So I was watching Josef’s Linux Channel and he talks about the new Arch.
Is it just me or is the Arch elite striking back at all the flack against their RTFM attitude? While the rest of the Linux community is ,(would striving be right ?), at least trying to make installers user friendly.
They have gone the other way making it seem more special for the “Brain Gang”,and the rest can just muddle along .
Josef has touch a nerve in me with his video. Your thoughts after viewing his podcast should be very interesting to read.
Seems like a good example of poor communication. I have to believe there is some valid reason for them taking this step but, since they didn’t bother to explain it, we get to guess why that is. It certainly seems like making something less user-friendly is a negative thing but again, I’ll hold my judgement until I understand the situation a little better.
could be Gentoo envy ,but that seems how its leaning towards.
It’s only you. This change complicates the installation process slightly, but hardly affects the existing installations at all.
The new metapackage is supposed to be a well defined minimal base for every Arch Linux system. This makes Arch easier to support, because every instance of Arch is assumed to have the base metapackage installed. This also makes packaging for Arch easier, because the new metapackage can be assumed as an implicit dependency. In my opinion a well defined base like this is a very good thing to have.
The new metapackage is smaller than the old base group, because some package choices are better to be left for the user and some packages of the old group were in many cases simply not needed.
The communication could have been better, but on the other hand there wasn’t much to communicate. For example for me this changes nothing and the announcement of the required manual intervention was enough.
I’ll leave some links to the mailing list threads, where this has been and is being discussed:
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-January/029435.html
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2019-October/046912.html
P.S. I would have posted a third link, but as a new user I couldn’t.
You state a good rebuttel. Still the community as a whole has been trying to make changes that push an easy workable installation yet it appears,( from my stand point),Arch has no intention of doing so. True a simpler smaller ISO is a good thing,but in doing so it just widens the gap.Such as people who have the knowledge and the searchers trying to learn. I fall in the later .
Don’t get me wrong here,I support higher learning and the hard work it takes to be successful in any field. As a older (age wise) user relearning is harder but the challenge is worth it.But why make it harder than it has to be.
Guess the Kiss factor does both apply and not here.
Arch based distros work great , I don’t deny that. But leaning more towards a Gentoo type thing . Making the learning curve harder to grasp.
From that stand point ,I’ll have to stay in distros that are easier to use.The WTFM crowd can just go their own way,and rest of us will enjoy playing with our simplier toys,that just keep working on and on.