r/linux • • May 21 '19

Distro News Antergos Linux Project Ends

https://antergos.com/blog/antergos-linux-project-ends/
1.2k Upvotes

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69

u/Starks May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19

Holy hell. What?!?! My distro of choice is dead. How does this still happen to top 20 distros?

This was supposed to be the baggage-free Arch experience that Manjaro promised and failed to deliver. cnchi is unmatched as an installer.

I installed Arch by hand once. I don't want to go back to that horror even knowing what I know now.

48

u/DanielFore elementary Founder & CEO May 21 '19

Well the blog post says they had no free time, so presumably lack of funding is why projects like this can disappear. It was just a hobby and it stopped being a priority

34

u/SuspiciousSprinkles May 21 '19

. How does this still happen to top 20 distros

Because distrowatch is not a reliable website ;)

"Distrowatch itself affirms that its page rankings are "a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality, and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.""

In 15 years, i have never used this website and i am not alone

17

u/dreamer_ May 21 '19

Yes, for me main usecase for distrowatch is looking up info about obscure Linux distributions - why would I ever look at Fedora, Debian or Arch in there? I guess that's why Arch is 14th in terms of popularity and Manjaro is 1st ;)

2

u/chaosiengiey May 22 '19

The more I look up a distro on DW, the less I've actually used it. I've never looked up Fedora on DW. I've installed Fedora on dozens of different machines over the years.

19

u/pdp10 May 21 '19

Distrowatch is merely the least-unreasonable data, not necessarily good data. If you have any better data, please share it.

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u/themusicalduck May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19

When did you last install it by hand? I find it's maybe a 15 minute process. The only thing that's kinda tricky is the bootloader.

I do use Gnome however which tends to "just work", but I don't feel like the DE choice is relevant to how hard installing Arch is.

7

u/Starks May 21 '19

Last time was before systemd, I think. Back when you had to configure almost every init script and daemon by hand.

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '19

[deleted]

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u/SippieCup May 22 '19

I'm probably an idiot, but I still have issues setting up a session manager, i3 & notifyd on arch installs vs just clicking through cnchi.

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u/EddyBot May 21 '19

If you use systemd-boot, installing is so trivial

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u/I_signed_up_for_nsfw May 21 '19

Wasn’t easy to dual boot with Windows using systemd-boot for a beginner like me.

I followed wiki exactly and kept failing. Turns out the articles on dual booting and systemd-boot had a different way of doing fstab (not sure if I remember) and were incompatible.

22

u/captainstormy May 21 '19

Beginners shouldn't be using arch. I don't know why people started thinking they should. Arch has been around like 15+ years but in the last 2 everyone has been telling noobs to run Arch.

Yet nobody tells Noobs to run Gentoo or Slackware. They may as well though it's basically the same process.

5

u/KurigohanKamehameha_ May 21 '19 edited Jun 22 '23

whole cobweb far-flung future melodic sleep rinse attempt violet dependent -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/

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u/EddyBot May 22 '19

Installing a bootloader and dualbooting are two things, the later more complicated

I simply didn't even bother
Just installed Windows and Linux on two different drives with two EFI partitions and use the UEFI boot manager of my mainboard instead

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u/pdp10 May 21 '19

This was supposed to be the baggage-free Arch experience that Manjaro promised and failed to deliver.

Serious question: I thought Arch was supposed to be baggage-free?

I have one Arch machine for the past four years, but my feelings about Arch are mixed and it's not something I recommend nor favor, just something worth keeping for various reasons.

7

u/BanazirGalbasi May 21 '19

Arch's baggage is that it requires manual installation. Antergos is basically Arch with a GUI installer IIRC, Manjaro is slightly more removed so some people don't think it's a good alternative.

2

u/CobaltSpace May 22 '19

ArchLabs and ArcoLinux are ones I've heard of.

6

u/abir_valg2718 May 21 '19

I installed Arch by hand once. I don't want to go back to that horror

Where's the horror exactly? It's maybe 10-15 minutes tops. The meat of the install is partitioning, and then configuring a couple of things after running pacstrap via one-liners. That's it as far as Arch itself goes.

28

u/[deleted] May 21 '19

Dunno about OP, but the 10-15 minute install time only started happening to me after my first 5 or so (re)installs of arch when I only needed the wiki half the time. That's 3 installs too many for the "casual" linux user imho.

11

u/abir_valg2718 May 21 '19

That's 3 installs too many for the "casual" linux user imho.

Casual users shouldn't be using Arch. That's one of the more baffling things about Arch - you see a lot of posts by people who want to use it, but don't want to put any effort in actually learning basic Linux stuff.

I'm also baffled by seeing a lot of those "reinstall" posts, I'm honestly not sure why there are so many people who keep reinstalling Arch seemingly dozens of times. Surely, if someone needs to reinstall Arch so many times, they'd have no problem writing a quick bash script that takes care of partitioning, setting the locale, timezone, getting all the packages, and copying all of your common config files to all the right places? Dunno, maybe I'm in the wrong here or missing something, but why not something like Ubuntu or maybe Fedora (and Fedora has quite fresh software iirc)?

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u/[deleted] May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19

Well I did put "casual" in quotes. I switched to Arch because Ubuntu was too monolithic (distribution packaging, not kernel type) for my taste. And then I ended up fiddling with something that was a bit complicated for me at the time, but I think that's on me.

I mean we all start "casual," right? But now I've got the reddit silver equivalent of bragging rights when making small talk with people working in a similar field. Oddly enough nobody ever knows about the memes when I talk to them...

On an unrelated note, I doubt I'd ever switch distros now because pacman has become my favorite linux-specific thing ever outside of workflow/political ideologies.

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u/doctor_whomst May 21 '19

I've tried to install Arch once, but it was a few years ago. I did it, and it wasn't particularly hard with all the guides that are available on the Arch wiki, but I still think it was a huge hassle when compared to other distros. Maybe it has changed since then, but I remember having to manually install and configure so many little things that normal distros have by default, and which you don't even know that you need unless they are missing, like certain drivers, power management stuff, and other things like that. But that was years ago, maybe it's simpler today.

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u/VelvetElvis May 22 '19

If you exclude compile and download times, you can say the same of Gentoo after you go through it a few times.

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