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by s-daveb 1228 days ago
There are now arch-based distros that are quick and easy to set up, like Ubuntu. I'm currently running endeavourOS, and I am eager to try Manjaro.

Don't be put off by the Arch-based nature of the OS - since both Endeavour and Manjaro have installers, they bootstrap your system's drivers, and all.

I've found maintenance to not be too overwhelming, and Arch's wiki is top-notch. When I used other distros like Gentoo, I sometimes found myself reacing the Arch wiki...

Package management isn't too different from using apt, synaptic, or the app store if you use the right tools:

Command-line:

- Pacman: for precompiled official packages

- Yay : Automagically compiles community-ported third-party applications

GUI:

- Pamac: Look it up - it's a lot like Ubuntu's "App Store"

The caveat here is that I'm an experienced Ubuntu/Debian user that moved to Gentoo for a while.

While using Gentoo, I got tired of the systemd migration nightmare and returned to Ubuntu to find the nightmare of Snapd and poorly-sandboxed applications in their community repo.

I've only used Arch for about a month, but after using Gentoo and Ubuntu, I think I'm staying here for a while. The kernels are brand-new and the GPU driver performance is at least 2x what I was getting in Ubuntu. With the derivatives, there's no reason to bootstrap an Arch system from the kernel framebuffer, like the olden days of Gentoo and Slack.

1 comments

Arch itself has install script (archinstall) these days which streamlines the install process a ton. Not sure how stable it is though (I hear it is still considered experimental) but it certainly made my recent install on my thinkpad a breeze.
I used it, it makes the process a lot easier but it's still not for the faint of heart.