this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Learning to install Arch, now that's a transferable skill.
If you actually try to understand what's happening, I think it's one of the best ways to learn how a system is composed, at least if you install manually. What's a partition, file system, what does mounting do, chroots, you name it.
I don't use Arch anymore but still think it's a great distro to learn the basics while still having the luxury of new binary packages. Manual Arch install abstracts basically nothing away from you, for better or for worse.
Currently on NixOS, I'd say while its engineering is better overall, the things you learn there are much more distribution-specific or maybe concept-specific and often not applicable to other distributions.
I guess there are also probably ways to install e.g. Debian manually, I've never seen instructions for it though as there was always the focus on the installer, and frankly I'm not a big fan of apt and all. It always seemed to be much more convoluted than pacman plus it does a lot of stuff for you, whether you want it or not was my impression.
The vast majority of people want to start by using Linux, they don't want an in depth lecture about Linux. It's like making someone take a course on bicycles instead of letting them get on the bicycle.
It appeals to a very specific niche who are already familiar with Linux and want that in-depth lecture. It's not a good approach for beginners, and it's not a good approach for experimented users who just want to install Linux fast.
Hey, I never said this is what people want, just that it is in fact a transferrable skill. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone just trying to get their machine running, but if you're looking to gain some insight, is not the worst choice.
What I meant by [non] transferrable is that the process is so highly specific to Arch that it won't benefit you on any other distro. You will learn to connect to WiFi on Arch but this will not help you connect to WiFi on Ubuntu or Fedora. The Arch process does not tell you which concepts are generic and which are not. At the end of the day you've learned Arch Linux, but not necessarily "Linux".
Hard disagree. Everything you learn on Arch is transferable because Arch is vanilla almost to a fault. The deep understandings of components I learned from Arch have helped me more times than I can count. It's only non-transferable if you view each command as an arcane spell to be cast in that specific situation. I've fixed so many issues over the years using this knowledge, and it's literally what landed me my current job and promotions.
Arch is why I know how encryption and TPM works at a deeper level, which helped me find and fix the issue a Windows Dell PC was having that kept tripping into Bitlocker recovery. Knowledge of Grub and kernel parameters that I learned from Arch's install process is why I was able to effortlessly break into a vendor's DNS server whose root password was lost by the previous sysadmin before me when everybody else was panicking. Hell, it even helps in installing other distros, because advanced disk partitioning is a hot mess on a lot of distro GUI installers, so intimate knowledge of what I actually need helps me work around their failings. Plus all the countless other times that knowledge has helped me solve little problems instantly, because I knew how it worked from implementing it manually. When my coworkers falter because the GUI fails them and they know nothing else, I simply fix it with a command.
If you use Arch and actually make the effort to learn, not just copy and paste commands from the wiki, you will objectively learn a lot about how Linux works. If you seek a career in Linux, there's nothing I can recommend more than transitioning to using Arch (not Garuda, not Manjaro, Arch) full-time on your daily driver computer.
Anyways, after about a decade I've recently switched to NixOS. Now there's a distro where the skills you learn can't be transferred out, but the knowledge I gained from Arch absolutely transferred in and gave me a head start.
Interesting how similar our distro careers are. My switch was also after a long time (15 years). Wouldn't go back to Arch. Still think it's a good distro for what it's trying to achieve.
A career doing what? Arch is not being used on servers or cloud...
You can learn Linux on any distro. This nonsense is why I can't take the Arch crowd seriously.
I explained my reasoning and you made no attempt to engage with it and just asked a question I already answered in depth. I'm not sure what you want, but it's clearly not an answer.
Technically it's the other way around.