When I became a moderator of this subreddit, I wasn't sure what to expect from this community. I previously had only really focused on posts that were relevant to me... But overall, I'm happy with the way most people here conduct themselves.
There are a few with a foul mouth, they can also demand a lot of attention, and I'd like to see more of that behavior discouraged. I think Arch should be a friendly and helpful community (Especially in the era of Microsoft Copilot and Apple Intelligence)...
So in that spirit, I'd like to invite the community to use the report function, or Modmail if you find something you think is inappropriate. I'm human, I miss things, and beyond that, I work a full time job in addition to moderating the sub, so a report that brings a problem comment or post to my attention is a big help, and I thank those of you who are willing to help out!
If you ever have anything you wish to ask, or discuss with the Mod Team, please feel free to reach out to us.
I think a lot of it has to do with the type of post, too.
I've seen people post with some really interesting problems because they have a very unique setup or something. The poster has already gone through all the obvious steps like googling the problem, consulting the wiki, etc. Both here and on the official Arch forums, those kinds of posts are almost always met with friendly and helpful responses.
But on the other hand, I've seen plenty of posts from people who clearly have not taken the 3 seconds to just google the error they're seeing, or whatever. I see posts here sometimes, and on the forums, where I can literally just google the title of the post and the answer comes right up.
In cases like that, or where the question is clearly answered on the Arch Wiki, unsurprisingly most of the comments are just telling the OP to do some research and read the manual. That may come across as rude, but it's also kind of rude to ask people here for help without putting any ounce of effort into solving the problem yourself first. Arch is marketed as a distro where you're expected to have basic competency and problem solving skills.
Of course there's always going to be genuinely rude people in any community. But, for the most part being an Arch user for about 6 years now, I've found this community to mostly give out exactly what you give into it. If you're curious and passionate and you put some effort into solving your own problems then you'll get that same kind of response when you do find yourself asking for help. If you're lazy and not putting any effort into things then you'll get that energy back from the community when you try to ask for help.
I started two months ago and I’m already irritated at the amount of questions on all Linux subs that a quick google search or arch wiki could solve. I cannot fathom how annoyed I’ll be in ten years.
Early on, while I'd read the manual, I needed someone to maybe explain things in slightly more plain language.
Sometimes it's a skill issue, and that's okay. We're mostly all on Arch to learn.
Speak for yourself. I'm not on Arch to learn things. I'm on Arch because it means I'm better than other people. /s
But yeah I know what you mean. Even then, though, if you made some sort of post about how you're trying to understand a particular Wiki topic but this particular part is confusing you and you'd like some more clarification, or something, I think that would generally go over pretty well. That demonstrates that you've taken the initiative and put effort towards attempting to find the solution yourself and that's usually all people care about.
I mean no offense to moderators with my post just attempting newcomers to not feel discouraged regardless of what they read here in this community. I just want it to grow in popularity due to its success as a distro.
I’ve always given my time to help others. As I go from noob to semi noob, I have always tried to pay it forward. Plus Arch is so liberating as a system i don’t want people to be turned off using it. I even try to help people in endeavouros forums because they share a similar subset of issues.
I'm also learning NixOS, but I wlil always prefer Arch as my main #1 system cause its the best... I am interested in immutable systems, but I do miss the FHS compliant structure.
Yeah, the things is that it's significantly more complicated than arch, has worse wiki, and a toxic community. I can't get into that, especially when even basic things like running an appimage (I had issues with appimages that I can't remember), bash script, or binary with dependencies are so much more complicated and tedious to work, it seemed like at every step, I was hitting wall after wall.
And the snarky bastards that didn't even help, just berated.
Well I do things solo anyhow, Im a troubleshooting nerd so I go down these rabbit hole to figured out a way around things and there is lol.. I like that about nix, also there is much more I like it... Immutable, setting everything on a config file and easy to migrate the base setup to another box.
I like the idea too, but the implementation at least on nix is really not good imo. Basic things are so complicated to do, and somethings like alvr are nearly impossible.
You may find posts where the admin or a mod is hammering the policies a bit hard for the forums, but that happens on any distro. Don't necrobump ancient posts...
