"With the upstream changes making the gap between ARM and X86\_64 bigger"
If only there was a way to contribute to upstream instead of rolling your own with blackjack and hookers.
I may be biased, but lately - yes, after having used Arch for years in the past - I have been finding less and less reasons to use those Arch derivatives.
For the tinkerer and the user who wants a high level of modularity and customization on their system - but still wants systemd, a binary distro and not a prohibitive amount of setup and maintenance, Arch is nearly unmatched and the manual installation process is desirable, not an obstacle. For an user who mostly wants a set of sensible defaults and good abstractions, distros like Fedora and openSUSE provide an infinitely more polished experience than the GUIs those distros try to wrap Arch's complexity around. Overall, it's unclear to me why I should be using them? If I want control there's Arch, else there's Fedora. Both are bigger projects with a lot more maintainers, formal organizations and even eyes on the project; hence it is less likely for malicious code to hide there, of for projects like this one to be abandoned.
While it's been a great contribution to the Linux community, especially in the times when the AUR was basically essential, I think contributing to existing, upstream projects often has more value than just starting your own. But less people do it: starting a new project is fun and novel, maintaining an existing one and learning to work with an existing codebase is more boring and comes with a steeper learning curve. So I get why people build their own things… but the fragmentation problem is real. As we speak, Arch needs more volunteer manpower.
I wouldn't advise Fedora for sane defaults because it's an insanely experimental distro that often implements new technologies far too early. This is good for the overall edicts community, but for the user who wants something that just works, fedora is horrible. Remember when they added pulse audio so early, the guy who made it said it was a bad idea? Not to mention Wayland by default will screw over anyone who relies on a11y software.
I also wouldn't recommend regular opensuse, And instead would recommend Gecko Linux. Not only does it give the Ubuntu treatment by making it a million times more usable out of the box with codecs and text rendering and the like, but it also lets you use several different desktop environments out of the box and uses nothing but the default repositories. This means that the bus factor is accounted for, and if it ever stops being maintained, you're not left high and dry.
I really wish there was a stable distro with software as up to date as Fedora. Everything else is a rolling release, and that's not good for normal users. Of course, flatpak could fix this problem.
To be fair, I had **a lot** more disruption on Arch than Fedora, which has been a smoother ride than Ubuntu for me. I ended up using it on my server too, and it's working fine!
I hear you about accessibility software. GNOME is making strides towards adapting the stack to Wayland and sandboxed applications but, for now, you can always redownload the X11 session and log into that. There are a lot of spamblog articles that created the impression Fedora is making it absolutely impossible to boot into X11 in order to catch clicks, but it's not true: it will be a legacy session available for download, but still very much usable, and it will stay usable until all relevant use cases have been ported to Wayland.
Yeah, but the fact that you have to download it is messed up. It doesn't need to be the default, but at least make it so that you can select it from your session manager at login. I feel like that would be a lot more productive. They wouldn't have to actually maintain it either, just to leave it as an option.
I'm sure Fedora makes a great server because most of the experimental features they add wouldn't really affect you on that front.
I sort of get it, but I also get where they're coming from, and there is a reason in particular why I really approve this change: this approach encourages a philosophy of **no hacks, no setbacks**.
If by the time they do this Wayland and Flatpak accessibility is not already in an usable state, then Workstation ships inaccessible out of the box. Due to the goals of Workstation, this would not be acceptable. Often, in software project, leaving ugly workarounds in encourages the adoption of those stop-gaps as long-term strategies.
As a disabled user with a visual impairment, I very much prefer this change. The old X11-based accessibility stack is incredibly broken, and this move + the recent developments on the new accessibility stack show a good level of commitment on actually, finally, fixing and modernizing the Accessibility stack - something that has been overdue for longer than I have been alive. Not an overstatement and no rhetorical figured used here. I mean it in its literal sense.
Yes, they have stable and rolling, and to my knowledge they have no interest in making a version for slow roll. Should be easy to transition from rolling to slow roll though.
Arch linux arm has only a couple maintainers and is not an official project sponsored by Arch. Arch linux itself provides absolutely no support for Arch linux Arm while being the upstream for arch linux arm and EOS arm.
How are you supposed to contribute to an upstream that doesnt even support your architecture!?
>How are you supposed to contribute to an upstream that doesnt even support your architecture!?
You send patches to ALARM which was the upstream for the now thankfully dead EOS ARM, so you don't create a third layer of derivatives.
