are they really truly superior to professional system admins who just dont want to do yet another commandline based install since they’ve done it 1000 times since the year 1980/1990?
Im of the opinion that ‘the arch way’ only should apply to linux n00bs and if your already advanced enough to come close to passing certification exams to become a system admin, doing it ‘the arch way’ is no longer beneficial to you and in fact, is a waste of time.
its like dude, i installed slackware 7 or 6 from zipslack with only a terminal and no internet connection to start. I absolutely hate having to argue with people over why ‘the arch way’ doesnt actually matter to old-school users like myself.
but back in them days, the arch way was the only way for all/most distros. you were lucky if you got a CLI based GUI installer back then, and almost certainly your init along with other things probably wouldnt be configured 100% correctly from the get go. I mean heck i spent days hacking around with an intel winmodem driver just to get dial-upp PPPoE going.
sure if its baby’s first linux install i think it has immense value in helping to slightly increase a person’s computer literacy (but its by no means a true introduction to BASH or anything)
I just dislike the arch-aficionado’s hatred for distros like this, because once installed they are functionally the same and if you already know more management skills in linux than the arch installer ‘teaches’ you, you arent learning anything and going through the extra work is just time consuming by a few more minutes.
if you wanna pay me to install you a headless server or something, sure. I’ll manually install it even over SSH if you got a liveUSB in the thing. but when there is no need for the extra complexity and you dont gain anything out of it, it stops being tradition and becomes a waste of time. and id rather spend that time configuring my desktop rather than just installing it.
But then again i already went through the original rites of passage in unix.
I mostly agree with you in regard to how you find the Arch installation and maintenance process to be in a special place, possibly making its disciples in a separate category from those who prefer using Arch derived systems as everyday drivers. Having had experience in the past with installation and administration of BSD on Vax clusters going back to the mid-80’s, I still have nostalgic connections to all of the machinations necessary to make one of the early Unix flavors work on a largely proprietary machine architecture, naturally more friendly to VMS. The wonderment I find historically with the spread of Unix into the proprietary hardware / systems world was its adaptability to so many different hardware configurations - from Dec PDP’s, Vaxes, and Alphas to Cray supercomputers, to Sun and Sparc workstations, all the way to Steve Jobs’ NEXT machines which morphed into Mac system software. Regardless of the underlying and disparate architectures, Unix was always at heart simply Unix. One didn’t need to know RSX-11 to navigate PDP-11s, VMS to work with Vaxes, or CrayOS to program on a Cray. Unix and ubiquitous languages like C could work across nearly all software levels with all of those architectures, without learning and resorting to disparate proprietary systems and assemblers. I say all of that as a prelude to admitting being profoundly grateful for the advent of Linux as a “Unix like” system, with similar advantages in addressing ever changing hardware. Unix/Linux make understanding computing and computers remotely possible in such a Moore’s Law dominated hardware world. So, if you still enjoy what is now the “Arch way”, it is great that you have found a worthy hobby or perhaps avocation. I personally, at a stage of life where time is becoming a valuable commodity, am thankful for the development of the contemporary desktop flavors of Linux, be they Arch based, Debian based, Ubuntu based, or whatever. It’s still Linux, and it allows me to play with the hardware in a time friendly manner, and with the flexibility to occasionally deal with lower level system “stuff”.
As a side, one of my most cherished computer memories is in having worked with the systems programmers who developed a system for the CDC 6400/6600 mainframe (later the Cyber 70) in the early 70s called UT2D (University of Texas developed OS to replace CDC NOS as an academia friendly OS for the CDC mainframe). It required extensive knowledge of CDC Compass, the assembler for that mainframe, and with a middling knowledge of Fortran as the lingua franca high level language on that machine. Deadgum thing had a 60-bit word on its main dual processor core, with 12-bit peripheral processors to handle I/O. I was in my twenties at the time, and still have a lot of retained knowledge of that old hardware and the UT2D system (largely useless now, but nevertheless somewher in my “core” storage). If Unix had been around for use on that old machine, whatever I might have learned with “the Unix way” might have still been of value today. Sorry … blah blah.
