this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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If you want to use arch for the first time use an already setup distro like Manjaro.
I disagree. If you want to use Arch for the first time, install it the Arch way. It's going to be hard, and that's the point. Arch will need manual intervention at some point, and you'll be expected to fix it.
If you use something like Manjaro or CachyOS, you'll look up commands online and maybe it'll work, but it might not. There's a decent chance you'll break something, and you'll get mad.
Arch expects you to take responsibility for your system, and going through the official install process shows you can do that. Once you get through that once, go ahead and use an installer or fork. You know where to find documentation when something inevitably breaks, so you're good to go.
If you're unwilling to do the Arch install process but still want a rolling release, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's the trunk for several projects, some of them commercial, so you're getting a lot of professional eyeballs on it. There's a test suite any change needs to pass, and I've seen plenty of cases where they hold off on a change because a test fails. And when it does fail (and it probably will), you just
snapper rollbackand wait a few days. The community isn't as big as other distros, so I don't recommend it for a first distro, but they're also not nearly as impatient as Arch forums.Arch is a great distro, I used it for a few years without any major issues, but I did need to intervene several times. I've been on Tumbleweed about as long and I've only had to
snapper rollbacka few times, and that was the extent of the intervention.Learning is good.
I know someone who after years of being told about gentoo, still refused to use the handbook to install it, had someone else install it for them, and gave up after a few months... recently revealed he thought it was a text only operating system. XD
Learning is good.
RTFM! :)
Exactly.
There's a difference between gatekeeping and being transparent about what's expected. I'm not suggesting people do it the hard way as some kind of hazing ritual, but because there's a lot of practical value to maintaining your system there. Arch is simple, and their definition of simple means the devs aren't going to do a ton for you outside of providing good documentation. If your system breaks, that's on you, and it's on you to fix it.
If reading through the docs isn't your first instinct when something goes wrong, you'll probably have a better experience with something else. There are plenty of other distros that will let you offload a large amount of that responsibility, and that's the right choice for most people because most people don't want to mess with their system, they want to use it.
Again, it's not gatekeeping. I'm happy to help anyone work through the install process. I won't do it for you, but I'll answer any questions you might have by showing you where in the docs it is.