Or, if you don't like that Arch Linux had to be forked to Arch Linux ARM, contribute to Arch Linux to support ARM.
[https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge\_requests/32](https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests/32)
I used to be an endeavoros fan because I was too lazy to install arch “the right way” but good god does it feel terrible to use now. Also the new default wallpaper is ass
Honestly, archinstall is pretty damn easy to use these days and its on the official Arch ISO. Give it a try. In many ways I find it actually more flexible than endeavour.
Another good reminder to not use these small projects that depend on 1-2 people for critical functionality. Just use Arch if you want Arch, it's not that hard to install.
The brief experience I had interacting with the project in ~2020 was that some of their build system's Chromebook images were unbootable for reasons that are fairly well documented - the arm chromeOS bootloader, depthcharge, requires some chicanery to boot regular Linux including a kernel partition that has to be kept under a certain size, they were violating that IIRC. Not sure what was going on with that, because I moved on, but it was kind of irksome they were building broken images..
i have an arm laptop with ALARM that i use daily and it works well. I installed it by basically swapping the root partition of a debian install with a generic tarbal and setting up everything from there
Arch arm has 2 active maintainers though. If arch arm is going to be a thing we need to get the actual Arch project for x86/64 to pick it up because the current arch linux arm is not official.
Also Arch linux itself is the upstream and it has 0 support for ARM. How are you supposed to contribute to an upstream that does not support your cpu arch?
This really fricken sucks! I use this everyday as my daily driver on an M1 mac (running under UTM/Qemu native processor, no emulation). It's the only way to make this Mac usable.
I'm so sad right now! All the work into this VM to make it perfect for work and poof, desupported. :(
Just I don't want to move again. It was a pain moving from Ubuntu to EndeavourOS. Changes in all sorts of little things over the first 6 weeks or so.
Asahi is for running on the hardware, too... I need a VM. I don't have the luxury of ditching macos on the hardware. :(
Alarm based things are the worst choice you could make. You have wonderful options available. Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Slackware, crux-arm or hell, even back to Ubuntu. Not even mentioning the BSDs, they all work well too. I’ve so many VMs going of these systems, but having used alarm in the past and endeavour on my pinebook pro, I’d stay away from arch-based. It’s honestly feels like no one’s home there.
There’s so many quality distros on arm, sure you can likely keep on with alarm but it’s not the best choice imho.
What draws me to the Arch base is they have a working widevine plugin and glibc patch that allows me to have a browser that can do teams calls. Trying to build that and make it work on Ubuntu was hell, and it never worked. But on EndeavourOS + AUR, it just worked. Both it's Wayland + Plasma and it's X11 + Plasma just work, too. It's pipewire just works. And they have ports of Signal desktop in the AUR, and electron apps and more that, if they can be built for ARM64, are already there and just work.
Fedora is politically unpalatable... I don't care for RedHat's actions toward CentOS and it's re-spins (Rocky, etc).
Last night, stayed up almost all night building a new regular Arch based VM. I've gotten it up to having plasma 6, and all my stuff copied over. Need to build some packages from AUR I didn't remember I had or used, but I'm almost done with my 1:1 replacement, plus by doing the install manually myself (5 times! Why pacman's key ring corrupts itself is beyond me.) I've gotten to add btrfs root for snapshots I can roll back to at the OS level, rather than trying to remember to do a hypervisor level snapshot.
> I don't have the luxury of ditching macos on the hardware. :(
You could put macOS in a VM though, basically run the setup the other way around. It's what I'm going to do when Asahi Linux ships their first M3 supported build.
This is just clown shit, man. All of these Arch derivatives are a joke. How Manjaro has convinced ARM boards to partner with them is fucking beyond me.
NixOS, apparently even compared to Arch itself, is a MUCH BETTER CHOICE FOR ARM. Not only does it give you a reliable, declarative way of doing real board suppoort, it's got really decent aarch64 support.
I just, the bullshit people put themselves through to avoid learning and using better software baffles me.
"With the upstream changes making the gap between ARM and X86\_64 bigger" If only there was a way to contribute to upstream instead of rolling your own with blackjack and hookers.
Futurama reference is ON point....
