flabberghaster wrote on February 1, 2023 at 4:12 PM

People say "I use arch BTW" as a joke bragging about being a Linux expert but I have found it pretty easy to use. Idk your level of wanting to fuck around with installing it, it's not that hard to do if you have a little bit of experience and they even have the arch install script now (which I have not used, so I can't say how good it is) but once it is installed I have had very few problems with it ever breaking that were not directly my fault.

I run an encrypted root right now, it was pretty trivial to set up. The disk has two partitions, 500 megabytes for boot (which is way more than necessary) and the rest is a big LUKS volume atop which I have an LVM to split it into home and root volumes. You could also just run it directly off the Luke partition with no LVM, if you don't care about doing a separate home partition.

twovests wrote on February 2, 2023 at 3:35 PM

I'm curious, what does using Arch look like nowadays? How long does it take you to get from zero to working? Why did you start using it?

I've been using Linux for awhile but never dabbled in Arch. I'm curious, but I don't have much of a reason to try it

flabberghaster wrote on February 2, 2023 at 3:58 PM

I think I started using it around 2012 ish because I was tired of reinstalling Fedora every six months for a new release.

I would say it takes me between a half hour to an hour to install, assuming I have a second computer to look at the install guide, but I've done it a few times and could probably just do it without if I had to. Might take slightly longer if you've never done it, or it might be way faster, if you just used the arch install script they have now, I have not tried doing that.

As for day to day use, mostly you just sudo pacman install something and it usually just works. You choose what to install so you choose what to run. Then maintenance wise you just pacman update and that's usually all you need.

It used to be more unstable and things needed tinkering after an update but that's not really been a problem for me in a few years. Mostly it's just a Linux install that feels like any other, to me.