An interesting rant on Arch users

Lounge EndeavourOS pub
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I just watched the rant, and while he is not wrong, I think he is overstating the “elitism” aspect just a bit too much. I think Arch forum members are entitled to their high standards when it comes to people participating in their forum. It’s their home, and if they don’t want to deal with newbies who ask stupid questions, that’s entirely their right and I certainly won’t hold them in contempt for it. Even though it is not something I personally practise, I can understand their attitude: they spent so much time and effort into writing what is probably the best Linux documentation project ever, the Arch Wiki. So, I can imagine how they can take it personally when someone asks a question that is answered there, without first looking there. Unfortunately, newbies often lack perspective, we tend to think that our problem is unique.

Fortunately, there exist other forums for Arch-based distros where newbies are welcomed with open arms (obviously, I really love this one, and the Garuda Linux forum is great, as well. Manjaro forum is also very welcoming to newbies). So it’s not true that elitism is the defining feature of the Arch Linux community or that Arch is unwelcoming to newbies, it’s just that the official forum is… well, a bit strict, to put it mildly :smiley:

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It’s an interesting thing what we mean by the word newbie. Someone may be a novice in one distribution and experienced in another, and that won’t be revealed on the forum.

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I’m not so sure about that. I like Endeavouros and it installs an Arch Linux with not too much extra stuff that I might not want. OTOH, I occasionally install a prepared ‘distro’ just to see what I can borrow from it. I’ve recently tried out kubuntu and Manjaro Openbox and Manjaro standard. I dumped them quite quickly (I didn’t intent to keep them anyway) because there was so much extra included that just got in the way (figuratively). I can see, however, that a lot of users will love them and that’s fine by them.

It only takes me about 15 minutes to install a basic Arch up to and including the Xorg and Lightdm part. From there, I wander around dragging down configs from my dotfiles. I end up with a clean and neat Arch Linux that runs nicely. I don’t play games so my installation is very light.

Yesterday, I decided to install DWM, Dmenu and ST from source on a very basic Arch and on my secondary computer. Just a basic install, with Xorg and no display manager using startx to load DWM. It was the most fun I’ve had for a while and I’ve got a simple system which works well. I’m no computer expert, so anyone can do it. I should add that I have Openbox on my main Linux computer and I still think that is the very best DE for Arch.

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I think you are mostly right. I certainly agree with you that installing vanilla Arch is not a difficult matter at all. It just requires one to carefully follow instructions, which are well written and detailed. It’s not rocket surgery. That is, unless something unforeseen happens.

When I fist tried Arch, that was about a year ago. I’ve been a Kubuntu user for many years, but I got tired of all the bloat and especially of Canonical and their :cow::poop: regarding snaps and similar spyware. So, I installed vanilla Arch. The installation from the terminal was something I’ve never done before, but it went pretty smoothly, apart from a very minor trouble with partitioning the drives from the terminal (but I ‘solved’ that issue by just booting an old Ubuntu ISO and using gparted to prepare the partitions for an Arch install :rofl:). Took me about an hour from the start to booting into the GUI session.

This is where the troubles started, as I had no experience with Arch and I got into this quite blindly. Some USB ports were not working, the interface was slow and laggy, and the system crashed about once an hour (I had no idea that I needed to install proprietary Nvidia drivers from the AUR, for example, and that the Nouveau driver was causing my GUI session to crash). So, after about a week of messing with it, I said “nope, I’m not experienced enough to do this, to heck with Arch, let’s try Manjaro, a.k.a Arch for noobs”.

I really like Manjaro, but after the initial enthusiasm wore off, I started to notice that it was trying hard to go in the same corporate direction as Canonical. It also pushed snapd and Steam and various proprietary garbage like “FreeOffice” (which is not Free at all). Nevertheless, I really enjoyed using Manjaro, since it was pretty easy to debloat and it ran a million times better than Kubuntu (still have it on my laptop, for now), but after that last PR fiasco, I decided to go back to pure Arch (now, with a year of experience in an Arch-like environment), but I somehow ended up using EndeavourOS. Which is great, because it is mostly vanilla Arch anyway. It’s about as big of a step in quality of life as going from Kubuntu to Manjaro.

TL;DR: my point is that vanilla Arch is not at all difficult to use, but you need some experience to handle unexpected issues. Once you get the hang of the basic things, it’s a fairly easy distro to run.

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I’m in line with the guy in the video. When I was younger I was more of a hobbyist. I didn’t mind spending hours trying to figure out why my laptop’s keyboard stopped working after a recent update because I enjoyed the challenge of troubleshooting it and the all the valuable knowledge I accrued. As plenty of others have said, for someone comfortable with the terminal Arch is very straightforward to set up. I even have a short script that basically does it all for me and boots me into a desktop environment with a display manager and all my main packages installed etc.

As I’ve gotten older, I don’t enjoy that process as much anymore. I’m spending my time on other things and so getting sidetracked by bugs, configuration issues or upgrade issues is not something that’s pleasant. It’s annoying now. The only “hobbyist” part of me that remains is the liking of bleeding edge software.

That said, while I run Arch on a couple of my servers I haven’t ran it on a desktop in years because even though I have a script that automates things a great deal (I dunno if it still works to begin with after all this time) it doesn’t do everything and it’s still more complicated then clicking next a few times in a GUI. This is where I feel distros like Manjaro and EOS for Arch shine (and I’m guessing ones like Sabayon for Gentoo do too). I sorta get best of both worlds and I can’t complain about that.

