# ARCH Linux Experience



## Ja.KooLit (Jul 14, 2021)

Hey Guys,

I made a video last month for installing arch the "easy way" which originally I made it for my friends to install and have experience with Arch Linux and thought I am gonna share with you. 










for connecting to wireless network if you dont have LAN










About the video, once you booted in Arch via USB,  you just need to type archinstall and then answer the questions.  Now just a little bit of warning, its better if you install this in a separate hard drive or USB or VM. because then if you dont want, your main OS wont be affected. 

Main difference between a normal arch install and the guided installer: Not so much difference. Perhaps main difference is hard drive or partitioning, mounting options, minimum packages.

I believe not so many TPU have arch or any arch-based experience.

Now, about Arch Linux. Perhaps many of you have heard that its not stable, nor easy to break nor and so on and so forth. With my nearly 5 months of using arch or any arch-based distro, I have not experience any major breakdown. Of course I had some difficulties because I was forced to search and read alot and that is because I have never tried any Arch and I have been using ubuntu-based distro for the past years.

Anyway, I will just answer questions if you have.


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## bug (Jul 14, 2021)

Ha, archinstall. I installed Arch before that was available 

But thanks for sharing, Arch is a great Linux experience (the best, imho, ymmv), if you manage to get it installed.

And about Arch breaking, the only real danger is using a new kernel that bugs out on your particular hardware config. Installing an LTS kernel alongside mitigates that problem.
And the upside: you really only get what you actually install, so it's very light on resources. The packages are also cutting edge, a new kernel release will be packages for Arch in under a week.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jul 14, 2021)

bug said:


> Ha, archinstall. I installed Arch before that was available
> 
> But thanks for sharing, Arch is a great Linux experience (the best, imho, ymmv), if you manage to get it installed.
> 
> ...


I have been using new kernel all the time and didnt experienced any breakdowns. 

unfortunately, I cant use LTS because my computers desktop and laptop are new and most of the amd patches are in newer kernel. My laptop in particular needs  a kernel 5.11 or newer since there is a patch which benefit it. I am now waiting on 5.13 as there is a big update for cpu and gpu as per linus. So kinda "excited" Tried compiling of course but I run into issues like my qemu/kvm not launching for example.

Yeah archinstall was only released april 1 this year. And thats also before I installed on my computers. I have created my own script so pretty much can reinstall or install arch easily. Although that archinstall is a nice thing so alot can try without going through arch way of installing


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## bug (Jul 14, 2021)

night.fox said:


> I have been using new kernel all the time and didnt experienced any breakdowns.


Been using it for some years now with no issues either. But each time a new kernel is released you read these stories... I'm sure they affect only a handful of people, but I'm glad I'm not part of that handful.


night.fox said:


> unfortunately, I cant use LTS because my computers desktop and laptop are new and most of the amd patches are in newer kernel. My laptop in particular needs  a kernel 5.11 or newer since there is a patch which benefit it. I am now waiting on 5.13 as there is a big update for cpu and gpu as per linus. So kinda "excited" Tried compiling of course but I run into issues like my qemu/kvm not launching for example.


Well, you know the saying: if it works, don't fix it 


night.fox said:


> Yeah archinstall was only released april 1 this year. And thats also before I installed on my computers. I have created my own script so pretty much can reinstall or install arch easily. Although that archinstall is a nice thing so alot can try without going through arch way of installing


I'll have to give it a try sometime. Having installed Arch from scratch once, I'm not keen on doing it again. I was considering Manjaro instead, but now that we have archinstall, it may be the better option.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jul 25, 2021)

I am so amazed how Gaming in Linux has really improved alot.

Did some benchmark on Shadow of Tomb Raider, tried to played both on my Arch and Windows 11 and I noticed that it is more smooth in Linux than in Windows. I ended up doing a benchmark, on both windows 11 and Linux


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## Easy Rhino (Jul 25, 2021)

night.fox said:


> I am so amazed how Gaming in Linux has really improved alot.
> 
> Did some benchmark on Shadow of Tomb Raider, tried to played both on my Arch and Windows 11 and I noticed that it is more smooth in Linux than in Windows. I ended up doing a benchmark, on both windows 11 and Linux



Could it have performed better on Linux because Windows 11 is still not finished?


