itchick2014 [Ohio]

Arch. I had some tinkering with other distros in the past but wanted to configure pretty much everything. Running it with Cinnamon. I love pacman and AUR and have been able to not break it so far after a year of being installed which is a new record for me 😂

Honestly I don’t know much about these things but have been around electrical engineers! I looked up a few things I will admit 🙂

Nope. https://www.ece.rice.edu/~jdw/435/book/ch9.pdf

Related but not the same.

Transformers don’t deal much with resistance though…reluctance I was referring to magnetic reluctance which is the magnetic analog…more applicable to the transformer in this case. Thanks for the interesting exchange 🙃

Nope! Referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_reluctance

🤪

It’s just a phase. They will get over their reluctance.

I just want to see the day where as a pedestrian I don’t feel like my retinas are fried every time a car passes at night or has their brights on during the day (ugh). I know it is wishful thinking because apparently politicians don’t give a shit about pedestrians (or cyclists).

Ahhh the unfortunate speaker placement kills me. Why do designs always seem to put them right where your hands are?

Teenage engineering partnered with Nothing. That isn’t the same thing.

My first experience with installing Linux on a hard drive involved wiping the wrong hard drive (my dad’s) and installing on it. Then panicking when Windows 95 didn’t boot up. Thank goodness my dad was understanding lol.

You are bringing back bad retail days memories lol

Why not dual boot? It is possible to have both. That is what I typically do and with Mac this can be helpful because sometimes you may need to access MacOS for drivers and such. This way you can cross-compare and have more opportunity to learn.

I would say this probably varies by person. I learned a lot by using multiple distros. When I put the dots together that yum, apt-get, and (later) pacman do the same thing, that was a huge ah-ha. Sometimes seeing the differences in how they work in command line especially helps you understand larger concepts. If you stick with one distro (like I did for too long) you may have trouble comprehending these concepts for longer. Some beginners may find choice overwhelming, yes, but I do think it can be useful having exposure to two or three distros out the gate…even if just on live USB.

I haven’t seen Arch recommended to new folks outside of the Arch community circles and even most of them express caution. I always recommend Ubuntu or one of its variants for a person starting out, but it does help for the person to try a bunch of distros to see what they prefer. When I was starting out everyone was recommending Debian or Fedora. The more user-friendly distros didn’t come out until much later. Since then even the mainstream distros have improved a ton concerning usability, though I will say documentation always leans a bit too technical for my taste…for Arch especially. Too many holes for people that have no experience.

I recently bought a used LG Gram to install Arch on after a few years of not having Linux…so recently did similar research, albeit with more Linux knowledge. I do NOT recommend Arch as a first distro unless you are willing to put in time for troubleshooting. That said, looking up a model of laptop you are considering + Linux in a search engine can be valuable in determining how much ease you will have getting basic (trackpad, Bluetooth, webcam, WiFi) items working. I dabbled with a CD distro as a gateway to Linux and the “live disk” option is still the best way to experiment. Nowadays it is on a USB stick. This method allows you to play around without actually installing. Others here have already given good advice. If you go the USB stick route, do be careful with anything related to disk partitioning and formatting. I accidentally wiped my dad’s hard drive once when I was not being careful!

I believe it was the Myrbacka.

I do not recommend IKEA mattresses. We had one and it started sagging about a week in and my husband started having back pain. New mattress and back pain went away.

Glad I am not alone, though I follow unixporn and other communities so was very familiar with the overall sentiments about Arch before diving in. I look forward to when I know a bit more about it. I put it on a laptop I specifically bought to install Linux alongside the existing windows install (LG Gram) so I knew I had nothing to lose and my whole intention was to learn. I would have never installed Arch on a machine I actually need to use at this point. I am lucky that I got as far as I did so quickly. lol.

I agree that Arch is a pro distro. I do IT tech support, have background with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Knoppix, and Fedora and installing Arch was hard mode for me. Would I do it again? Hell yeah. Would I recommend it as a second or third install experience? Nope. Too many distros that are beginner to intermediate friendly. That said, I will forever have a fondness for pacman just because I like the name. I am still working out device drivers and a few smaller details a month later. Also, the wiki is written by someone who doesn’t do good technical writing. It assumes too much back end knowledge. I kept having to follow blog or article posts and still had to sandwich those snippets I got together hoping something worked…and again, I have some background knowledge of Linux already. An absolute beginner would be totally lost.

lemmit.online already has this and I blocked the communities of that instance because I don’t want Reddit content…I want Lemmy content.

If you do decide to do it, use a bot specific instance with bot specific communities. Don’t flood existing communities with bot content.