this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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If you actually will be going to, i could personally recommend EndeavourOS. Don't fall for "Ubuntu is best for noobs", it isn't, and in my experience it lacks stability.
Also, if you're not quite a mouse person, you could try tiling wms on your journey, like i3 or awesomewm. For me i3 is one of the major reasons to never return back. The ability to actually be able to do all you need with just a keyboard is huge for me, and something I was looking for even before switching to linux. Now floating wms and especially Windows itself seem so unhandy and irritating
Maybe Linux mint, I love archlinux as much as the next guy but jumping head first into a glass of water takes practice. Unless you revel in the challenge of jumping in the deep end just so you can learn how to swim like I do!
I'm just glad I chose arch instead of Gentoo. I got plenty of will power to learn something new but waiting hours or even days for a bunch of software to compile was too much for me.
EndeavourOS is as simply installed as Ubuntu, even better, considering last time i tried, ubuntu installer gave me some weird errors few times. I think EndeavourOS is actually the best for noobs because of AUR and yay. AUR is supperior to all that PPA stuff. Not to mention the great ArchWiki. All Ubuntu has is forums, not so comprehensive. Mint has even less comprehensive answers on its forum, and they're a lot often outdated. And not all answers from the ubuntu ones are relevant for mint. Opposing to them, what's relevant for Arch is relevant for endeavourOS. Also, it comes in nice flavours, offered during the install process. Not to mention the "welcome" utility helping you make some initial tweaks.
I love seeing people enjoy arch and I'm not discouraging anyone from trying it. Ubuntu kinda sucks but most people coming from windows don't feel comfortable doing anything in the terminal. Debian drivitaives and fedora are probably a safer bet.
If it wasn't for the CLI first approach for arch and the dangers using potentially unstable or malicious packages in the aur I'd recommend arch derivatives to everyone. It's exceedingly rare but I have been left with broken packages a couple times in my first year of using arch. The aur isn't vetted or controlled to the degree the official arch repositories and could leave them open to downloading malicious code if they don't check the package first. Literally anyone can put whatever they want on the aur until someone notices.
With Debian derivatives I find the Debian wiki along with the forms of your distro a 1 2 punch that can be almost as good as archlinux wiki and communities. I do agree with you the information for issues you might have on arch is everywhere. That comes from a crowd of enthusiast and they typically, understandably expect a level of understanding and independence that you don't find with average users (sorry average user).
AUR was super confusing to me as a new user when I was running Manjaro for a few months. It still donent really make sense since it seems like it throws every advantage of a package manager out the window
As far as I've heard, manjaro is notorious for its AUR "support" so no wonders. For me on my EndeavourOS setup its as easy as running "yay -S *package name*" to install one or just "yay" to update everything and then everything just works.
Just started on EOS this week after running Manjaro a few years back and then running Debian derivatives for a few years. I really like it, everything has been so smooth (well, other than some minor issues with upgrading to Plasma 6 yesterday I suppose, but that's not in EOS I suppose). I was a little bit lazy about learning the ins and outs of pacman and yay, but I immediately found pacseek, which has been a pretty nice TUI package manager
But the documentation is really good and I like the simplicity of OpenRC. Give Void or Alpine a go if you want to dip your toes into something similar, but without all the compiling.
How's the init script management access? I had a friend try to switch to openrc on Arch (I know) and he had a terrible experience, most likely because it's Arch and not Arco which is designed for alternative init systems. Do you have to write and maintain your own init scripts, or is that created during installation?
Packages should come with the necessary scripts (on Gentoo and Alpine they do), but if they don't for some reason then writing them is pretty simple. I think the updated layout really only needs dependencies and a couple variables defined.
Void uses Runit which is even simpler, you have one directory per service and at least a script called "run" in there which gets executed by the supervisor. The is usually just one line, that's all it takes to make a service work. It also has the supervisor take care of handling logging, similar to what Systemd does. I think it's a very clean, modern take on classic init, except that dependency/ordering doesn't exist - it just retries until things fall into place. Works well though.
i wonder if you can do a waterfall init where you can have an entry point that defines what services to run next. then you services can continue to pass on the next to run, or if it encounters one with a service that isn't running, it looks at what services that one requires and traverses up to start the root unstarted service. Easy way to define dependencies without much hassle. The former case handles system services, the latter handles application services.
I like OpenRC! I never really measured it but it feels like a much faster boot time than systemd. I'd have to get used to the syntax and writing my own scripts but if the majority of Linux distros switched to it tomorrow I'd enjoy it.
Big and small projects alike typically have poor documentation for alternative init systems and what they depend on in the aystemd ecosystem so I'll probably stick to systemd for now. The poor documentation on alternative init systems is probably one of the biggest reasons Gentoo doesn't move fast on getting new projects in their repos.
I don't think I wrote more than one or two init scripts during my years of using Gentoo, the packages usually come with them. The newer syntax looks like you can get by with just a few variables and a dependency definition, not that different from a unit file I think.