I think there’s a lot of decisions like that to make in Arch

edit: Beginner's guide, not install guide, is what was deleted

I love hearing that, because it was a goal of Arch from the very beginning: to stop fearing the commandline.

And I was the first alpha tester, in that I wanted to learn more about how the sausage was actually made, so to speak. I was comfortable using things like Linuxconf at the time, but its beginner-friendly veneer meant that I didn't really know what to do if it _wasn't_ there.

After tinkering with Crux and PLD for a bit, I wanted to go deeper and start from nothing. So I loaded up the LFS[1] docs and just started typing in the shell stanzas to start building my compilation toolchain. In an effort to DRY as much as possible, the work also got placed into shell scripts, which eventually became PKGBUILD modules.

I started having way too much fun with it, so I put up the world's ugliest webpage[2] to share my triumphs, and a couple people found it, somehow. That begat the immediate need for documentation, which eventually brought Arch into the forefront. I can't recall who spearheaded the Arch wiki, but we owe them a great debt, because it has become a valuable resource for Linux users, and not only the Arch users.

Arch is my happiest accident.

ps: btw, I run Arch (is this still a meme?)

[1] https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20020328043401/http://www.archli...

Started a CS degree the following year, and I decided I wanted to take Linux more seriously, so I wiped Windows off my laptop and threw Arch on it to force myself to learn, and it's been my daily driver now for the last decade!

You don’t really understand anything more except how to configure a system with a poorly designed configuration system. Installing a difficult-to-use Linux distribution teaches you nothing about operating systems, compilers, linkers & loaders, shared libraries, or anything else about the foundations of modern computing.

Besides, it’s not like this knowledge is useless. I now find myself being able to diagnose and fix problems with my system which previously I was clueless about. And it makes it a lot easier for me to learn the lower-level details if I so choose.