If you have linux experience Arch Linux can be a good idea.
Sure the daunting setup process would fall into the "a hobby" category but once it runs it tends to just keep running as long as you update it from time to time.
Using it now for ~5 Years and in that time I had two times problems one was that the new kernel version didn't work with my laptop and another which was fully my fault by doing some "special" boot setup with some custom self written package and not maintaining it. Oh and the only reasons they where problems was because I never setup recovery boot or boot prev. kernel version.
Besides that I remember having more work with maintaining Ubuntu when I used it ~8 years ago.
Also disclaimer I had some more work like setting up edurom with network manager without using any proper UI for it (nmtui...). It's doable but not properly documented. But non of this is a problem if you "just" use Gnome or KDE or at last part of the tooling from Gnome/KDE.
EDIT: But Fedora is probably what you are looking for. Widely used, well maintained and normally up to date.
Ugh, no. Manjaro is the no-nonsense "I really don't want to waste time troubleshooting my own shit" version of Arch Linux. I stopped using Arch when I found Manjaro and I'm so glad I did. Arch just requires way too much fiddling for it to ever feel "complete" and or finished.
The cost of Arch over anything else is 100% in the installation. After that, it IS Manjaro except you are using the real thing, not a derivative. I've had to trouble shoot Arch far less than any other distro I've ever used.
My main problem with Arch is that there's rarely a point where I feel like I've finished installing. There's always something missing or something not configured right. Shit, dialog still isn't a default package in 2020, which you need to use wifi-menu during the install process. So if you happen to forget to install that (and it isn't mentioned anywhere in the documentation), you're going to have to reboot into the live media, chroot into your install, install dialog, then reboot again.
Which sort of ties into my next problem which is that Arch simply isn't opinionated enough. Which is fine for people who want that kind of experience, but if you used Ubuntu before and you want a similar "install and go" experience, Arch really isn't the right answer. It is if your goal is to tinker with Arch, but that isn't what everybody wants.
Hmm... not my experience. Not discounting yours at all, I promise, but I have a 20-package one-liner install script that I run on new systems and it's ready to go. After I pull in my dotfiles and symlink them into place, I can't even tell it's a different install.
Arch is pretty much exactly as opinionated as I want a distro to be. Hell, there are LOTS of folks who think it's too opinionated for forcing you to use systemd. The real installer is pacstrap, and it installs, I think, 300+ megs of stuff. That's all someone's opinion. And keeping it to just 300 megs is an opinion too, I guess.
EDIT: Okay, re-reading, and it sounds like installing 20 packages is a pain. But when I used Ubuntu I had to go through way more to get it how I liked it (and OS X is a nightmare 2 hours of clicking menus and buttons, and installing from web pages). I don't remember all of it now, but I had to get rid of the weird mini-vim and replace it with neovim, strip out Libre Office (nothing against them, I just have no use and it's a pain to wait for the giant updates all the time), my printer drivers were on a webpage somewhere, not the repo like Arch, etc. Ubuntu is WAY more work for me to get set up with just because removing and replacing is more work than installing.
> Don't worry about getting all the packages you want - you can easily install more of them once the basic system boots by itself. The only exception to this rule is installing any packages you need for setting up internet connectivity. These packages usually are:
> dhcpcd
> wvdial
I had fresh install recently, rebooted three times in LiveUSB to pick wifi-menu, wpa_supplicant, dialog (rechecked with pacman -Qe). That's fine, I still use Arch. And it is good Manjaro provides another set of defaults.
> DON'T PANIC!
> The Arch Linux system is assembled by the user, from the shell, using basic command line tools. This is The Arch Way.
Please tell me you're fucking joking. You can't be serious. This ties into one of my other comments about how god awful the documentation is for beginners (or even intermediates) after scrapping the beginner's guide.
> Maybe, but not all people have the same opinions...
Yes. And that's fucking fine. Arch Linux isn't opinionated. Which is great, but not what I (or others) might be looking for in a distro.
On the other hand, it’s the RTFM approach of Arch documentation that forced me and others I know to actually learn Linux, and step up from beginner use to power user status.
Sure, if you want to remain a Linux beginner forever, the Arch docs would be terrible.
Well, my point was just that yes, Arch takes longer to install, and requires work, but it doesn't become a "hobby" _after_ that. Then people got into a flame war about how hard it is to install, which it is, and I freely acknowledge. :shrug:
I used to be when I was younger. I used to spend days and weeks on this stuff and enjoyed it. But nowadays I have more important (and interesting) things to do (from my perspective).
Ditto, have downloaded sources from kernel.org and mirrors and predecessors probably hundreds of times, wrestled endlessly with xf86config, window manager configs, installed slackware, gentoo... it got old, real old.
My experience with Arch a few years ago was if you miss a few updates things tend to get REALLY broken. More than once I would have to hard reset some things because pacman + aurget would break something. If you update every day it’s okay, but it wasn’t my daily driver and I ran into that problem a lot!
I'm inclined to think that complexity in the installation is to put away random impatient users to keep the community cleaner. Of course many cloud providers provide a pre installed OS image too though.
Does Manjaro do pretty well with wireless and graphics drivers. I honestly want something I can live boot, install and use immediately. I dont mind customizing later, but I've had my fun fighting with getting linux set up.
From my perspective Manjaro seems like Arch+added nonsense. I honestly don't see what are you trying to say regarding Manjaro with "I really don't want to waste time troubleshooting my own shit" or "Arch just requires way too much fiddling". On the other hand I could understand if you just wanted something that requires less knowledge to set up the first time, but then why not go with Debian or something?
To clarify, I doubt that Manjaro is more debuggable than Arch, considering it's just Arch+added complications.
