tl;dr Title

It’s common knowledge at this point that Arch has a reputation for being very difficult to use which led to it becoming a meme ( like everything else on the internet). Even tho Arch users swear that it is actually trivial to install and use for someone who is willing to read documentation, it is also known that distributions with significantly higher requirements on overall *nix knowledge like Gentoo, Oasis, KISS and Crux (?) exist. So my question is this: was Arch used to be harder to install and use? Because I heard bad things about Debian’s installation process too, even tho it is incredibly easy now. I also hear Ubuntu being bad for user privacy, even tho that whole Amazon thing happened years ago under a completely different management. Things move fast in Linux family’s world, was Arch a very different system back in 2006?

  • NUKKE@lemmy.ml
    13·
    4 years ago

    I don’t think it was necessarily harder. It was different, maybe simpler.

    First off, the Arch Wiki had a more straightforward “Installation Guide” compared to the current one. The previous one had more detailed steps in the guide itself, compared to the current one which has links on certain sections to different tools. As an example, partitioning a drive using parted was part of the “Installation Guide” back then, and it gave you an example layout for MBR and EFI layouts in the article itself; whereas the current guide now gives you a link to the “Partitioning” page, which itself has links to the various tools (parted, fdisk, gdisk, etc), which in turn have command and layout examples.

    You also gotta consider that drivers were different back then, too. AMD’s offerings were not as great back then as they are now, so sometimes, depending on your card, you’d have to install different drivers, kinda like how things are right now with NVIDIA. Now the opposite is also kinda/sorta true with Intel. Newer (read: Kaby Lake and above) require an external package to be installed to enable certain features like proper hardware acceleration.

    Lastly, you now have hundreds if not thousands of videos on YouTube of guided installations for Arch. The quality of said videos might vary from video to video, but nevertheless they’re resources that people use.

    Ultimately I don’t think it’s that Arch used to be harder, it’s more so that the landscape of Linux and its community has changed. Some things have changed for the better, others for the worse. Things are just “different.”