Au contraire.....

Arch is one of the simplest to set up....allow me to explain:

First, the initial download and installation is the fastest and easiest of any distro I have used. To be sure, at this stage, you have basically nothing except a terminal.

But---you have one of the best package managers around. Enter "pacman -Syu" and take a coffee break (dinner, if you're on a slow connection). Now your system is updated. In principle, you could go years without ever doing another clean install.

Assuming that you want a GUI, enter "pacman -S xorg xfce4". Repeat coffee break.

This process continues as you add your desired applications. It might take days or weeks, but there is a sense of being in control at every step.

Is Arch perfect? Of course not!!

Except for that halfwit on youtube.

Interesting. I'm curious why the arch official install guide never mentions this "pacman -Syu" command. In fact, it goes on and on about stuff users are expected to do first before it says much of anything about pacman.

Well...the install guide is for....installing. Read further for package management and other things. Actually, on the Arch wiki, just use the search engine to find "pacman". And of course there is "man pacman".

Note:

In spite of what I said earlier, it is also very much OK to install a few basic things like xorg and xfce before doing the upgrade. The typical issue with Arch is attempting to install SW without first at least doing "pacman -Sy". It starts off happily downloading and then fails because it can't find something. What's nice is that everything is cached, so you can then do pacman -Sy, and then repeat the installation command---and it goes relatively quickly because of the stuff already cached.

That was no half-wit. You are being WAY too generous.......

A nanowit, is that better?

And "installing" is another way of saying "setting up"; hence, given that the install guide (or the set up guide) looks complicated (to me), my assumption is that "Arch Linux is pretty complicated to set up, I think" (IE, complicated to install). However, I'll take your word for it that, in spite of the impression that the install (or set up) guide gave me, that Arch is reasonably easy to set up.

You can keep updates from coming, because they are usually just security vulnerabilities, and there are next to no viruses for linux. To remove this, go to system > Preferences > Startup programs in GNOME and click updates, and then remove. CLose the window. The update manager will not start on next boot, and don't be too mad at updates, they usually don't install new, but as their name implies, replace the old. Ubuntu is by no means a minimalistic distro, and neither is my favorite full-featured distro, fedora. Fedora is really REALLY fast at installing from a LiveCD, bu it's bulkier than ubuntu. However, if you want a much slower install but a more pure config, use the fedora DVD or CD set, and choose only the most minimalistic of stuff, you can download more later right from fedora's package manager. Arch is a good minimalistic distro, puppy or DSL would be way too minimalistic. I have never installed arch, though I have worked with it. Last, as far as OpenSUSE goes, I hate OpenSUSE, but the boot error might be due to what you did to that poor ubuntu install. TO start anew, deleting all partitions and all data on the disk, boot up any linux LiveCD, if this is your only hard disk, run the command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 as the super user (root) in a terminal.

THIS WILL DELETE ALL DATA. This command will take literally no time to complete. Then you should be able to install a new distro without encountering the same error. OpenSUSE is crap, even when you get a working install, trust me, YaST is hell. (the OpenSUSE package manager) Not all distros are created equal, pal, but when you actually try to learn it, you will see it really is much better than windows. Don't give up on linux.

mark_alfred

Arch can be intimidating to set up yes but not difficult. I would suggest you know commandline though if your going to attempt it (And for God sakes! Please realize that its CASE SENSITIVE).

The Wiki's are nice because they try to go through every step, and explain possible issues you might have. Eventually when you get used to it you know easy shortcuts in setting up the OS quickly and easily.

pacman -Syu
does two things.
y = update the version info. Think of hitting "Update" in synaptics.
u = upgrade. If you put nothing after it, it upgrades everything that needs it.

You'll see on the wiki pacman -Sy and pacman -Su usually separately, because it tries to let you do one step at a time.

And also installing is not the same than setting up. installing involves using the install CD to get the system on your computer. Setting up is the process of getting the Operating system fully usable. Many distros and windows try to combine these two, taking away any control you might want. While Arch gives you the basics and lets you do what you want with it, giving you all the tools you need, but letting you choose what you want and don't want.

And please no Distro wars. I like Slackware and Ubuntu and any distro under the sun. I just perfer Arch for me.

-Jessica-

Some quibblement......"pacman -Sy" simply updates the local database to tell pacman what is available. It does not update any packages.

Distro wars---NEVER!!! Arch is the best, but lazy people like me sometimes flip to something else if they can't figure out how to get something working.

As long as the soap box is out: At work, they support Linux (Good), but not on laptops (Bad). They only install and support RHEL.

To try an get better interoperability with our Windows world, I finally had them put RHEL on my company-owned laptop. (Bad--Yuck--Ptooey)

RHEL is still there, but GRUB defaults to---you guessed it---Arch...