Ill admit its been a couple years since ive done an arch install, but i always just pull up the arch wiki and follow that line by line, took only about ten minutes last time
The wiki page is 55 pages long. It had you pick a network manager, and offered no help when I didn't pick a good one. Spent 50 minutes googling for answers which led me mostly to forum posts of people replying to others telling them to just google
This is the page I keep bookmarked, re-reading it it is a bit silly that it doesnt just say "use systemd-networkd" without making you click through and read another page. I guess I just know to do that from habit now
There's archinstall to facilitate the install. I agree it's painful to run it manually otherwise but a good one time experience (not to reiterate or as a first try though). I run Manjaro as I learnt of the install helper only after I had my setup running
Give yourself room to change your mind: set up one OS partition, a second OS-sized partition (unused, for future OS), and all the rest for user files (/home). Then you can switch OS and share the same user files.
I was gonna say "depends on your goals" but I read the other threads so I know what those are.
Anyway, given that, Fedora starting from a minimal install (like, the option in the installer) is correct.
Otherwise I would have suggested Oasis because it's pretty cool tbh.
ah yes, the third one. LFS!
I believe NixOS is a minimal installation (barebone config for sure), although everyone has an opinion on it. I like my heavy version of Fedora😇
I went from Manjaro to NixOS last year and have had 0 issues so far. I love having my whole config on GH so I can clone it on other devices if needed 😇 And if something goes wrong I can just pick the last derivation from GRUB menu.
Yeah lol. Bazzite is a "set it and forget it" experience. You don't include Steam, Lutris + whatever else and package the OS as images for storage optimization lmfao
Depends on your experience. If you like to learn your system well, do the Arch install. It is easier now than ever before. Otherwise, all known distros have minimum versions that you can try. There is no secret thing. Just stick with the main distros that are well maintained and supported.
Do you just want enough drivers that the hardware works and a terminal prompt, and enough GNU tools to actually do something with it, or a bare bones desktop GUI setup, no bloat?
Honestly, if the former I'd use Debian and do the minimal install option. Otherwise Linux Mint.
I really prefer OpenRC to systemd so I used Artix for a while but I found that the AUR's keys would break a lot. I switched to Gentoo and it's been a much better experience I've been using it for about a year on all my computers.
How minimal are we talking? The Debian network installer gives you tasksel where you can select, or deselect options for install, so that allows you to end up with a no-gui terminal only interface without even core system utilities, or a full fat desktop. Just depends what you want.
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I spent a day trying to get arch installed. Make sure you pick the correct network manager, beacause of course that's super important 🙄
Distro-hopping can be fun.
Anyway, given that, Fedora starting from a minimal install (like, the option in the installer) is correct.
Otherwise I would have suggested Oasis because it's pretty cool tbh.
I believe NixOS is a minimal installation (barebone config for sure), although everyone has an opinion on it. I like my heavy version of Fedora😇
love the concept but needs real docs
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_in_WSL
Do you just want enough drivers that the hardware works and a terminal prompt, and enough GNU tools to actually do something with it, or a bare bones desktop GUI setup, no bloat?
Honestly, if the former I'd use Debian and do the minimal install option. Otherwise Linux Mint.
i'll never use arch but the aur is the best feature on any linux distro
debian needs it desperately
it just feels like a lazy excuse for having insufficiently comprehensive repos at this point to me