[arch-general] Newbies in Arch [WAS: Suspend seems not to work with nVidia Nouveau driver]

[Alex Liu]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Oon-Ee Ng <ngoonee.talk at 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.