this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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This is a real problem, and I think the video actually has a pretty accurate take on it. I used Arch for a ~5 year stretch recently, and the Arch Linux community has an unjustifiably bad attitude. It's like Stack Overflow culture but with double the attitude and without the endgoal of useful and searchable results. Luckily I didn't ever need to interact with the community beyond reading the Arch Wiki, but if I was forced to be around those people all the time I would have switched distros in a heartbeat.
Like the video says, I really disagree with the whole idea that Arch is "only for experienced users." It's an intermediate difficulty distro at worst, and it really feels like some Arch users have a misplaced sense of superiority for its perceived difficulty. The Arch forums feel like 8th graders picking on 5th graders in this regard. Even here yesterday, in a recent Lemmy thread someone was having an audio problem and someone just posted "before asking maybe check the archwiki" and dropped a link to an article that didn't even mention the problem OP was having.
Sometimes things aren't worded in a way that clicks for a certain user, or sometimes people don't have the same experience in the same areas as you have had. Rewording solutions in different ways that people can later search and find is part of having a quality community. Maybe the OP did spend time scouring the internet for answers before posting their question, but because no one will answer any question that could technically be found somewhere else on the internet, they didn't know how to phrase their search in order to find that specific post that you're thinking of.
As I said, I literally just pretended that the Arch community didn't exist when I was using Arch and I didn't lose any sleep over it. Arch Linux is still an S-tier distro in my opinion, but not because of its community.
Edit: If curious, I switched from Arch to Debian Stable solely because Arch's bleeding-edge design no longer fit my usecase. Debian Stable + Flatpaks is just a better fit for me at the moment. If I need a bleeding-edge distro again I will be right back on Arch.
I've been avoiding linux groups in general for the last 20 years because every time I dip in (slashdot, digg, reddit) I wind up asking a legitimate question I get hammered by someone who thinks they are better than everyone else. My last instance was trying to set options in grub or from the console to change the default CLI resolution -- the post was taken over by a mod who didn't even seem to understand what I was asking, and spent his time answering every post by berating me for having the gall for connecting a monitor to a server, because "a real server would never have any kind of display device connected to it." I finally found out why I wasn't getting any replies from the people that had tried to help, someone told me later the mod must have shadow-banned me from the group. That person had logged in under their mod account and noticed all my unanswered replies in the post which they hadn't been able to see under a regular account.
The linux groups here on Lemmy are my first positive experience with any linux groups, and I really hope it stays that way.
Ok but that reddit mod (it was /r/Linux right ? ) was eventually booted for being an utter arse and I'm 98% sure he didnt run Arch (he had a foss purism thing going and iirc was on debian)
I mean toxicity at reddit is why most of us are now on lemmy right ?
Yes that particular mod was on reddit, but it's been so many years ago that I have no idea who it was. This was probably within a year of the migration from Digg so it's been awhile. I just hadn't found any need to try again after seeing the same asinine entitlement on all three sites.
I'm currently using Arch and doing the same thing. I learned more than a decade ago not to even bother with asking questions to the community at large. Bunch of self righteous dicks they are.
Any thoughts on which distro has the friendliest community?
I looked this up a few months ago when I was changing from Fedora to OpenSUSE.
OpenSUSE itself was mentioned as having a friendly community, which I thought was great since I was switching to it anyway.
But my first experience asking for help on their official forums was ehhh—I asked about some guidance I'd read in the official docs (basically a blurb that said FYI, you can do this another way), and was told, condescendingly, that "no one does it that way."
That's fine—the sarcastic or condescending tone I mean—maybe it's a European or a German thing that's rubbed off on its users.
The distro itself it great though. I've been able to solve most other issues myself.
EndeavourOS, Mint, Fedora. I was a part of EnOS forums for a year, these people are saints. Just say hello or make a help request and five different people will greet you.
I think that's the successor to Antergos, if so that makes sense!
Ubuntu or mint (which is just Ubuntu tbh) would be my guess.
I haven't personally noticed a bad attitude in any other community. The general Linux community is friendly enough, if your questions aren't distro-specific.
I'm actually surprised that you had a bad experience with the OpenSUSE community - it's one of my favorite distros, the leadership seems on the pulse, and it's user-friendly to begin with. If nothing else I'd be surprised if they were toxic simply because they are probably overwhelmed with Linux newbies and they can't curse them all out. Hopefully that was just a fluke - you probably want to avoid getting cornered by the people with 40k forum posts in any niche forum.
What are the arch forums?
https://bbs.archlinux.org/