I’ve been daily driving Linux for 17 months now (currently on Linux Mint). I have got very comfortable with basic commands and many just works distros (such as Linux Mint, or Pop!_OS) with apt as the package manager. I’ve tried Debian as a distro to try to challenge myself, but have always ran into issues. On my PC, I could never get wifi to work, which made it difficult to install properly. I’ve used it on my daily driver laptop, but ran into some issues. I thought a more advanced distro, that is still stable, would be good overall. However, not getting new software for a long time sounds quite annoying.

I’m wanting to challenge myself to get much better with Linux, partitioning, CLI, CLI tools, understanding the components of my system, trying tiling window managers, etc. I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve. Is this a good way to learn more about Linux and a Linux system in general? I always hear good things about the Arch Wiki. Is there any other tips someone can give me, to sharpen my Linux skills? I was even considering trying out Gentoo on my X220, but the compiling times sound painful. I wouldn’t daily drive Gentoo or Arch, just yet, but I would try to use them as much as possible for general use.

    • Max-P
      17•10 months ago

      Arch is actually not as bad as many say. It’s pretty stable nowadays, I even run Arch on some servers and I never had any issues.

      Not even just nowadays. My desktop is running a nearly 10 year old install. It’s so old, it not only predates the installer, it predates the “traditional” way and used the old TUI installer. It even predates the sysvinit to systemd switch! The physical computer has been ship of thesis’d twice.

      Arch is surprisingly reliable. It’s not “stable” as in things change and you have to update some configs or even your own software. But it’s been so reliable I never even felt the need to go look elsewhere. It just works.

      Even my Arch servers have been considerably more reliable and maintenance-free than the thousands I manage at work with lolbuntu on them. Arch does so little on its own, there’s less to go wrong. Meanwhile the work boxes can’t even update GRUB noninteractively, every now and then we have a grub update that pops a debconf screen and hangs unattended-upgrades until manually fixed and hoses up apt as a whole.

      • @[email protected]
        4•10 months ago

        Similar experience. My current install is not as old due to hardware failure but I’ve been using arch since 2007ish and it’s been stable enough through all that concurrent with sort of losing interest in being an admin for a hobby in the last few years that I’ve honestly got kind of bad at administrating the thing, haha. But it hardly matters because issues are rare.

      • Thorned_Rose
        4•10 months ago

        Third same. Before my current PC, my old PC was a 6yo install. Never had problems that weren’t caused by me (although I could count on one hand the number of times I had issues in that 6 years).

        My current install is more than 2yo trouble free.

        I’ve DE hopped and fiddled with heaps of stuff in that time too.

      • ayayaEnglish
        4•10 months ago

        Same here. Been going on 8 years with the same install and it has never let me down. The only time something “breaks” is when I’m the one who caused it, and it’s always been easily fixable with arch-chroot from the iso. Although I haven’t even had to resort to that in 3 or 4 years now.

    • @cogitoprincipleOP
      6•10 months ago

      Thanks for this, I think I will give Arch Linux a go, and avoid GUI file management. My plan is to daily drive my X220 for more lightweight tasks as it’s a nice laptop to use. So using Arch on it may just force me to have to use Arch as a daily driver if I want to use a nice laptop keyboard.