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## Ja.KooLit (Jul 25, 2021)

Easy Rhino said:


> Could it have performed better on Linux because Windows 11 is still not finished?


a possibility but then if it performs well in windows 10 that means it should perform worst in any games in windows 10 vs windows 11 early benchmarks? Most of the time, windows 11 have gaming performance uplifts by small percentage.

Hardware unboxed have made a video about it few weeks or days ago


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## Deleted member 212040 (Sep 23, 2021)

I still think EndeavourOS is the best way to start with Arch. It offers a great customizable installation process and a friendly community. As someone who's never interacted with Arch before and only Ubuntu/Debian based distros, they sure were a lot of help.


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## bug (Sep 23, 2021)

Emily said:


> I still think EndeavourOS is the best way to start with Arch. It offers a great customizable installation process and a friendly community. As someone who's never interacted with Arch before and only Ubuntu/Debian based distros, they sure were a lot of help.


The best is relative in this context, it depends on how strong your Linux-fu is.
Personally, I think having an option that will meet your needs regardless of what these are (ease-of-use, stability, cutting-edge, light on resources, headless server, etc.) is what makes Linux great and rather unique. At the same time, there are those that look at the same arguments and consider them a weakness because they lead to fragmentation. And they're not wrong, either.

TL;DR In the Linux world, there's something for everyone.


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## Liquid Cool (Sep 23, 2021)

bug said:


> TL;DR In the Linux world, there's something for everyone.



Agreed. 

This is from July, but I actually only just saw this video from night.fox for the first time this evening.  I don't know how I missed this before.  

Truly enjoyed every minute of it and frankly speaking...I'd like to see more.  .

After having been with Debian based distros since the beginning(ubuntu 12.04) of my own personal journey into linux...now that I'm in the world of all things Arch.  I'm seeing a lot of the same commands, just different verbiage....  Arch is different, but in a way...familiar to some degree.

As I mentioned in the screenshot thread.  I'm parking myself in Manjaro for the time being.  It feels like home to me, but I'll be working my way to Arch just as I did with debian...from ubuntu.

Regards,

Liquid Cool


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## xrobwx71 (Sep 23, 2021)

Easy Rhino said:


> Could it have performed better on Linux because Windows 11 is still not finished?


What are we seeing on the Windows side that looks sharper and has more color saturation?


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## PaulieG (Sep 25, 2021)

Other than trying Ubuntu for like 5 minutes several years ago, I've never used Linux. I just wiped a drive and installed Manjaro not knowing a damn thing. I have no idea what I'm doing.


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## ThrashZone (Sep 25, 2021)

PaulieG said:


> Other than trying Ubuntu for like 5 minutes several years ago, I've never used Linux. I just wiped a drive and installed *Manjaro* not knowing a damn thing. I have no idea what I'm doing.


Hi,
Op was recommending manjaro a couple months ago on the linux thread now arch lol
This is one of the main problems with linux all the distro spawns and people bouncing back and forth on recommends of which one is said to be best

All look like nothing but desktop themes but no is another linux spawn instead lol

I looked for a linux distro usage statics chart and what I found was pretty funny anyone have a reliable distro usage chart ?


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## Ja.KooLit (Sep 26, 2021)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> Op was recommending manjaro a couple months ago on the linux thread now arch lol
> This is one of the main problems with linux all the distro spawns and people bouncing back and forth on recommends of which one is said to be best
> 
> ...


my first Arch based was Manjaro. And I was drawn to Arch since I was intrigued by lots of people saying how difficult arch is, being a bleeding edge distro, unstable etc etc. But having experienced it, it was actually easiest to maintain, granted I spent time playing around with it, so I have learned alot. 

"Best" distro is subjective. Unless you get out of your comfort zone, defining best is what people actually knows about such distro.

Perhaps one reason why Arch is so much in talk now is because of steam deck OS


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## ThrashZone (Sep 26, 2021)

Hi,
Ran into distro watch 
It was really funny and sad at the same time that the top distro only showed 3500 users lol


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## Deleted member 202104 (Sep 26, 2021)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> Ran into distro watch
> It was really funny and sad at the same time that the top distro only showed 3500 users lol



The numbers at distrowatch are nothing more than hits per day to that distros page at the site.  It has nothing to do with user base.  It's kind of pointless.