Manjaro is install and go. Arch Linux is ... well, if you haven't done it before, you're going to waste at least an hour going through the awful documentation trying to piece together what the installation flow is supposed to be. The beginner's guide was scrapped and the replacement is awful. So if you're new, it's going to be painful. And if you aren't new, it's still painful if you just want to install your OS and get working on things that actually have anything to do with things that interest you. You like Arch Linux, fine. But don't pretend everybody wants to install and configure everything manually, then mess around with whatever seems to be not working because the moons aren't aligned just right that day. I'm tired of Arch Linux. I'm tired of all the tinkering. I'm tired of the additional cognitive load of all the things I have to make sure is configured right. I already waste hours of my day just getting tooling to work for whatever god awful language I have to work with that day. I just want things to work. Manjaro just works.
I think what you're describing is decision fatigue, which is the hard part of your first Arch install.
It can get really technical really quickly, and you end up making decisions almost randomly if you have shallow or no knowledge of a subject.
It's like ending up at the voting booth, and knowing what president you want, but then your momentum fades and you want to vote along party lines and get out.
I wonder for example, how many people are technically prepared to choose EFI vs BIOS boot, and if they want a bootloader, which one.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that by making the decision, even the wrong one, you build up a valuable pattern in your mind and you are growing.
That said, it's harder on arch to do more involved things like encrypted boot, selinux or virtualization. But when you do it, you can consider yourself a post hole digger.
I agree that installation requires more learning than other distros, but once you get past that I don't understand the problem. I think Arch "just works", too, and I don't see how Manjaro could be better in that regard considering it is closely related to Arch. BTW, you do know you don't ever need to reinstall Arch (on a single machine)?
EDIT:
> I'm tired of all the tinkering. I'm tired of the additional cognitive load of all the things I have to make sure is configured right. I already waste hours of my day just getting tooling to work for whatever god awful language I have to work with that day. I just want things to work. Manjaro just works.
I definitely understand that, but I feel that if I went to Manjaro or Debian or whatever the added complexity would make debugging much more annoying.
> BTW, you do know you don't ever need to reinstall Arch (on a single machine)?
People say this, but I've found plenty of reason to reinstall Arch (none of it necessarily having to do with Arch, and more trying different distros out of curiosity and Arch remaining my main distro). I always have these discussions with Arch veterans who seem so incredulous about my frustrations with Arch. And I sort of chalk it down to the fact that I ended up installing Arch anew more often than once a year and the last time you or some other vet installed Arch was years ago. I think there's a fundamental disconnect between Arch vets and beginners (or even intermediates), which is clearly shown by the scrapping of the excellent beginner's guide.
I gather that you simply want something more opinionated than Arch, and that is OK, even the BSDs have a more opinionated install procedure than Arch.
But FTR scrapping the "Beginner's guide" was done for really good reasons: it duplicated the content of other Wiki articles, which is a maintainability nightmare, and was too opinionated for Arch. All the content should still be accessible by wiki links to other Arch wiki articles.
> I gather that you simply want something more opinionated than Arch, and that is OK, even the BSDs have a more opinionated install procedure than Arch.
Yes, this is why I emphasized the "install and go" aspect of Manjaro. It requires a certain amount of "opinionatedness" by the maintainers, which of course isn't a priority for Arch, which is also fine.
I saw and understood the reasons for scrapping the beginner's guide. I still disagreed with it. All I saw was that the Arch community was unwilling to provide for beginners. Yes, it's a lot of effort and it is to a degree duplication, but it's duplication in the same way that Simple Wikipedia is a duplication of Wikipedia. It sort of is, but it sort of isn't.
It's duplicated effort, definitely, and if you don't prioritize onboarding beginners, then it's also wasted effort. But as somebody who personally used the guide a lot, as somebody who takes no pleasure in scouring through 5 different 30 page long wiki pages to find an answer to something trivial, the documentation as is simply isn't an adequate replacement for the beginner's guide. I've accepted that the Arch community has decided that it's the best solution, but I won't stop criticizing them in discussions like this for sacrificing such a great resource just because we happen to have different priorities.
Sorry, I can't agree about scrapping "Beginners guide".
Ubuntu gave me simple install. Once I've started tinkering it become broken. Following Installation guide and Beginners guide I got stable system with internet connection without Gnome toolbar widget. I could build on top of it.
Before switching to Arch, check if packages you rely on for your job are not in the AUR. It became "a hobby" really quick for me to rebuild my entire dev stack because of the bleeding edge approach and "let's update every week and fix source code while we're at it".
Do you have any examples of such packages that were missing? I've been using arch for maybe five years at this point and am an embedded developer. I had maybe oneor two times that I had to install something that was not in the aur.
FWIW I switched from Ubuntu to Arch recently and to me the setup was a breeze. Just follow the instructions. I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner.
Sure the daunting setup process would fall into the "a hobby" category but once it runs it tends to just keep running as long as you update it from time to time.
Using it now for ~5 Years and in that time I had two times problems one was that the new kernel version didn't work with my laptop and another which was fully my fault by doing some "special" boot setup with some custom self written package and not maintaining it. Oh and the only reasons they where problems was because I never setup recovery boot or boot prev. kernel version.
Besides that I remember having more work with maintaining Ubuntu when I used it ~8 years ago.
Also disclaimer I had some more work like setting up edurom with network manager without using any proper UI for it (nmtui...). It's doable but not properly documented. But non of this is a problem if you "just" use Gnome or KDE or at last part of the tooling from Gnome/KDE.
EDIT: But Fedora is probably what you are looking for. Widely used, well maintained and normally up to date.