Why Arch Is Not For Me... Or Maybe It Is?

Okay, time to eat humble pie. I recently wrote two blogs; one was about how I thought the Evo/Lution-AIS "distro", AKA Architect, was not user-friendly, and the other one was about the flood of invective I received over it. I was wrong. My opinions were not based on proper research. First, it's not a distro, and second, it's way more user-friendly than I first thought. 

I have removed to offending blogs for the sake of unity in the Linux community and for the sake of fairness to the dev who worked hard to make Arch easier to install and for the sake of those who love and defend it. Now to the main subject of this blog.


Think of me as a Linux couch potato, who loves to have his meals prepared for him, so he can play with yet another Linux distro. Though I love using the command line, when it comes to Arch I find that it's a heck of a lot of trouble just to play with Linux. However, It bothers me that even after all these years of using Linux and installing scores of Linux distros, that I can't even get Arch to work so that I can use it as I do other distros. I guess I don't know as much as I thought I did.

To be honest, I find that getting Arch to work for me the way I'd like to, is a daunting task. For one thing, even after successfully using Architect to install that vaunted "pure vanilla Arch"--may Its Holy Name be praised in the ages of the ages, world without end, amen!--I still have to do a lot of shit to get things under way. I see now why they don't recommend this for noobs... and Linux couch potatoes.

For example, using Manjaro, I have at my disposal, a bunch of tools already installed, which in Arch I have to install myself. One of those tools is "yaourt", which is a handy-dandy tool to download and install stuff from the AUR(Arch User Repository), using the command line. But in order to do this in Arch, I can't just go "sudo pacman -S yaourt'. Noooooo, because yaourt is itself from the AUR, therefore I had to download it, get the PKGBUILD file for it, use makepkg, only to find out that some dependencies were missing. Oy gevalt, this is frustrating work! Later on, I found an easier way, but I had to manipulate a text file in /etc.

See, this is what I mean by Arch being a daunting task, and maybe why it isn't for me, a Linux couch potato. But I don't feel good inside about giving up on such things. I'll try again, with Architect. I'll try to get a working Arch with KDE installed. I like KDE, although GNOME is my very favourite. 

Carl Duff, the lead dev at Architect, wrote me and asked if we could bury the hatchet, after I walked into their forum and made a fool of myself. I'm all for that. He seems like a likable guy, not to mention quite knowledgeable about Linux and Arch.

I'm presently a member of the Evolution Linux forum, so I'll be asking questions, maybe lots of them, because I'm not much on RTFM, especially when the FM is so damned huge! I read somewhere that the Arch beginner's guide is 8,000 words long; and that's just the beginner's guide! And I find that manual a bit technical too.

I guess Arch isn't for everyone, and maybe not for me, but I'll find out by installing it, setting it up and using it. Who knows, maybe I'll learn to love it... or not? ;-)

grgaud

"Give me certainty... or something else."
~~ Unknown