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## kruk (Sep 26, 2021)

The problem with DistroWatch is that it counts only users that visit that site. It's not really relevant to the market share and/or the number of distro users:



> The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.



Sadly, at the moment there seems to be no reliable method of counting Linux users.

/edit: heh, ninjaed by weekendgeek


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## ThrashZone (Sep 26, 2021)

Hi,
Knew it couldn't be right that was the funny part


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## Ja.KooLit (Sep 26, 2021)

Emily said:


> I still think EndeavourOS is the best way to start with Arch. It offers a great customizable installation process and a friendly community. As someone who's never interacted with Arch before and only Ubuntu/Debian based distros, they sure were a lot of help.


Endeavour is also great and so as Arco. Arco developer is doing alots of videos and he spent so much time tinkering Arco. So I believe, for new to Arch, arco is better since developer is very active.


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## R-T-B (Sep 26, 2021)

xrobwx71 said:


> What are we seeing on the Windows side that looks sharper and has more color saturation?


Well, there is HDR, which linux still completely lacks.

It's the only thing keeping me at present.


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## Deleted member 202104 (Sep 26, 2021)

R-T-B said:


> Well, there is HDR, which linux still completely lacks.
> 
> It's the only thing keeping me at present.



There is hope:






						Red Hat Is Hiring So Linux Can Finally Have Good HDR Display Support - Phoronix
					






					www.phoronix.com


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## R-T-B (Sep 26, 2021)

weekendgeek said:


> There is hope:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Godspeed.


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## Deleted member 202104 (Sep 26, 2021)

R-T-B said:


> Godspeed.



Agreed.  For me, HDR is more important and has a greater visual impact than RT and high refresh rate (>120Hz) combined.


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## xrobwx71 (Sep 26, 2021)

R-T-B said:


> Well, there is HDR, which linux still completely lacks.
> 
> It's the only thing keeping me at present.


I wonder what would happen to the numbers if that was turned off?  I suspect Windows's numbers and mentioned "smoothness" would look better.


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## R-T-B (Sep 26, 2021)

xrobwx71 said:


> I wonder what would happen to the numbers if that was turned off?  I suspect Windows's numbers and mentioned "smoothness" would look better.


HDR?  It doesn't have a performance penalty unless the game implents it, and even then it is minor.


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## Easy Rhino (Sep 27, 2021)

kruk said:


> Sadly, at the moment there seems to be no reliable method of counting Linux users.



Don't worry, we will tell you if we use linux. That is how we count the number of linux users


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## bug (Sep 27, 2021)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> Ran into distro watch
> It was really funny and sad at the same time that the top distro only showed 3500 users lol


It's probably impossible to get accurate numbers. Not only is Linux completely at your command (meaning you get to disable any kind of automatic reporting and whatnot), Linux' primary job is running servers. And those are even more locked down.
I have grown to disregard popularity completely. I just pick a distro I like, learn how to work with it and, if there are major pain points, I just move to the distro that addresses them. As such, I have been running Kubuntu for over 10 years (incidentally, it's arguably the worst distro for KDE, but I didn't know this at the time), moved on to Neon when that was available and when I realized they won't move off of Ubuntu LTS train, I went straight for Arch. At work, it's been Fedora, Kubuntu and, more recently, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.


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## Solaris17 (Sep 27, 2021)

bug said:


> OpenSUSE Tumbleweed



just as god intended


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## kruk (Sep 27, 2021)

Easy Rhino said:


> Don't worry, we will tell you if we use linux. That is how we count the number of linux users



Probably true . Anyway, Manjaro KDE (Arch derivative) user here, and I'm running my install with regular updates since January 2018. It's a surprisingly smooth experience - and TBH kind of better than Kubuntu/Debian KDE stable, because broken things in those distros stay broken for too long ...