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And while I don’t know much about the communities within other distributions, I’d have to say that we have a very supportive group of people on IRC and the forums. Most users receive answers very quickly, and we’ve received many kudos for our efforts here.
-Judd Vinet

Interesting to hear what the Arch Community was like then. I wonder what caused it to changed. I mean, I was never around it back then, so not much I can say.

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Having now lurked in #archlinux for a few days, people do get help quickly as long as they have put in some basic effort beforehand. It’s not really a “relaxed general chat” atmosphere, but if you need focused and purposeful help it is pretty decent.

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I remember my second post there. The nervousness I’ve felt and the anxiety of being judged and maybe found lacking. Like when presenting the homework at school.

For my first post I was not prepared for anything. I took it full blast. Nasty experience altogether.

That was more than 2 years ago. No clue how the community evolved.
Edit: I’m actually talking about the Arch forum, I just realized the post above is about something else.

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Not always the case, unfortunately. I got the full ‘attack mode’, despite the efforts (documented well) that I put in. They decided (wrongly) that I wasn’t on an Arch install - and I got accused of lying to them and worse.

If they don’t want you to ever add in a repo from elsewhere, they should say so :grin: Or maybe it’s because I used yaourt to get started! ( A friend gave me a pkg file to get started - as I wasn’t ready for makepkg -si at that point. Anyway - you can’t count on much there.

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I’ve been a member of the Arch forums for close to a decade and I’ve never found the reputation they had of being unfriendly even remotely true. 99% of the time someone would have their throat jumped down it’d be because they were running Manjaro or Antergos and saying they were running Arch. If you’re new to Arch and post in the newbie forum they tend to be understanding and will politely reply with what info you should provide if you don’t happen to do it in your OP.

My 2 cents on the stereotype of Arch users being unfriendly/hostile is that Arch is not a “warm” community. My experience on other forums (like Ubuntu, Manjaro and here) is that people tend to be warm and friendly to each other while on Arch things have a much more “professional” feel. People go there mainly to talk shop or get help and that’s it. It’s not a “warm” place but you don’t really need that if you’re not looking for a place to hang out I suppose. Because of the “coldness” people take that the wrong way.

That said, no community is perfect and there are going to be people who will tear down others to make themselves feel better so no doubt there’s going to be people who got burnt by the Arch community, but for me personally it’s been a positive experience overall.

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That is what I expected, actually, but not what I found. Maybe it depends on the time of the month :grin: They certainly do know how to do attack mode - if only it was justified…

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I was active in the community from very near the beginning for about 6 years. In my time there, unfriendliness and actively attacking new users was the norm. I would try to reply to a post and by the time I was hitting submit I’d get an error that it was locked with a “RTFM” comment, and that was it. This was FAR too common. It’s the reason I ultimately left. The toxicity of the forums was worse than any other community that I’d ever been a part of. The military was less toxic and less hostile.

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The impression I got is that the general users are not so sure about the RTFM responses - but that the mods are ‘hard-core’ - which explains the quickly locked threads when they’re around :slight_smile: I sort of understand it, but I don’t think it is justified to the extent they take it…

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Gods no. There were times that user would post a link to the KB article that referenced what they were trying to do and specifically say “I read the KB, but don’t understand it, can someone explain it simpler” and what would be the response? RTFM, lock thread. Horrible people in that forum. Now, I’ve been gone from those forums for something like 9 or 10 years at this point, so MAYBE it’s improved in that time, but I still hear enough people say things like this still happen that I have my doubts. One thing is certain, even if I could remember my username and password I would never go back.

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Well I’m a old Arch Linux user joined the forums 2 times the last was in 2008, I read so much CRAP about the forums its untrue.
It is stated very clearly in the forum rules that only “Arch installed the Arch way is supported”. So why do Manjaro users and users of spins insist on posting on their forums beats me.
It is the Arch users support forum after all, ITS not that they refuse to help others its they can’t and the reason is very simple, Arch has the best support forum apart from Gentoo and you can just imagine if they gave technical advice to a Manjaro user for instance, on a graphics problem seeing as Manjaro uses a totally different way of configuring them, or the kernel, grub is totally different BLAA blaa

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In case of Manjaro I agree, but EndevarourOS is 100% Arch. You can remove the single extra dedicated repo and the system suffers no harm (it’s just some utilities).
So the “Arch installed the Arch way is supported” statement sounds more like a douchy elitist thing to me. Anything applying to Arch applies to EOS. I never mentioned in the forums I was not using pure Arch, and never had issues specific to EOS but not Arch. So the treatment I was getting was that of an Arch user. It’s true I was using Antergos at that time, but Antergos was almost like EOS, it just had a bigger own repo.

Mind you, I realized I would barely get any help there as a noob (well actually I did get some help but it was a tedious and anxiety inducing experience), so never bothered to post there again.

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In a way i prefer personally enos is 100% arch based. But being a arch is always different story. Manjaro is a mix up with arch packages and own packages. Also some buildupnis bit different.

But is all kinda subjective

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If Endeavour wasn’t 100% Arch, I would probably just use Arch. I’m using Endeavour just because I like this forum so much.

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I think Manjaro is one distro that makes it possible or easier for some or many users to get acquainted with how things work generally in Arch (Arch-based distro). After that only the Arch sky is the limit.

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