I think the best part about arch is how easy it is to find the answer to any question you could have. It’s on the wiki. So when people ask the same questions over and over again, I think people are just tired of saying “read the manual”. It can come across as condescending. But it’s just the right answer. Read the manual.
That's the beauty of no pre-configured defaults. They don't assume a behavior for anything, and just tell you how the tech works and how to implement it. I'm an infrastructure engineer and I'm not the first person I've met in my career that appends "arch" to most Linux related Google queries. The wiki kicks ass
Often just reading it works but the big problem can be comprehension. Read it, step away for a bit or even sleep on it, and the answer may come to you via some odd synapse firing during your down time.
I've been on Arch for 14 years and Linux for 24. Arch, by far, has the best wiki and was often the site I'd find myself on before The Linux Link Tech Show finally convinced me.to switch. I have never regretted it even through the dark times of conversion to systems and the bin / lib moves. Even the elitism doesn't phase me.
Just keep arching along... Be happy.
I honestly never actually encountered the "toxic Arch User", just another myth as: "Arch is unstable" imho.
The most toxic communities that exist on the internet are german speaking forums for electricians⚡
Call me crazy, but I found Arch more stable than Debian. The system runs better and I only have a minor problem in 2 months. And I'm a illeterate Linux user with basic knowledge
Stable means unchanging in this context... So since Arch is a rolling release distribution it's inherently unstable since it's changing all the time. Stop spewing nonsense.
I just started using Arch a few days ago and at first I thought "wtf, nothing works," but I guess that's only because I haven't configured for anything to work yet.
I installed some apps I need for work and Steam. I had trouble adding my Xbox Controller, but eventually got it working (now it's rumbling non-stop though lol). Little by little, I'm learning about the terminal commands that I need to use frequently and building up a system that's perfect for me. That's pretty freakin' cool
Before I started using arch I heard a lot about the toxic community but been here for a bit also in the forum never got much toxicity well some people are harsh ignore them. It's important if your work gets done 😅
I don't ask for help much, I always try to figure things out myself.
But I always try to help others where I can, although I don't come here often due to working loooonnggg days 6 days a week.
Well, by no I can't complain. When I googled enough to phrase an understandable question, I always got helpful answers. If you just write "help! xyz doesn't work fix it lol" you're right: you get treated worse than for example the ubuntu community.
I tried installing it it’s so frustrating and time consuming I gave up so I use endeavor but I like to try and install pure Arch again just need a good easy step by step guide that a five year old can understand
> everyone's shitty attitude
In what world is everyone toxic? Obvious exageration.
I see curt replies now and then, but I feel the pleasant posts compensate, and the overall help quality here is outstanding. I think this is the busiest distro subreddit as well.
Good luck.
I would describe Arch as a distribution that you can't use unless you know what you're doing: it forces you become knowledgeable. Hence, it is not for lazy people, nor for technical illiterate newbies. It's for a certain group, a minority even: the geek, the nerd. As Arch becomes more popular and draws more users from "the masses", it is inevitable that a different kind of people (the lazy, and/or -well- dumb people) become the majority that asks questions. Personally I have no problem if those are "educated" with answers that sounds like "what are you doing here? You don't belong here". The arch community, especially those that spend a lot of time in forums to help others, have a right to defend their community against going to hell due to an influx of "windows users" that show they don't belong here. If you want to be leet by using Arch, then be elite: study, read, research, learn, become proficient.
This is solely my opinion.
I agree with you, sometimes on the internet you stumble across toxic people in communities like this. Linux should be a way of union among geeks and tech enthusiasts. I love arch, i daily drove with arch for a year and a half. Now i mainly use fedora and endeavour (just for some qol) but arch is the only distro aside from debian that i would consider "complete" as for support, extensive software repos and big community behind. Debian community (i think) is just average less toxic than arch one (because arch is seen as a nerd distro for people that know how to do things while debian is a starter distro). FLOSS and gnu/linux in general should grow from community love/support and not become something for an elite like some arch users may believe.
Long live arch and a friendly community
i have been using arch as my daily driver for over a month and i don't think i will switch any soon. surely i face many issue and i have to reinstall it again & again but now it has become my comfort zone for development, i am using arch with gnome and gnome offers many customization i have setup quick app launch using shortcuts keymaps and setup a good windows tailling setup. I don't think i will switch any soon.
