everything is simple once you know how to do it. i think a lot of the arch recommenders likely don’t realize how difficult some of these things can be the first time. it’s the same with any kind of specialized knowledge i think. it’s one of the reasons why teaching can be difficult. but the arch community has been super helpful in my experience
It’s a general problem with the community in my experience. People keep saying it’s “simple”, then whip 3 terminal commands out of their pocket nobody without extensive knowledge would understand (or be able to tell if they do something wrong). They just don’t realize how much knowledge they possess in comparison, and/or how little others are interested in gaining said knowledge (not because they’re ignorant, but simply because they got other priorities in life).
The community really needs an “injection of normies” for some people to wake up from their elitism trip.
People keep saying it’s “simple”, then whip 3 terminal commands out of their pocket nobody without extensive knowledge would understand
People do the same thing for all Linux distributions though. You’ll see people telling you to run apt-getupdate&& apt-get upgrade like you’ll see people telling you to run pacman -Syu.
Not arguing that Arch is easy, just that this specifically doesn’t feel like a counter argument.
Well yes, although with Arch Linux it’s a necessity. Most distros using apt do come with graphical software centers as well. Unfortunately many people in the community indeed do ignore those tools instead of pointing to them. Hell, some even still recommend editing the god damn fstab file despite it being perfectly manageable with both Gnome and KDE tools, which are present in most popular distros and way safer unless you really know what you’re doing. To have those on Arch you’re forced to use CLI tools first.
It was more of a rant about the community than an argument against Arch.
It’s true. Simple things like “be sure to review AUR scripts before installing” are so easy to say, but incredibly difficult to really explain what you’re looking for that could be problematic.
Another thing that I hadn’t really thought about before reading another comment in this thread is that the arch wiki install guide (and other pages) are written with the assumption that you want to understand what you’re doing. And I think for many people that’s just not the case. Which is fair enough, not everyone enjoys tinkering with software. Just like I’m currently paying someone to build my new pc for me because I really don’t enjoy doing that. But there have been a few places within the arch install process where I had to research some background info to know what to optimally do for my use case instead of taking a guess and hoping it works out. And that’s quite a barrier, I see people struggle with similar things all the time at work. If any research is required beyond what your step by step guide is telling them, many people will give up.
everything is simple once you know how to do it. i think a lot of the arch recommenders likely don’t realize how difficult some of these things can be the first time. it’s the same with any kind of specialized knowledge i think. it’s one of the reasons why teaching can be difficult. but the arch community has been super helpful in my experience
It’s a general problem with the community in my experience. People keep saying it’s “simple”, then whip 3 terminal commands out of their pocket nobody without extensive knowledge would understand (or be able to tell if they do something wrong). They just don’t realize how much knowledge they possess in comparison, and/or how little others are interested in gaining said knowledge (not because they’re ignorant, but simply because they got other priorities in life).
The community really needs an “injection of normies” for some people to wake up from their elitism trip.
Original, because sharing xkcd without alt text is a crime: https://xkcd.com/2501
Tacit knowledge really is a problem in the Linux community, but also in the rest of society.
People do the same thing for all Linux distributions though. You’ll see people telling you to run
apt-get update && apt-get upgradelike you’ll see people telling you to runpacman -Syu.Not arguing that Arch is easy, just that this specifically doesn’t feel like a counter argument.
Well yes, although with Arch Linux it’s a necessity. Most distros using apt do come with graphical software centers as well. Unfortunately many people in the community indeed do ignore those tools instead of pointing to them. Hell, some even still recommend editing the god damn fstab file despite it being perfectly manageable with both Gnome and KDE tools, which are present in most popular distros and way safer unless you really know what you’re doing. To have those on Arch you’re forced to use CLI tools first.
It was more of a rant about the community than an argument against Arch.
It’s true. Simple things like “be sure to review AUR scripts before installing” are so easy to say, but incredibly difficult to really explain what you’re looking for that could be problematic.
Another thing that I hadn’t really thought about before reading another comment in this thread is that the arch wiki install guide (and other pages) are written with the assumption that you want to understand what you’re doing. And I think for many people that’s just not the case. Which is fair enough, not everyone enjoys tinkering with software. Just like I’m currently paying someone to build my new pc for me because I really don’t enjoy doing that. But there have been a few places within the arch install process where I had to research some background info to know what to optimally do for my use case instead of taking a guess and hoping it works out. And that’s quite a barrier, I see people struggle with similar things all the time at work. If any research is required beyond what your step by step guide is telling them, many people will give up.