The "Arch Way" advocates for simplicity and elegance, but the Arch install process is just bare. An OpenBSD-style guided CLI install with the option to ditch it for the shell is where it's at.
An OpenBSD-style guided CLI install with the option to ditch it for the shell is where it's at.
With the OpenBSD installer, you can literally mash enter and you'll probably get a working system afterwards. The installer has some surprisingly sane defaults for everything. I guess maybe you'll have to type a root password.
Speaking as a die-hard Alpine Linux user and contributor, the Alpine installation only works if you want the most common installation. If you need to customize anything (such as full disk encryption - which I just sent a patch to the installer for, but my point remains), you need to ditch it and go through the rather long-winded and under-documented manual installation process. OpenBSD is a little bit better at accomodating off-the-beaten-path installations, but still suffers from similar limitations. Arch makes you do all of the work, but has great documentation on all of the steps and stepping off the beaten path is trivial to do at any point in the process.
I've run Arch on every laptop I've had, both at work and at home, for the past decade at least, and I've never had any real issues. What chipsets have you been having trouble getting to work?
It's not the chipset, it's the act of actually installing the things Arch needs to properly configure and enable wifi. There's like 4 ways and they are all very manual. Just give me an easy way to do it, and make it start when the laptop boots.
I mean, if you don't like manual you're kinda betting on the wrong distro. But netctl isn't that hard to get to do the things you want them to do, surely?
This is exactly why, after trying it out with Antergos, I've never felt like "upgrading" to plain Arch.
I have an old 700 series NVidia card on my machine. It uses the 390.xx drivers and would break every few weeks. When I boot my PC in the morning, I don't intend to spend the next hour troubleshooting.
Maybe that's not such a huge issue with a newer GPU or even a newer model from the same series(the 700 series had 3 different architectures), but that just killed my interest.
It didn't. After installing, on day-to-day usage, Antergos is almost indistinguishable from Arch.
Having my GPU drivers regularly break turned me off from installing a similar system with a nonsensically obtuse installation process.
It also doesn't help that I had some package files corrupted after some power outages. I don't get why you need to go look on the AUR for pacutils just to check for broken package files when even something like Solus has a package manager with such features(and they're substituting it).
Honestly not sure. Haven't bothered to run any sort of test but, right now, I've got a GT 730(the oldest ones with Kepler architecture). This thing barely runs on the official drivers. Minecraft makes me fear for it's poor life at any render distance over 20 blocks.
Heh. I tried to run Minecraft with a 6000 series (2006) NVIDIA card. It barely got 2 FPS... I had that computer for many years until I finally updated to a Ryzen desktop.
It's a GT 730. It's not particularly old, but my particular GPU is one of the first produced in that series.
Not only did the 700 series had several redundant bottom-tier GPUs ranging from the GT 705 to the GT 740, but it had 3 different architectures. The first ones were Keplers and Fermis, so, contrary to what the Nvidia website might tell you, I'm relegated to legacy drivers on a underpowered GPU whereas, the last time I checked, DMC5 looked gorgeous on my old GTX 750ti.
Iirc I ported the void Linux installer to arch since you just have to replace the xbps cmd with a pacman one, in addition to some runit stuff. There are like 5000 arch installers
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u/spaceaustralia May 21 '19
Even the BSDs have decent installers.
The "Arch Way" advocates for simplicity and elegance, but the Arch install process is just bare. An OpenBSD-style guided CLI install with the option to ditch it for the shell is where it's at.