Hope this isn't inappropriate but there doesn't appear to be a specific forum for Artix so posting here instead.

A couple of weeks ago I fell over and landed on my laptop, which was smashed beyond repair, fortunately I was able to salvage the hard drive out of it so I didn't lose all my data (a lot of it was backed up anyway but who has backups 100% up to date).

I bought a new laptop and decided to install Artix as I've been wanting to move to a distribution without systemd for some time and Arch is getting a lot of positive talk recently. I'm a pretty experienced Linux user (I've used Redhat, Debian, Knoppix, Suse, Ubuntu . . . even OpenBSD) so I was fairly confident in my ability to install, configure and use a new distribution.

However I almost immediately ran into problems even something as basic as installing Vim, almost the very first thing I did, ran into dependency problems. I don't know if I used pacman wrong:

sudo pacman -S vim

I've forgotten what my second attempted install was but that ran into dependency problems too. I had some other problems some of which I was able to resolve but others . . . well to be honest I just gave up and installed Ubuntu instead.

So a number of issues:

Q1. Is that command correct or was I mis-using pacman?
Q2. Is this likely to be an issue peculiar to Artix and not Arch?
Q3. Do I need to learn more about Arch/Artix before I try to install it again and what resources are available/recommended?
Q4. As I'm very used to the apt and dpkg systems would I perhaps be better off with debuan (not meant to be inflammatory)?

Your installation command looks correct.

To help you resolve the issue, I would need to know what the issue is. You don't provide a description ("running into dependency problems" and "some other problems" are not descriptions).

Do you need to learn more? Hard to say, since I don't know what you know.

Are you better off with something you are familiar with? Probably, but Arch is a rolling release distro whereas Devuan is not, as far as I know. Thus there are other factors to consider than the package management system.

Yes, I'm sorry but I didn't think to write down the error messages I was getting and now would have to re-install Artix again to replicate the problem.

Really I was just hoping this might be a known issue with Artix but I guess it's not.

I would still like to go with a rolling release as you suggest so I may try installing Arch and put up with being trapped in systemd - I am using Ubuntu at the moment anyway so I'd be no worse off.

In order to tell you whether something is a known issue, one would first have to know what the issue is. How hard is it to run the command sudo pacman -S vim again?

I don't also know what the dependencies you needed where, but it sounds like you didn't configure the repos properly (Arch has a couple for community, main, etc).

I also remember you have to choose between openrc, runit or r6. Some packages need their init system equivalent, but Vim is not one of those.

Can't help much more without info, so you might want to undust the install media and give it a go

Well by some freak coincidence this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1K5vi-q9bo seems to be addressing the exact problem I was having - as best as I recall.

Pure coincidence honestly.

Yes I remember choosing runit just randomly as I wasn't sure which would be best. Is there any particular rational reason for preferring one or another?

Ok, I am not sure if I am the best person to reply, but I can tell you I prefer openrc simply because I like to be able to start/stop services from /etc/init.d. There is also a TON of documentation for it.

Runit it is said to boot super fast and it is true... I couldn't believe how fast it booted! Sadly, at least in my case I also found that the booting winnings where paid back with interests when I wanted to shut down. It took the damn computer AGES to power off/reboot.

And s6... I never tired it! Might be amazing and I am missing out :P. In any case, if you ever want to reinstall, you can play and test with different versions, and see what works better for you. At the end of the day, init systems in Unix are something quite solid, and it feels like no one would be really bad