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Like going to an Indian restaurant for the first time and saying you want a lot of spice
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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I like to ask Linux people "Would you recommend Arch for a newbie?" Not because I have any intention of using Arch, but their answer to that question helps me judge the quality of their advice going forward.
It really depends on whether they're an enthusiast excited about it or they're just trying to ditch windows...
9/10 times, no.
And believe it or not, the 1/10 case: also no.
Let people do dumb shit if they want to!
I don't recommend things based on if people are new to it or not. I recommend things based on if they read and are willing to learn or not.
If you don't read, arch is not a good distro for you.
*judges the quality of your advice going forward*
You should always judge the quality of advice others give, especially random internet bozos.
If you don't read, nothing is good for you, you'll kill all distros if you don't care and aren't willing to learn
Agreed. Also I would rather read the archwiki than loads of outdated faq posts when troubleshooting an issue.
I guess a lot of accurate text is intimidating compared to a concise message that is very confident.
I've also seen people just refuse to read an error message. I think this is from using Microsoft products that never have accurate error messages.
Anyway, I hope people willing to learn try a whole bunch of things, and don't give up at the first problem because that is how you learn.
The Arch wiki's secret: Most of the time, the info is applicable to other distros, even when you're running Debian oldoldstable.
Microsoft (and not only!) Fucked up the perception of error messages so much with their innacurate errors and random gibberish
I can't read this comment π
Slackware
Eh, rolling release distros are great for gaming. I recommend it enthusiasts (noob or not) and gamers. If you just need a rock solid platform for a server or browsing the web / word processing then sure slap some Debian or Fedora on there and call it a day.
Honestly, if you are new to Linux and are making the switch because you enjoy customisation and tinkering, a manual Arch install is the way to go. It's fun and you learn a lot, while still having a good OS.
Guys stop this nonsense. I spent 2 hours in wpa_supplicant trying to fix Wi-Fi because I missed a package containing regional wpa shit.
You all vastly under estimate how quickly a novice may be overwhelmed.
I have multiple times partitioned the wrong drive. With a graphical installer.
I now physically remove the SSDs I donβt want to partition.
You mean configuring EFI, /root, /home, and /swap knowing mkfs and gparted wasn't just natural?!!!!? Noob!
It's still a bad place to start. Go try a curated experience or two before you try building a system from the ground up.
That also means you're less likely to end up with a final bloated system with 7 DEs, 16 shells, 4 file manager, and every piece of software installed that sounded cool because you wanted to try them all out.
Yeah fair enough actually. Doing something like Fedora -> Arch is probably smarter for beginners.
I recommend it for learning/entertainment/passtime - I don't see why anyone cant fuck with it on a vm or spare partition. Not for dependency though.
But i generally recommend people strive for some degree of independence in most things, as a good fallback.
you can try it. i personally recommend you install it without the archinstall script once so that you learn a bit about how linux works, and if you dont want to learn so much stuff at once, either install it through archinstall or choose a different distro. you're probably going to learn some stuff once something breaks, though that could take a while
of course though, i'd only say that to someone who shows a lot of enthusiasm for linux. if they simply don't want windows, i'd just recommend fedora
I think it depends on how we define a newbie. No experience with linux at all? Hell, no. They'll likely fail and never touch it again. Someone who understands some basics and really wants to learn? Go ahead.
eh if you're REALLY interested in linux you can do it with no prior knowledge
though i guess you can't be that interested in linux without knowing anything...
So what would βWould you recommend Nix for a newbie?β reveal?
The cat shelter probably doesn't let you adopt anymore.
I'd say no but you'll probably end up there eventually. At least for me I went crunch bang++, popOS, fedora, arch, bazzite, cachyOS, now thinking about arch again