yeah the DE is honestly more important. I started on Mint, stayed on it for two weeks, then switched to CachyOS. Now I’m on NixOS and I just distrobox all the other major distros.
so I was tinkering the other day and I found a great example of what arch doesn’t do that makes it difficult for new users. it doesn’t make default configuration files, even when you have it up and running just fine.
so I’m like why isn’t this working as I expected, reading some Ubuntu documents showing that someone edited their config and that fixes it. i go to the directory and it’s only got a .example file. i copy it so it’s a .config and remove the # from the line that is supposed to correct the behavior and what do you know, it’s working now!
that wouldn’t be something for a new user to resolve and gave me a fresh understanding of the difference in approach and why arch shouldn’t be a newbie system
archinstall has an automatic set-up, it’s fine but if you’re concerned about hardening you want to create /tmp and /var and /home on separate partitions. Bonus of /home on its own partition is for if you want to distro hop
I don’t know what the point of separate partitions for OS and userspace is, but whatevs…
Some folks like to be able to reinstall the OS while preserving /home. That’s the only reason I’ve seen for doing separate partitions. (I’m not someone who does that, but it’s the explanation I’ve seen)
That makes sense. I would personally just back up /home and then recover it after reinstalling, but if I were doing all that anyway then I guess I would partition the OS separately in case I need to do it again…
Choose the DE, not the distro.
… Well also don’t take advanced distro either. Train on easy distros, then switch if you want
Please forgive my ignorance, what is a DE?
Edit: Wait, is it desktop environment?
yeah the DE is honestly more important. I started on Mint, stayed on it for two weeks, then switched to CachyOS. Now I’m on NixOS and I just distrobox all the other major distros.
so true
so I was tinkering the other day and I found a great example of what arch doesn’t do that makes it difficult for new users. it doesn’t make default configuration files, even when you have it up and running just fine.
so I’m like why isn’t this working as I expected, reading some Ubuntu documents showing that someone edited their config and that fixes it. i go to the directory and it’s only got a .example file. i copy it so it’s a .config and remove the # from the line that is supposed to correct the behavior and what do you know, it’s working now!
that wouldn’t be something for a new user to resolve and gave me a fresh understanding of the difference in approach and why arch shouldn’t be a newbie system
I noped out of arch during setup. It expected me to partition the drive for swap/os/usr. It’s not 1996, I’m not doing that today.
archinstall has an automatic set-up, it’s fine but if you’re concerned about hardening you want to create /tmp and /var and /home on separate partitions. Bonus of /home on its own partition is for if you want to distro hop
Swap is only necessary if you have low RAM or use most of your RAM in memory-heavy processes or multitasking.
If you’ve got more RAM than you’ll ever need, you don’t need swap. Although, these days maybe that means swap will become more necessary again.
Also, you don’t need a swap partition, you can make a swapfile that works just as well.
I don’t know what the point of separate partitions for OS and userspace is, but whatevs…
Some folks like to be able to reinstall the OS while preserving /home. That’s the only reason I’ve seen for doing separate partitions. (I’m not someone who does that, but it’s the explanation I’ve seen)
That makes sense. I would personally just back up /home and then recover it after reinstalling, but if I were doing all that anyway then I guess I would partition the OS separately in case I need to do it again…
this one! the DE matters so much more than the distro itself
it depends
Yeah like most things, but usually it’s like that