This is true. Most Windows users only know how to click on an icon or a downloaded program that is an executable file. They know little of the command line and now with Windows 10 even less with power shell.
What i care about is that the software works. Linux does and Windows doesn’t …most of the time. Oh…sorry i gotta reboot so i can finish installing this!
I’ve read the replies diligently and it seems to me there is confusion over the desktop environments and the operating systems. You can find almost all of the desktops on all the Operating systems or makeup your own. I believe the Operating systems are the main subject. Please keep on track here. Perhaps another rant is in order over desktop environments?
Regarding to second part of your post: You’d be surprised how much that knowledge might be usable today. Fine tuning of compilations on supercomputers is for me pain in the… I wish I have such solid background for doing that, but there is so much administrative stuff to do, that I guess I will never find enough time to deep dive into that topic, as well as many many others.
That’s why despite the fact that I’m just at the beginning of my sysadmin career, I really appreciate shortcuts of self installing arch. I don’t see a point of doing that over and over, once you have the background and know stuff going on under the hood. I’d rather spend that extra saved time on learning new things.
Yes, unfortunately, many people blend the operating system with the desktop environment. One reason for this is that the use of desktop Linux is becoming more and more popular these days.
Cool. The first time I ever used a computer was a simple Cobol program on a CDC 6400. My Dad was a programmer at Bell Labs and got my program keypunched and run on the system in 1969. That system was about a half-acre in size.
If Windows wasn’t working how can there be billions of users which can only click on an icon and still able to use it?
I moved away from Windows for reasons, “not working” wasn’t one of them.
If we’d entertain the thought experiment of all Windows machines coming to a halt tomorrow, maybe because of some extreemly effective malware, we would face a global crisis, as non of these icon clicking individuals would be able to pay bills, hand out prescriptions, take your food order, get goods into your local grocery store…any longer.
The same would be true for Linux by the way, because it powers most of the services we and those icon clickers depend on.
I really enjoyed reading what you wrote - I’ve read it 3-4 times though I understand only 85-90% of it
I totally agree with you - as I more and more often prefer a less “complicated” way to install it. It gets boring to type in the same commands over and over again. I mean - what will it teach my at my install No 56 that I didn’t get the 45 previous times It’s not even about saving time - it might save me 10 - 15 minutes. I still like to get as close to base as possible - as I like to configure and install every tiny thing on my system myself (controlfreak maybe)
I was content using Windows for a while when Hackintosh wasn’t an option any more with NVidia graphics. But that’s it.
Windows was sluggish way too often, updates were a btch. Driver installations were a pain. I started trying Linux distros to try and find a suitable one, since Linux gaming had gotten much better.
Tried Mint, which was said to be good. I didn’t like it. Just didn’t sit right. Tried Zorin and PoPOS and they both felt really good. Stumbled into Antergos and it just was perfect!
These days it’s just about finding the perfect DE. KDE is really good, but has some minor annoyances, like bugs in display switcher, that make want to smash my screen. Sometimes the screen(s) will just freeze after switching display modes. Having to sleep the computer for a second just to get out of it sucks. There are also a bit too many settings.
Linux is really great. As a GUI user I’m having some trouble with setting permissions and some apps with weird permissions, but nothing major. Give me Linux with a macOS UI’s functionality and that would be the perfect OS. Arch is the next best thing. I can make it my own.
Isn’t that that guy that shamelessly throws in his love for Linux Mint on almost every video?
What If my hobby is Linux and I make money from that, where does that leave me?
It’s not even about saving time - it might save me 10 - 15 minutes. I still like to get as close to base as possible - as I like to configure and install every tiny thing on my system myself (controlfreak maybe) 
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