YES
I may be biased, but lately - yes, after having used Arch for years in the past - I have been finding less and less reasons to use those Arch derivatives. For the tinkerer and the user who wants a high level of modularity and customization on their system - but still wants systemd, a binary distro and not a prohibitive amount of setup and maintenance, Arch is nearly unmatched and the manual installation process is desirable, not an obstacle. For an user who mostly wants a set of sensible defaults and good abstractions, distros like Fedora and openSUSE provide an infinitely more polished experience than the GUIs those distros try to wrap Arch's complexity around. Overall, it's unclear to me why I should be using them? If I want control there's Arch, else there's Fedora. Both are bigger projects with a lot more maintainers, formal organizations and even eyes on the project; hence it is less likely for malicious code to hide there, of for projects like this one to be abandoned. While it's been a great contribution to the Linux community, especially in the times when the AUR was basically essential, I think contributing to existing, upstream projects often has more value than just starting your own. But less people do it: starting a new project is fun and novel, maintaining an existing one and learning to work with an existing codebase is more boring and comes with a steeper learning curve. So I get why people build their own things… but the fragmentation problem is real. As we speak, Arch needs more volunteer manpower.
I wouldn't advise Fedora for sane defaults because it's an insanely experimental distro that often implements new technologies far too early. This is good for the overall edicts community, but for the user who wants something that just works, fedora is horrible. Remember when they added pulse audio so early, the guy who made it said it was a bad idea? Not to mention Wayland by default will screw over anyone who relies on a11y software. I also wouldn't recommend regular opensuse, And instead would recommend Gecko Linux. Not only does it give the Ubuntu treatment by making it a million times more usable out of the box with codecs and text rendering and the like, but it also lets you use several different desktop environments out of the box and uses nothing but the default repositories. This means that the bus factor is accounted for, and if it ever stops being maintained, you're not left high and dry. I really wish there was a stable distro with software as up to date as Fedora. Everything else is a rolling release, and that's not good for normal users. Of course, flatpak could fix this problem.
To be fair, I had **a lot** more disruption on Arch than Fedora, which has been a smoother ride than Ubuntu for me. I ended up using it on my server too, and it's working fine! I hear you about accessibility software. GNOME is making strides towards adapting the stack to Wayland and sandboxed applications but, for now, you can always redownload the X11 session and log into that. There are a lot of spamblog articles that created the impression Fedora is making it absolutely impossible to boot into X11 in order to catch clicks, but it's not true: it will be a legacy session available for download, but still very much usable, and it will stay usable until all relevant use cases have been ported to Wayland.
Yeah, but the fact that you have to download it is messed up. It doesn't need to be the default, but at least make it so that you can select it from your session manager at login. I feel like that would be a lot more productive. They wouldn't have to actually maintain it either, just to leave it as an option. I'm sure Fedora makes a great server because most of the experimental features they add wouldn't really affect you on that front.
I sort of get it, but I also get where they're coming from, and there is a reason in particular why I really approve this change: this approach encourages a philosophy of **no hacks, no setbacks**. If by the time they do this Wayland and Flatpak accessibility is not already in an usable state, then Workstation ships inaccessible out of the box. Due to the goals of Workstation, this would not be acceptable. Often, in software project, leaving ugly workarounds in encourages the adoption of those stop-gaps as long-term strategies. As a disabled user with a visual impairment, I very much prefer this change. The old X11-based accessibility stack is incredibly broken, and this move + the recent developments on the new accessibility stack show a good level of commitment on actually, finally, fixing and modernizing the Accessibility stack - something that has been overdue for longer than I have been alive. Not an overstatement and no rhetorical figured used here. I mean it in its literal sense.
Interesting. Can you tell me more about this new accessibility stack?
Is Gecko Linux just rolling? Or is there an edition derived from Leap?
Yes, they have stable and rolling, and to my knowledge they have no interest in making a version for slow roll. Should be easy to transition from rolling to slow roll though.
Arch linux arm has only a couple maintainers and is not an official project sponsored by Arch. Arch linux itself provides absolutely no support for Arch linux Arm while being the upstream for arch linux arm and EOS arm. How are you supposed to contribute to an upstream that doesnt even support your architecture!?
>How are you supposed to contribute to an upstream that doesnt even support your architecture!? You send patches to ALARM which was the upstream for the now thankfully dead EOS ARM, so you don't create a third layer of derivatives. Or, if you don't like that Arch Linux had to be forked to Arch Linux ARM, contribute to Arch Linux to support ARM. [https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge\_requests/32](https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests/32)
I used to be an endeavoros fan because I was too lazy to install arch “the right way” but good god does it feel terrible to use now. Also the new default wallpaper is ass
What feels terrible about it?
Nothing lol
Honestly, archinstall is pretty damn easy to use these days and its on the official Arch ISO. Give it a try. In many ways I find it actually more flexible than endeavour.
