My experiences with Arch Linux and some of its distros
I still use Arch, btw
I remember the first time I came across one of Luke Smith’s videos. It was one of his “rants” about something. It might have been the one where he explained why he doesn’t use anything made by Apple, or one of his random life advice videos.
Regardless of which one it was, I sensed that this guy might have important wisdom worth looking into. I was surprised to see most of his videos were tech videos. Specifically, Linux videos.
I’d used Linux on many occasions before. I used Kali Linux on a hard drive (made me feel like hackerman!) I used Ubuntu in some school computer labs. I remember my dad having Linux Mint on his old laptop. The concept of an OS different from Windows and MacOS wasn’t foreign to me.
But I never used them enough to understand how different they really were. I probably would have learned more about Linux in the future, but if it wasn’t for Luke Smith I might not even have scratched the surface.
A rash decision
At the time, I had some issues with my computer that made only one of my memory cards to be read. Add to that the fact that my CPU wasn’t the best either, and my very-used Windows system started to frustrate me. A lot.
I managed to fix my RAM issue, but I wasn’t satisfied. I knew Windows was bloated, and even with a clean install it would still be Windows. I knew I could work around that somewhat, but I also wanted to live the Linux experience (mostly inspired by Luke Smith, Mental Outlaw, DistroTube, and other Linux YouTubers)
Instead of dualbooting, I made the decision to make Arch my main and only OS. Yes, base Arch. Don’t ask me why I refused to dual boot. I still don’t know to this day.
I chose base arch because installing a distro like Roman felt like the equivalent of getting Linux Mint — it’s really not, but that’s what I thought back then — so I decided to jump in cold turkey.
Installing Arch
I never understood why people were scared of command lines, even though I almost never used one. I figured that, as long as you had a good grasp on what it is you were doing, not having a GUI did not make that much of a difference.
Installing Arch completely from a command line(specially working with filesystems, partitions, and mounting) made me understand why someone would be reluctant to work in one.
Not seeing outputs after running commands was scary (I knew enough to know no output was good because it meant there were no errors, but that didn’t change a thing). Not getting to instantly see how it was affecting my system was scary. Not actually knowing why the person in the tutorial I was watching did a certain thing was scary.
Yes, I did make use of tutorials while using this. Despite what Luke and other people will say, the Arch Wiki is not a good standalone resource for beginners. The overflowing amount of information can be bewildering. You need to read a separate wiki page to understand the wiki syntax, and even then it feels a little crowded to move around.
But watching random tutorials presents the opposite issues. They could or could not go into details. They might explain things with a good structure, or do things sort of randomly. There are 20 minute Arch videos and 2 hour ones.
Using both resources is what I did to try to find a balance, and I’m glad I did. My installation was not flawless, and I had my fair share of frustration fixing issues that came up.
After getting a working installation and installing KDE plus a bunch of icons, though, I felt relieved. KDE looked so slim and modern, and having everything look like an actual desktop environment felt extremely rewarding. I’d learned about the “everything is a file” part of Unix philosophy, lived it, learned about Arch’s Systemd and Pacman, X my knowledge of bootloaders, hard drives, and filesystems, and all of this from a terminal.
The bad
My first “true” installation of Linux on my main system was base Arch. As much as I like to credit that with a deep understanding that came earlier than most, that also set me behind in some ways.
During the installation process, sometimes the pressure of things not going smoothly made my brain take the easy way out. For example, after scouring online a lot for a solution to my Ethernet not being detected, and finding out that it was just a matter of its name being different from the default, I didn’t even bother with Wi-fi. I wasn’t going to use it for the time being anyway.
I also didn’t understand half the stuff I did with grub. After you run out of mental energy to be thorough, following tutorials and the wiki can make it quite easy to go into “autopilot” mode. That definitely happened to me.
I only truly realized these things recently, when trying out EndeavorOS and ArcoLinux. In an ironic way, the ease of their installations and general tools for setting everything up only highlighted the gaps I’d left during my first installation. That, of course, and some of the issues that arose from trying to tweak these distros post-install.
Why beginner distros are called that
When installing ArcoLinux I was pleasantly surprised to see their wide selection of installers. Being the person I am, I chose their most minimal install, ArcoLinuxD (XD). The installation process was fantastic. The variety of packages I was able to choose, both Arco-Linux packages and not, was very convenient. Having it deal with keyboard and timezone setting, working with partitions, and setting the bootloader was nice for a change.
EndeavorOS was a similar experience, although their package selection wasn’t nearly as great as ArcoLinux’s. This isn’t too surprising, as both their installers use Calamares. However, when it came to tweaking some system stuff, I realized why a base install was and will continue to be preferable.
After a while of using ArcoLinux, the welcome screen started to bother me. Most of the Arco packages I got seemed unnecessary or did I not like them as well, so I set out to remove them. I wrote a small bash script to find them and remove them all, only to find out Pacman wasn’t working anymore.
After some confusion and much digging, I found out that one of the packages, pacman was not using the usual mirrorlist, but Arcolinux-mirrorlist. If I messed with the mirrorlist as I would have in a normal installation, I would have realized this, but being that I was using a distro with the purpose of making things easier, I felt there was no need.
A similar trend occurred with EndeavorOS. As far as I could tell, they didn’t pull any shenanigans like the mirrorlist one. However, after I had to restart my Modem Ethernet stopped working. I didn’t get too worried and just set out to fix it with my network manager when I realized I didn’t know which one was being used. I usually use netctl, and even though I knew the chances of Endeavour not using NetworkManager were small, I needed to make sure.
These might seem like minor nuisances and nitpicking, but they did pose a problem. I didn’t want to deal with something like this. It felt like an added layer of completely whenever something went wrong. And, on a more irrational level, it felt like I was using some else’s install.
After my experience with these distros, I decided that it would bring more peace of mind to do a base install of Arch, even if it took a bit longer and was slightly more prone to errors. At least then I would be able to make my own decisions instead of having to reverse engineer what a distro’s devs did.
