Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.
I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.
Why ArchLinux over LinuxMint?
“Arch btw”
Street cred
Could be just them sharing the wiki with em (which is a great companion to ANY Linux Distro. Arch or non-Arch, a lotta the stuff there can be very helpful), but…feel like it’s a bit early to be doing that IMO. “Start em young” and all that, sure, but also let them learn, fail, and get into messes themselves first, ya know
By simply installing and configuring Arch, one can learn a lot about GNU/Linux. Even when OP won’t use Arch as primary OS, it’s a valuable experience.
The advantage with Arch is the superior package management system. With raw Arch/pacman you can get VERY close to any configuration or distro you want. Mint has a LOT of stuff baked in that people that run Arch don’t want. I want to pick all the utilities I run myself. I want to install every library I need so that there’s no wasted space on my drive. Arch is also a rolling release so any new code that gets released is near-instantly available in Arch. I’ve been on Gnome 45 for a while.
That’s cool and all, but this person is (I’m assuming) new-ish to Linux and hasn’t developed their opinion on “what distro/DE/way of doing things works for me” and “what do I want/don’t want in my system”, which IMO is extremely important because…it’s their system, and what works for you (Gnome + Arch) might not jive well with em. That’s the beauty of Linux: it’s up to the user to do as they will. Maybe let them get their feet wet first before throwing something that needs to be babysat and occasionally maintained at them as a better option, just saying.
Also, that Arch has “the superior package management system” is an opinion, not a hard fact.
The question was Why Arch.
That’s why.
Experience isn’t relevant.
To me it was quite clear that they were asking, “Why Arch over Mint for OP?” They weren’t asking why you like it, they were asking why you think OP would like it.
In that context I think experience is extremely relevant.
Yes. The question was “why Arch?”, but specifically the question was asked because Arch demands some level of competance from the user when it comes to fixing and maintaing their own system by nature of it being a rolling release. So yeah, expierence is relevant here.