Why Are Arch Linux Users So TOXIC?
Why Are Arch Linux Users So TOXIC?
This is a real problem, and I think the video actually has a pretty accurate take on it. I used Arch for a ~5 year stretch recently, and the Arch Linux community has an unjustifiably bad attitude. It’s like Stack Overflow culture but with double the attitude and without the endgoal of useful and searchable results. Luckily I didn’t ever need to interact with the community beyond reading the Arch Wiki, but if I was forced to be around those people all the time I would have switched distros in a heartbeat.
Like the video says, I really disagree with the whole idea that Arch is “only for experienced users.” It’s an intermediate difficulty distro at worst, and it really feels like some Arch users have a misplaced sense of superiority for its perceived difficulty. The Arch forums feel like 8th graders picking on 5th graders in this regard. Even here yesterday, in a recent Lemmy thread someone was having an audio problem and someone just posted “before asking maybe check the archwiki” and dropped a link to an article that didn’t even mention the problem OP was having.
Sometimes things aren’t worded in a way that clicks for a certain user, or sometimes people don’t have the same experience in the same areas as you have had. Rewording solutions in different ways that people can later search and find is part of having a quality community. Maybe the OP did spend time scouring the internet for answers before posting their question, but because no one will answer any question that could technically be found somewhere else on the internet, they didn’t know how to phrase their search in order to find that specific post that you’re thinking of.
As I said, I literally just pretended that the Arch community didn’t exist when I was using Arch and I didn’t lose any sleep over it. Arch Linux is still an S-tier distro in my opinion, but not because of its community.
Any thoughts on which distro has the friendliest community?
I did search for this and saw OpenSUSE mentioned, but my first experience asking for help on their official forums was—well, let's say the responses felt thick with condescension.
That's fine. Maybe it's a European thing, or maybe a German thing. But, I asked about guidance in the official docs, and was basically told that "no one does it that way."
The distro itself it great though. I've been able to solve most other issues myself.
I haven’t personally noticed a bad attitude in any other community. The general Linux community is friendly enough, if your questions aren’t distro-specific.
I’m actually surprised that you had a bad experience with the OpenSUSE community - it’s one of my favorite distros, the leadership seems on the pulse, and it’s user-friendly to begin with. If nothing else I’d be surprised if they were toxic simply because they are probably overwhelmed with Linux newbies and they can’t curse them all out. Hopefully that was just a fluke - you probably want to avoid getting cornered by the people with 40k forum posts in any niche forum.
EndeavorOS ... these people are saints.
I think that's the successor to Antergos, if so that makes sense!