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I recognize the problem of distro hopping for years and the comforts of proprietary operating systems. Then I found Arch Linux. Once installed, there is less fiddeling than for any other system I have tried, for my usecase. I tried installing OpenBSD on my laptop about a month ago, and it failed miserably, as it could not recognize the wireless network driver. There was also talk about this ancient technology called CD-ROM, which was disturbing. Within less than an hour, Arch Linux was up and running with all my favorite applications installed and a fully working desktop / window manager.



Counter point:

I find Arch Linux to be the opposite. I've spend more time tweaking it than any other distro. However, that may be because it is so tweakable. Also, things like to break in ArchLinux on normal updates more than other distros, so be prepared for some .pacnew tweaks if old config files aren't compatible.

That being said, I run Arch on my secondary machine, and it's the best fit I've found in the *nix world.


If the internal wifi doesn't work you could try a supported USB-based wifi adapter. Your internal card might eventually be supported. If having internal wifi is very important then try before you buy.

Do you remember what Linux wifi support was like between 2000 and 2010? Wifi drivers are pretty hard to write and there are virtually no docs for any of the available hardware. Linux (and FreeBSD, too) have better wifi support nowadays because vendors have finally started writing drivers for those systems. Look at the email addresses of authors in copyright statements of Linux drivers for Atheros, Broadcom, and Intel cards, for example, and you'll see that this driver code was written in-house by vendors. OpenBSD doesn't get that level of support from vendors.


By the way, add Realtek and Ralink (now Mediatek) to the above list of companies writing drivers for Linux.

And now name a wifi chipset that isn't made by one of these companies. :-)

It's awesome that Linux has achieved this kind of support. But this is a luxury. Don't take it for granted. It took a long time and a lot of energy to get there. These companies are still keeping hardware docs under NDAs so it is very hard for other open source systems to compete fairly.


I installed Arch (actually Antergos) on a brand new Samsung laptop and everything worked out of the box: touchscreen, 3200x1800 display, touchpad, wifi, /home on a separate partition, encryption, etc...


What window manager/DM do you use? How does software like browsers or other non-terminal based applications work with the HiDPI screen?




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