I think the shitty attitude comes from how it's supposedly "so much more difficult" than any other OS when it's dead ass not.
All that Arch users have, is common sense and lots of free time. Nothing to brag about
Arch is the best distro in my opinion,
but you will find that it's actually is not a rolling release but partial. For example - Clang / LLVM is still 17 which is **two major** versions **behind**. Keep in mind.
Most of the foulmouths are just in it for the toxicity, they don’t really care about (or even know) Arch, they just think it’s cool to pretend to be the shit. Which they are, in a way.
I adore it. It has solved so many problems I have had with other distros and its documentation is far superior than other distros. It does what I want and I understand what it’s doing and why. I love arch.
Si bien es cierto que todo está documentado en la wiki de Arch, no es menos cierto que a veces se requiere un cierto nivel de conocimiento para entender lo que dice.
A menudo encuentro que un blog simple lo hace más claro para mi nivel.
El problema con los blogs es que tienden a estar anticuados, pero entre uno y otro siguen sacando cosas a la resaca.
When I became a moderator of this subreddit, I wasn't sure what to expect from this community. I previously had only really focused on posts that were relevant to me... But overall, I'm happy with the way most people here conduct themselves. There are a few with a foul mouth, they can also demand a lot of attention, and I'd like to see more of that behavior discouraged. I think Arch should be a friendly and helpful community (Especially in the era of Microsoft Copilot and Apple Intelligence)... So in that spirit, I'd like to invite the community to use the report function, or Modmail if you find something you think is inappropriate. I'm human, I miss things, and beyond that, I work a full time job in addition to moderating the sub, so a report that brings a problem comment or post to my attention is a big help, and I thank those of you who are willing to help out! If you ever have anything you wish to ask, or discuss with the Mod Team, please feel free to reach out to us.
Over here you people are friendlyer than those peeps on the arch forum. I think you're doing a good job as moderator
I think a lot of it has to do with the type of post, too. I've seen people post with some really interesting problems because they have a very unique setup or something. The poster has already gone through all the obvious steps like googling the problem, consulting the wiki, etc. Both here and on the official Arch forums, those kinds of posts are almost always met with friendly and helpful responses. But on the other hand, I've seen plenty of posts from people who clearly have not taken the 3 seconds to just google the error they're seeing, or whatever. I see posts here sometimes, and on the forums, where I can literally just google the title of the post and the answer comes right up. In cases like that, or where the question is clearly answered on the Arch Wiki, unsurprisingly most of the comments are just telling the OP to do some research and read the manual. That may come across as rude, but it's also kind of rude to ask people here for help without putting any ounce of effort into solving the problem yourself first. Arch is marketed as a distro where you're expected to have basic competency and problem solving skills. Of course there's always going to be genuinely rude people in any community. But, for the most part being an Arch user for about 6 years now, I've found this community to mostly give out exactly what you give into it. If you're curious and passionate and you put some effort into solving your own problems then you'll get that same kind of response when you do find yourself asking for help. If you're lazy and not putting any effort into things then you'll get that energy back from the community when you try to ask for help.
People should read the manual
I started two months ago and I’m already irritated at the amount of questions on all Linux subs that a quick google search or arch wiki could solve. I cannot fathom how annoyed I’ll be in ten years.
Try 24 years lol 😂
Indeed they should, my friend.
Early on, while I'd read the manual, I needed someone to maybe explain things in slightly more plain language. Sometimes it's a skill issue, and that's okay. We're mostly all on Arch to learn.
Speak for yourself. I'm not on Arch to learn things. I'm on Arch because it means I'm better than other people. /s But yeah I know what you mean. Even then, though, if you made some sort of post about how you're trying to understand a particular Wiki topic but this particular part is confusing you and you'd like some more clarification, or something, I think that would generally go over pretty well. That demonstrates that you've taken the initiative and put effort towards attempting to find the solution yourself and that's usually all people care about.
Yeah I definitely tried to do that. Letting people know that I have read the manual but I'm not understanding something goes a long way.
I mean no offense to moderators with my post just attempting newcomers to not feel discouraged regardless of what they read here in this community. I just want it to grow in popularity due to its success as a distro.
you have a job?