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## PaulieG (Sep 27, 2021)

Well, I ran into my first snag with Manjaro. Pretty much this:

BOINC Manager GUI does not work - Support / Software & Applications - Manjaro Linux Forum

It's really unfortunate, because I'm really enjoying the user experience, but I just can't have problems that have too much of a learning curve on my WCG machines. I do psych evals for a living and have to use way too much brain power for my job. I look at the thread linked above and just think to myself "I don't have the mental capacity after I get home from work to have to think this hard". Hardware issues are different. So much of that comes second nature and is meditative and relaxing for me. This stuff, not so much.


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## ThrashZone (Sep 27, 2021)

PaulieG said:


> Well, I ran into my first snag with Manjaro. Pretty much this:
> 
> BOINC Manager GUI does not work - Support / Software & Applications - Manjaro Linux Forum
> 
> It's really unfortunate, because I'm really enjoying the user experience, but I just can't have problems that have too much of a learning curve on my WCG machines. I do psych evals for a living and have to use way too much brain power for my job. I look at this thread and just think to myself "I don't have the mental capacity after I get home from work to have to think this hard". Hardware issues are different. So much of that comes second nature meditative for me. This stuff, not so much.


Hi,
Yeah that kills linux for a lot of people I've found some basic functions/ apps useful in mint but could very easily be don't in windows too

Bottom line linux against apple/ windows/.. to be generous only has 2.24% of the world using it 
Even if you add the unknown and android you don't even get to apple's usage.
Continental drift slow migration


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## bug (Sep 27, 2021)

Solaris17 said:


> just as god intended


It's a bit funky how it changes which package comes from where and how you have to use dist-upgrade instead of upgrade, but otherwise yeah, very little complaints.


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## pavle (Sep 27, 2021)

Just a quick observation - Linux Lite is also a good alternative to the Windows NT6.x shifting sands.
Very small system requirements and very user-friendly to the newcomers and also with powerful support because it's based off of Ubuntu.


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## Ja.KooLit (Sep 27, 2021)

PaulieG said:


> Well, I ran into my first snag with Manjaro. Pretty much this:
> 
> BOINC Manager GUI does not work - Support / Software & Applications - Manjaro Linux Forum
> 
> It's really unfortunate, because I'm really enjoying the user experience, but I just can't have problems that have too much of a learning curve on my WCG machines. I do psych evals for a living and have to use way too much brain power for my job. I look at the thread linked above and just think to myself "I don't have the mental capacity after I get home from work to have to think this hard". Hardware issues are different. So much of that comes second nature and is meditative and relaxing for me. This stuff, not so much.


there is a good documentation how to set up BOINC in arch.






						BOINC - ArchWiki
					






					wiki.archlinux.org
				




Manjaro, being an Arch alternative, the guide could be use to set up BOINC. I dont know if it is working though

from the link you have mentioned, last post was already fixed. Its more than 6 months old link so if you set it up, it ia probably fixed already


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## Liquid Cool (Sep 27, 2021)

Completely off topic...apologize.

PaulieG...

I was going to join the folding team around the time Norton left, but that "second" machine never came to fruition.  Back then...as far as I know people were using Linux Mint for BOINC.  If you're completely new to linux and wanting to run BOINC.  I'd start with Mint...it's probably a bit easier to work with.

It seems there was a thread on this in the folding forums...I remember the guys talking about it.  Circa 2017-18.

BOINC Client/Manager

Best of Luck.

Liquid Cool


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## bug (Sep 28, 2021)

night.fox said:


> there is a good documentation how to set up BOINC in arch.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Well, iirc, Manjaro's default repos are also 3-6 months behind Arch. You can opt to have it work like a rolling release distro, but that's not how it works out of the box.


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## kruk (Sep 28, 2021)

bug said:


> Well, iirc, Manjaro's default repos are also 3-6 months behind Arch. You can opt to have it work like a rolling release distro, but that's not how it works out of the box.



The delay is usually probably only a few weeks (less than a month).

@PaulieG: I would recommend to backup/move the config files and try running the client as fresh install. A setting in the config files might be breaking the GUI. Yes, it's frustrating, but such problems can arise on Windows client too ...


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## Ja.KooLit (Dec 27, 2021)

Another way of installing Arch .


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## Ja.KooLit (Mar 7, 2022)

how I wish I have steam deck so I can compare the or see if I can costumize more than arch kde in there 

But cannot buy in S Korea..


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