Is Arch worth installing?

That is a legit worry for sure, but let me tell you a story. I myself, actually went for Gentoo, before Arch and while I was following the handbook, trust me, I didn’t understand about half of what I was typing. There were two reasons for that, first, I was literally a kid back then. Second, and more important, I didn’t know where to go, who to ask “what the hell is going on?”. So by the time I was up and running, I couldn’t access my wifi card. What did I do next? I left Gentoo, for quite some time, with a decent sized discouragement.

The reason I’m telling you this, is to express the fact that time has changed. And dare I say, right now, you’re in one of the most friendliest communities I’ve seen in a long time. You need help? You have this forum, not feeling like starting a topic? You have a Telegram group, where Ringo, UncleMez, Michael and a lot of others are mostly active, and will help you in no time, maybe even while you’re going through the process itself. So don’t get intimidated, get after it.

I might’ve gone a bit overboard on this post, forgive me for that, I’m listening to a really weird music rn.

:joy: :joy:

Gentoo says hello :"3

(Before someone walks in and says “Slackware smiles in a corner”, let me tell you, installing Slackware is a piece of cake, compared to what Gentoo can put you through. Yes maintaining an install? I don’t even wanna get into that :'))

Well, I got my first Arch running.

Installing it and doing basic set-up was way easier than I thought. I installed it in a VM, but I honestly wouldn’t recommed it. I had more problems with qemu than with Arch and some installation steps may be different depending on where it’s installed – on the actual hardware or in VM. This makes the idea of a script more difficult.

It doesn’t answer the question whether it’s worth to run Arch, but for me it definetely does answer one I had – whether it’s worth installing it just for the sake of it. As it was said before:

all I’ve ever learned from installing Arch, is how to install Arch.

+I learned to sendkey to qemu and that the same wm and keybindings on the host and guest is a bad idea :sweat_smile:

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I personally don’t use Qemu. Everytime i have tried it i found it harder to use than installing Arch. I use virtualbox because it works for me and it’s easy to install setup and use. If you want to try an Arch install using an install script Archlabs and Anarchy are both good. I would suggest you try them in virtualbox and then you’ll really have answered the question. Is it worth it?

I believe qemu is the best out there performance-wise, it runs almost as a native OS. It’s quite well documented and is not very complicated for the basic use. I just didn’t read the documentation very attentively and spent too much time trying to do things that would take minutes otherwise.

No more Arch for me :sweat_smile: But I’d like to look at the source

What is the trick to getting Qemu installed and working on Arch? i literally have tried it numerous times and seem to not be able to get it to work right. Virtualbox is so easy to install and it just works. i really wanted to try Qemu but got frustrated with it.

I use this script. Arch purists will say it’s not arch but imho it’s as close as you can get.

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I think i have tried it? :thinking:

You just install it as any other package with sudo pacman -S qemu, then create a drive for the system with qemu-img create -f format image_name.img size where format is the image format (I used qcow2), image_name is the future hard drive for the system and size the size of it. For example:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 arch.img 32G

Then you just need to load the ISO into that drive and pass the options you need.
I used a script for it

#!/usr/bin/zsh
 
 exec qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm \
         -m 2048 \
         -smp 3 \
         -boot d \
         -vga std \
         -usb \
         -device usb-host \
         -soundhw hda \
         -cpu host \
         -hda /home/ana/Images/arch.img \
         #-cdrom /home/ana/Downloads/archlinux-2020.02.01-x86_64.iso

cdrom is not needed for the consecutive booting of the OS, once it’s installed.
edit: other than that the options should stay the same, otherwise it won’t boot

I’m not normally using VMs though, so I’m not sure I was able to explain it very well. That’s why I said that I’d rather install it on the hardware directly.

No wonder i can’t figure it out… :crazy_face: installing Arch is easier! :rofl:

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  • libqcow version 2 = libqcow2 = qcow2

All so confusing :wink:

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