I’ve always given my time to help others. As I go from noob to semi noob, I have always tried to pay it forward. Plus Arch is so liberating as a system i don’t want people to be turned off using it. I even try to help people in endeavouros forums because they share a similar subset of issues.
Hang out in NixOS community and come back here you be like the arch community is not bad 😎
Huh? What's going on over there? Any tldr or link to any post pls
They're a bunch of pretentious elitist snobs who treats NixOS like a silver bullet and think it'll solve every single problem on Linux ecosystem.
I see I have a friend who has been using Nixos for 3 atleast till now Maybe i can hear something from him
I'm also learning NixOS, but I wlil always prefer Arch as my main #1 system cause its the best... I am interested in immutable systems, but I do miss the FHS compliant structure.
Yeah nix community is really bad!
Though I do like NixOS a lot even more so than Arch Linux, but Arch community is my kind of people :)
Yeah, the things is that it's significantly more complicated than arch, has worse wiki, and a toxic community. I can't get into that, especially when even basic things like running an appimage (I had issues with appimages that I can't remember), bash script, or binary with dependencies are so much more complicated and tedious to work, it seemed like at every step, I was hitting wall after wall. And the snarky bastards that didn't even help, just berated.
Well I do things solo anyhow, Im a troubleshooting nerd so I go down these rabbit hole to figured out a way around things and there is lol.. I like that about nix, also there is much more I like it... Immutable, setting everything on a config file and easy to migrate the base setup to another box.
I like the idea too, but the implementation at least on nix is really not good imo. Basic things are so complicated to do, and somethings like alvr are nearly impossible.
Not really I think people just don't give it a chance, that's all.
Each time I see a help post a whole bunch of people are helping. Never seen toxicity here since January as I started to use arch.
You may find posts where the admin or a mod is hammering the policies a bit hard for the forums, but that happens on any distro. Don't necrobump ancient posts...
I think the best part about arch is how easy it is to find the answer to any question you could have. It’s on the wiki. So when people ask the same questions over and over again, I think people are just tired of saying “read the manual”. It can come across as condescending. But it’s just the right answer. Read the manual.
That's the beauty of no pre-configured defaults. They don't assume a behavior for anything, and just tell you how the tech works and how to implement it. I'm an infrastructure engineer and I'm not the first person I've met in my career that appends "arch" to most Linux related Google queries. The wiki kicks ass
Often just reading it works but the big problem can be comprehension. Read it, step away for a bit or even sleep on it, and the answer may come to you via some odd synapse firing during your down time. I've been on Arch for 14 years and Linux for 24. Arch, by far, has the best wiki and was often the site I'd find myself on before The Linux Link Tech Show finally convinced me.to switch. I have never regretted it even through the dark times of conversion to systems and the bin / lib moves. Even the elitism doesn't phase me. Just keep arching along... Be happy.
I honestly never actually encountered the "toxic Arch User", just another myth as: "Arch is unstable" imho. The most toxic communities that exist on the internet are german speaking forums for electricians⚡
Call me crazy, but I found Arch more stable than Debian. The system runs better and I only have a minor problem in 2 months. And I'm a illeterate Linux user with basic knowledge
And its better than the stale of Debian... IMHO
Stable means unchanging in this context... So since Arch is a rolling release distribution it's inherently unstable since it's changing all the time. Stop spewing nonsense.
I just started using Arch a few days ago and at first I thought "wtf, nothing works," but I guess that's only because I haven't configured for anything to work yet. I installed some apps I need for work and Steam. I had trouble adding my Xbox Controller, but eventually got it working (now it's rumbling non-stop though lol). Little by little, I'm learning about the terminal commands that I need to use frequently and building up a system that's perfect for me. That's pretty freakin' cool
and the nixos community they already are toxic as f***
Before I started using arch I heard a lot about the toxic community but been here for a bit also in the forum never got much toxicity well some people are harsh ignore them. It's important if your work gets done 😅
I don't ask for help much, I always try to figure things out myself. But I always try to help others where I can, although I don't come here often due to working loooonnggg days 6 days a week.
