Diary of a new Arch user: One weird trick to make Arch easier.
The memories of a painful install have now faded, and I’m now more than comfortable using Arch day-to-day. Perhaps the most important thing in my becoming comfortable with Arch has been a change of process. Previously, if I needed some software, I’d apt-get it and expect it to work. If it didn’t work, I would curse the package maintainers (regardless of whether or not it was their fault), then head to the web to find out if anyone else had had a similar problem. This more-or-less worked for everything from small utilities to new desktop environments.
Since this was my standard way of working, I tried this at first with Arch, and looking back, I think much of my early frustration came from this approach. While there is quite a bit of software that you can just pacman -S and run, a significant proportion that needs some more setup in order to run. It took longer than it should have to change my method of working, but I now check the Arch Wiki before trying to install anything new. Now, I don’t run into problems and get frustrated, I solve them before they happen. It doesn’t really save much time over getting a broken configuration and then fixing it, but it’s done wonders for my mental state.
Arch users always say that the Wiki is the best feature of Arch, and you need it to keep everything running properly. I knew this when I started. What took me so long to figure out is that it’s import to not wait until something’s broken to use it.
Perhaps, at some point, I’ll become familiar enough with Arch to be able to switch back to my old routine. For now though, it’s Wiki first, install second.
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About The Author
Ben Everard
Ben Everard is the co-author of Learning Python with the Raspberry Pi and hacks hardware projects held together with a big dollop of Linux and Free Software glue. He's @ben_everard on Twitter.
I’m sure it’s a good idea, but it seems a bit of an overreaction. I certainly consult the arch wiki before installing a new desktop environment, or an apache server, or virtualization or something else complicated. Of course I would look at the community pages for Ubuntu as well for this sort of thing. For installing any old package like a file manager, terminal emulator, pdf viewer or whatever, I don’t see that Arch has any additional config requirements or necessitates consulting the Arch wiki. It’s just my opinion, but I’ve been using Arch primarily for a number of years now.
Arch is very similar to Slackware and Gentoo in that the packages are left very close to the defaults set by the original developers, and sometimes the original developers have a philosophy of provding a very usable config out of the box, sometimes they leave it very minimal for security reasons or to force the user to read and learn. And sometimes the package wasn’t really developed with Arch in mind so there may be some common corrective actions you need to follow. Expect an app like Leafpad to work out of the box, and expect apache2 to require a lot of manual twiddling.
Ubuntu: new user friendly, not super secure, loads of out of date documentation throughout their forums
Arch: competent user friendly, more secure, brilliant central wiki documentation with multiple up to date solutions
Gentoo: RTFM. Here’s an outdated installer and outdated docs, but we have a really top notch set of scripts for tweaking your very own distro with the very latest packages.
Slackware: Here’s an installer. You’re welcome.
I can completely emphasise with you – that’s basically how I started out with Arch.
However, because Arch is usually bleeding edge all that searching on the intertubes usually turns up old / wrong information, so I find that the Arch Wiki is sometimes the *only* place to go.
It’s similar to all the wailing around systemd, etc – I learnt all about it from the wiki, got to grips with how it works, and I’ve never looked back.
All those ubuntu installs that are dreading the change to systemd will probably cover the same “apt-get install && wget google” approach :¬)
Wil has a good point though – “simple client” apps usually install and work as expected, it’s generally the more complex “server” apps which require effort – but that effort was always required, you just didn’t know it… :¬)