On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Oon-Ee Ng <ngoonee.talk@gmail.com> wrote:
Arch's niche is about control and simplicity, and making it 'newbie-friendly' (whatever that means) would compromise that.
The 'whatever that means' part is, I think, the important aspect here. What does it mean? Is newbie-friendliness providing a user with a graphical user interface by default and an easy-to-use installer like Ubuntu does? Many people seem to think so, because Ubuntu is commonly called a 'distribution for beginners', but actually I disagree. In fact, I think Arch is very newbie-friendly, if not the most newbie-friendly distro out there. And that's because of the huge wiki and the excellent documentation you get. Ubuntu et. al. might be easier to use for people who switched from Windows, but that's just because they're used to GUI and the 'out of the box' experience; however, I don't think that's what newbie-friendliness is all about. I mean, even someone who has never in his life used any Form of GNU/Linux or Unix before can install Arch and make it work by reading the wiki and the documentation -- so that is, in my opinion, very newbie-friendly. The same is true for, for example, Gentoo, which is commonly called a very hard to setup distro. I remember doing it ten years ago with little to no Linux experience and it worked, just by walking step by step through the instructions. Maybe Arch is not for everyone (I agree), but I don't think it has anything to do with being a newbie or not, but with being willing to learn, read the docs, etc.