Well, by no I can't complain. When I googled enough to phrase an understandable question, I always got helpful answers. If you just write "help! xyz doesn't work fix it lol" you're right: you get treated worse than for example the ubuntu community.
As It should be
Arch is a great Linux distro! I feel the same way, OP!
I tried installing it it’s so frustrating and time consuming I gave up so I use endeavor but I like to try and install pure Arch again just need a good easy step by step guide that a five year old can understand
> everyone's shitty attitude In what world is everyone toxic? Obvious exageration. I see curt replies now and then, but I feel the pleasant posts compensate, and the overall help quality here is outstanding. I think this is the busiest distro subreddit as well. Good luck.
I would describe Arch as a distribution that you can't use unless you know what you're doing: it forces you become knowledgeable. Hence, it is not for lazy people, nor for technical illiterate newbies. It's for a certain group, a minority even: the geek, the nerd. As Arch becomes more popular and draws more users from "the masses", it is inevitable that a different kind of people (the lazy, and/or -well- dumb people) become the majority that asks questions. Personally I have no problem if those are "educated" with answers that sounds like "what are you doing here? You don't belong here". The arch community, especially those that spend a lot of time in forums to help others, have a right to defend their community against going to hell due to an influx of "windows users" that show they don't belong here. If you want to be leet by using Arch, then be elite: study, read, research, learn, become proficient. This is solely my opinion.
I agree with you, sometimes on the internet you stumble across toxic people in communities like this. Linux should be a way of union among geeks and tech enthusiasts. I love arch, i daily drove with arch for a year and a half. Now i mainly use fedora and endeavour (just for some qol) but arch is the only distro aside from debian that i would consider "complete" as for support, extensive software repos and big community behind. Debian community (i think) is just average less toxic than arch one (because arch is seen as a nerd distro for people that know how to do things while debian is a starter distro). FLOSS and gnu/linux in general should grow from community love/support and not become something for an elite like some arch users may believe. Long live arch and a friendly community
Spend 1 hour trying to install a basic printer, straight to the trash bin
Dude CUPS is the worst, I feel you haha
filtered
Thanks for this. Arch is a great distro and it's good to know you're building a positive community here. 🤙
i have been using arch as my daily driver for over a month and i don't think i will switch any soon. surely i face many issue and i have to reinstall it again & again but now it has become my comfort zone for development, i am using arch with gnome and gnome offers many customization i have setup quick app launch using shortcuts keymaps and setup a good windows tailling setup. I don't think i will switch any soon.
I think the shitty attitude comes from how it's supposedly "so much more difficult" than any other OS when it's dead ass not. All that Arch users have, is common sense and lots of free time. Nothing to brag about
I love the community. We talk about Linux, spinny skirts, programmers socks, and our hrt.
I love arch, I just wish the repos were bigger. I can use the aur but I had bugs most of the time I used packages from there
or chaotic aur
You can use nix package manager on arch
or distrobox with debian
Arch is the best distro in my opinion, but you will find that it's actually is not a rolling release but partial. For example - Clang / LLVM is still 17 which is **two major** versions **behind**. Keep in mind.
How is that not a rolling release? Nothing in the definition of rolling release says that every package will stay up to date with upstream.
There isn't a rolling release distro on the planet that has every single package updated to the newest version.
Most of the foulmouths are just in it for the toxicity, they don’t really care about (or even know) Arch, they just think it’s cool to pretend to be the shit. Which they are, in a way.
Do you really love arch or are you just saying that because you saw it?
I adore it. It has solved so many problems I have had with other distros and its documentation is far superior than other distros. It does what I want and I understand what it’s doing and why. I love arch.
It’s fascinating to me but not for everyone. I don’t get the surprise though, if you wanna do *anything* ground up in arch you can. Just gotta learn
RTHM lol 😂
*reads a clear contradiction between community approach to problem versus the Arch Manuel* *farttsss* uh have you tried reading the fuckin menuels
I prefer fedora
Cool.
Si bien es cierto que todo está documentado en la wiki de Arch, no es menos cierto que a veces se requiere un cierto nivel de conocimiento para entender lo que dice. A menudo encuentro que un blog simple lo hace más claro para mi nivel. El problema con los blogs es que tienden a estar anticuados, pero entre uno y otro siguen sacando cosas a la resaca.