this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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I have a friend who runs arch, and recommends arch to people. His computer constantly has problems because he doesn't fully know what he's doing.Β
I respect doing it for yourself, you do you, but I feel like he's actively discouraging my friends from giving Linux a go because of his constant issues. Recommending the hardest distro to beginners just bugs me.
Yeah, let everyone do their own thing - there's nothing wrong with starting with Slackware if you want to. But if we're going to recommend a starting point to people, maybe go with something that is designed to work out of the box. There's going to be so much else to get adjusted to that extra options aren't necessary.
Oh, and by the way, most people don't like tinkering. They want their car to take them from A to B and their computer to do the thing, it's not a hobby for them and we shouldn't expect new users to be looking for a new hobby.
Infinitely this!
Yes, it's super cool to have control over your own damned machine but for some, the computer is just the thing the lets them work, porn and game.
OK, you explained it well to me with the car example. I am not a car person, all I know about them is they can usually move, but I am not really interested to learn more.
I run slack, alpine, freebsd, deb and mint for the gui testing on various servers personally and professionally.
I recommend kubuntu.
Thank you
I have a recommendation for your recommendations. There's KDE Neon which is distributed by the KDE project, which is Ubuntu-based. That's what I personally run, now that I really don't have the time/energy to tinker.
I think a verrrrrrry very large part of the problem is that the most vocal linux proselytisers have never actually had to do a job (or have, but done it very badly) where you have to tailor to the client.
Rookie mistake.
Is it really a rookie mistake if it's not their job though?
'Rookie mistake' applies colloquially in many situations that aren't professional.
When someone asks you for advice on an OS, tech kit, or any other item you should be considering their use case, not your own.
I know I was just being difficult
Why?
Hmm, when a car has problems, you go to someone who fixes that for you. People under 60 usually don't do that for PCs.
I don't recommend Arch to newbies, but I do prefer it because it's more robust: other distros patch stuff to make it easier, but those patches mean things are farther from the tested upstream version. Arch doesn't do that as much so I run into fewer bugs.
But this view might be outdated. I just remember that before 2017 (when I installed my current Arch system) I constantly had problems with dist-upgrades in Ubuntu
No you're probably right, I've had my Ubuntu-based distro act up after upgrades, and I actually find it more random now than what it used to be like in the 2010s. My feeling is that Debian/Arch are better in this regard, and most newbies don't actually need bleeding-edge patches.
This is Me. I had more problems on Bazzite and Debian, so I prefer Arch. It still breaks all the time and I still don't know what I'm doing, but at least sometimes it works.
That's actually really surprising to me, bazzite is fairly plug and play, and Debian while slow to update is still very stable. What kind of issues were you running into?
Bazzite would overtax the CPU and freeze a lot. Debian didn't like Proton 10 when Splitgate 2 first came out, and Splitgate 2 needs Proton 10 in order to use a mouse. With CachyOS, performance is better and I can install the newest graphics drivers.
Try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
It's practically Arch minus elitist culture minus breaking all the time minus having to manually manage anything and everything. Also, it has properly set snapshots by default, so almost any screw-up can be reversed.
No thanks, I love the elitist culture. I want to be expected to learn and get better over time, and I have been. I even learned how to enable snapshots.
To each their own
Overall, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has all you need to practice in a safe environment and learn all the things you do with Arch. It just doesn't force you to do it when all you want is open a document :D
You might just have learned more about how stuff works by now. Arch is very much βyou need to make every choice manually, but then you've seen what choices existβ
I actually thought I was having issues with Debian. I was only getting like 6 - 8 updates when I tried to do them, even after a longer period of time. I kept searching around how to update Debian properly, but found no good answer.
Then something like 2 months later there was a large number of updates at once. So it is working then, huh.
I'm running arch now for gaming.
I never had any issues* which makes me worry, cause i truly dont know what the fuck am I doing. Jesus take the wheel...
*im surfing on issues actually
Fucking Donkey describes recommending Arch to noobs. It's astounding.
Gentoo begs to differ
I run arch on a thinkpad just so I could learn it, and it will pretty much always break the wifi and whatnot if i update, so I just haven't updated it.
Just FYI, it doesn't need to be like this.
Yeah but it wears me out.
I made a push to fully use Linux last year, so I installed arch on this thinkpad, fedora on a desktop, and i already had mint on a mini pc (at the time mint was all i knew). The desktop was new with an nvidia rtx 5070, and it came with Ubuntu installed (which i thought was neat that it did but I didn't actually want to use).
I went through installing arch without the script following the wiki, and troubleshooting issues here and there, but for some reason that update issue occurred pretty often, virtually every time (the touchpad also usually stops working too). The desktop also had issues, sometimes with updates as well, because of the GPU or the Bluetooth wouldn't work, or i would just break something trying stuff.
I have 1 usb drive, and I kept putting one of the two isos onto it so I could fix or start over on either device. I did other things too, like rolling back packages one by one until whatever issue went away, or actually just finding a real fix for things. Either way, I eventually got burned out on troubleshooting and just wanted to reliably USE the devices (like i had been doing with mint all this time). So, if i update on arch and it breaks, I just roll it back with timeshift and ignore it and I switched over to bazzite for now on the desktop so I would stop breaking things (lol).
If I was at a point where I could easily identify that "oh the touchpad and connection issue is just the dinglehopping transister setting getting changed in this update, easy fix!" I'd be fine, but I don't know the cause and I got tired of searching. (Edit: Or if I didn't give myself TWO projects at once)
Sounds like the average Arch user to me
Funny meme btw lolololo
β¦ why are you like that?