For the love of root:
Do not start learning Linux with Arch.
That’s like trying to learn to drive by building the car first.
Grain of truth in that, and exactly the point where EOS shines: It gives you your first car, not a heap of parts.
If I hadn’t grown up with dinosaurs (PDP-10, VAX, DG, POINT.4, IBM/360, SCO UNIX, …) anyway, I wouldn’t have used Linux since many decades, and maybe never stuck with it. I might have ended up as a Windows user, instead of having left it behind since 13 happy years.
I think it’s good for a beginner to start with something that works out-of-the-box (Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, EOS; like the car in driving school), enjoy Linux first (your first car), and then have the chance to learn why Linux is such a beautiful and performant system, and how to modify/improve/do even more things with it. Becoming interested. Like learning to be a more proficient driver, or even a car mechanic.
That’s the point where Arch comes in (the apprenticeship years). And it does a great job at that, in whatever workshop you learn (car brand; Arch-based distro).
An argument I often hear is “But I have to learn all that!” — Yes, you do. But you’d also have to learn to drive a car. Or Windows. Or MacOS.
So here’s some perspective from a fellow ‘old-timer’ who grew up with VAX/VMS and Unix.
Things were, far, far more modular then. But at the same time, we learned by exploring, and digging into the guts of systems. Sometimes there would be a man page, or a - -help flag. More often than note, there would just be a terse error message.
For me, I learned way more, and faster, from not being given “the whole car” first. I built up my skills in the basic tools first, - tcsh, emacs, vi, and later WordStar (for fellow fans, Joe has a great mode called jstar, which which mimics Wordstar perfectly!), and then spread myself wider as my needs grew. So yes, very much “built the car first” but also learned how things worked, and why, from the bottom up, rather than the top down.
Different people learn in different ways, - but I would have killed for an “Arch” back then, as it is, growing up in the era when everything was a flashing cursor on a command line, and apps were terminal based, I think I learned more from that limitation than I would have if there had been a pretty GUI layered on top to obfuscate the complexity.
i didnt know that, sometimes i have to work with 1gb+ text (json) files and some editors croak when loading those files, ill try Joe, thanks for the info
About “growing up with the dinosaurs”: I started my professional studies with the Soviet rip-offs of PDP-11 and IBM-370 (with punched cards!) and then continued on MS-DOS, and most of my career has been Linux, with some HP-UX and Solaris thrown in for variety. Lots and lots of CLI, and still, I’m all for “gimme normal GUI”, and still keeping a Windows station around and handy, for dealing with file formats nobody ever cared to write Linux apps for, or with all sorts of MS-Office-produced PDFs only Acrobat Reader parses in a non-broken way.
This being said, I can just agree with the point that Arch Linux is not for Linux beginners.
So true. Arch and its derivatives are not for novice or first time Linux users. For that stick to Mint/MX Linux/Ubuntu/Debian. Only once the user has dipped their toes sufficiently and what to take the next step should they come to Arch. Most of the users need not take this step.
Not all of us want to tweak their cars to get the best performance out of it. Just use the cars without knowing its internals.
(“Goldfinger”, 1964)
