As the title and the website say, I’m currently making a distro with the goal that you don’t have to compromise between ease of use + safety and bleeding-edge + performance optimizations.
As I will likely be able to publish the 0.0.1 source code to the GitHub link and the ISO to the website sometime next week, I would like people to be aware of my project so I can have some feedback for further improvements when I release the first version. I have not posted this anywhere else yet, as I value the opinion of this community more than Reddit or whatever.
If you have any questions or any criticism, please voice it, I would love to hear it, good or bad, in the end I want to make a proper OS. (I’ll go to bed now so expect replies to take a few hours from posting.)
Is arch really this hard? I’ve been on it for 3 years with practically no issues. It “just works”.
Nope, I don’t find it that hard either, but we are in a bubble here. The average “which distro should I pick” post suggests SteamOS but only with a full AMD system and when people suggest CachyOS, it’s met with “bUt YOu cAN’t sUgGesT aN ArcH bASeD diStrO tO a BegInNer” so I hope to bridge the gap for people that are waiting for a general-purpose SteamOS release PLUS the CachyOS performance on top. Also some distros do offer people to add the CachyOS repos, which is however forbidden due to their repo policy. Yes it is open source, but they understandably don’t want their servers and mirrors to be used by people not even running their distro. As I will compile the kernels for now, ALL packages in the future and host them myself, I actually comply with their repo policy as one of the few distros.
wdym about hard? this is to achieve immutability plus kernel efficiency improvements.
I just see all these derivatives and everyone saying “to make arch more accessible and easy”. I just dont get it I guess.
this is something else i guess, it’s not about UX but about how the system works kind of. i’m not exactly sure about how silverblue does it but think of it this way. not everything in your system needs to be mutable (your home dir does) so those parts are isolated and made immutable, the user cannot modify them, this helps to keep a more stable system. they can be changed when the system updates them , but it’s more like they are replaced and a one image is built rather than a modification if you will.
It used to have more problems. As others have noted, there is always the possibility of updates breaking something with the rolling release model. But for the last few years, it has been stable enough that a user knowledgeable and willing to read a log and modify a configuration file has likely been fine.
As has been noted in the ArchWiki that is expected to be read by users, one should always check for package-related news before upgrading their Arch system. This is because package changes and breakages that require user intervention do occur, and ignoring them can sometimes leave a broken system. Arch isn’t really hard after getting over the bootstrap hurdle, but simply requires more upkeep effort than most point release distros would.
Yeah I just have arch news as my homepage. Haven’t seen a breaking change that applies to normal gaming desktop usage in a while.
I think the biggest one in recent (past year) would have been the upgrade tree to nvidia-open, which would break 10-series and older support without changing package on affected systems. Definitely a lot of the more recent breakages are not large-scale problems, but they do still exist.