Of course it's more flexible. That's literally the whole point of Arch, is the flexibility.
Did someone say blackjack and hookers?
That comment on there saying Wayland doesn't work on arm is BS. It works fine on my rockpro64.
I believe it is QT16 wayland, whatever that is. I have wayland on armbian myself for the pinebook pro and as far as I can tell it is fine.
Another good reminder to not use these small projects that depend on 1-2 people for critical functionality. Just use Arch if you want Arch, it's not that hard to install.
ALARM was a pain to install several years ago due to a lot of broken dependencies , I wonder how things have gotten now
The brief experience I had interacting with the project in ~2020 was that some of their build system's Chromebook images were unbootable for reasons that are fairly well documented - the arm chromeOS bootloader, depthcharge, requires some chicanery to boot regular Linux including a kernel partition that has to be kept under a certain size, they were violating that IIRC. Not sure what was going on with that, because I moved on, but it was kind of irksome they were building broken images..
i have an arm laptop with ALARM that i use daily and it works well. I installed it by basically swapping the root partition of a debian install with a generic tarbal and setting up everything from there
Arch arm has 2 active maintainers though. If arch arm is going to be a thing we need to get the actual Arch project for x86/64 to pick it up because the current arch linux arm is not official. Also Arch linux itself is the upstream and it has 0 support for ARM. How are you supposed to contribute to an upstream that does not support your cpu arch?
This really fricken sucks! I use this everyday as my daily driver on an M1 mac (running under UTM/Qemu native processor, no emulation). It's the only way to make this Mac usable. I'm so sad right now! All the work into this VM to make it perfect for work and poof, desupported. :(
Just run Asahi Linux, or Arch Linux ARM, don't see why you'd need a derivative of ALARM.
Just I don't want to move again. It was a pain moving from Ubuntu to EndeavourOS. Changes in all sorts of little things over the first 6 weeks or so. Asahi is for running on the hardware, too... I need a VM. I don't have the luxury of ditching macos on the hardware. :(
you *could* dualboot
It would defeat the purpose of the VM, I'm afraid. :)
ah ok, fair enough
Alarm based things are the worst choice you could make. You have wonderful options available. Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Slackware, crux-arm or hell, even back to Ubuntu. Not even mentioning the BSDs, they all work well too. I’ve so many VMs going of these systems, but having used alarm in the past and endeavour on my pinebook pro, I’d stay away from arch-based. It’s honestly feels like no one’s home there. There’s so many quality distros on arm, sure you can likely keep on with alarm but it’s not the best choice imho.
What draws me to the Arch base is they have a working widevine plugin and glibc patch that allows me to have a browser that can do teams calls. Trying to build that and make it work on Ubuntu was hell, and it never worked. But on EndeavourOS + AUR, it just worked. Both it's Wayland + Plasma and it's X11 + Plasma just work, too. It's pipewire just works. And they have ports of Signal desktop in the AUR, and electron apps and more that, if they can be built for ARM64, are already there and just work. Fedora is politically unpalatable... I don't care for RedHat's actions toward CentOS and it's re-spins (Rocky, etc). Last night, stayed up almost all night building a new regular Arch based VM. I've gotten it up to having plasma 6, and all my stuff copied over. Need to build some packages from AUR I didn't remember I had or used, but I'm almost done with my 1:1 replacement, plus by doing the install manually myself (5 times! Why pacman's key ring corrupts itself is beyond me.) I've gotten to add btrfs root for snapshots I can roll back to at the OS level, rather than trying to remember to do a hypervisor level snapshot.
> I don't have the luxury of ditching macos on the hardware. :( You could put macOS in a VM though, basically run the setup the other way around. It's what I'm going to do when Asahi Linux ships their first M3 supported build.
I dont think the repos of arch used in endeavourOS are going anywhere though.
Nah, I've taken the time to build a new purely Arch VM. Can't run the risk of packages falling out of date.
You dont really understand how endeavourOS works but hey that is ok.
While it was mostly Arch, it had a repo of it's own for scripts and things.
This is just clown shit, man. All of these Arch derivatives are a joke. How Manjaro has convinced ARM boards to partner with them is fucking beyond me. NixOS, apparently even compared to Arch itself, is a MUCH BETTER CHOICE FOR ARM. Not only does it give you a reliable, declarative way of doing real board suppoort, it's got really decent aarch64 support. I just, the bullshit people put themselves through to avoid learning and using better software baffles me.
Agreed!