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Artix as a first distro

Thought I'd solicit advice from the experts here before I went and did something I might regret.  Various factors have convinced me to finally migrate to linux, and after reviewing the available distros, I decided I'd give Artix a try.  I didn't like what I read about the situation with systemd, and Artix seemed like the best option among distros foregoing it.  On the other hand, I'll be using this machine primarily for daily desktop use, I am not particularly concerned about server performance/maintenance/etc. 

To give some background, I'm a software developer and used to work on linux workstations at a previous job, but it's been almost a decade and I was only a user rather than admin of any kind.  So I have a passing familiarity with the operating system, and at least nonzero technical skills, but will be learning most of what I need from scratch. 

My thought was that I would begin by slowly working through a CLI install on a usb drive so that I could familiarize myself with all the commands, and the systems those commands interact with.  This way I could get a good feel for the architecture before committing to migrating permanently.  Unfortunately I have little concept of the scale of the task I'm setting for myself, and if it will take me many months of effort or more to get to the point where I can have any confidence in getting things running and keeping them running, I'm not sure if this is the right decision?  I guess my main fear is just having none of the expertise or experience to troubleshoot the problems I encounter and being unable to use my machine in the meantime if I completely break everything.

I know the FAQ says that new linux users will be fine in Artix if they just use a community edition, but I guess such a significant change made me want to seek a more nuanced set of opinions.  Also, I was thinking I would start with cinnamon as my DE, but I'm guessing I shouldn't go with one of the cinnamon iso's since it looked like anything which isn't a community iso contains considerably less prebuilt functionality.  What kind of stuff is built into the community versions that is missing from the base versions that makes it more friendly for new users?

Anyway, whatever advice you may have would be much appreciated.
Thanks!

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #1 –
Hello and welcome.

I'm not a developer, but I've been using GNU/Linux distributions since 2003.


I discovered Artix in 2017 and after testing Artix OpenRC + XFCE in a virtual machine, I installed it on all my PCs (sometimes dual-boot with MX-Linux) in 2019.

I've used different GUIs over the years, but I've stuck with XFCE since 2013.
XFCE is stable, relatively lightweight and easily configurable.
As I mainly do graphics, I use Dolphin as a file manager, because the thumbnail view offers options not available on Thunar.
To make my life easier, I install an XFCE OpenRC version and add a ton of additional applications in a single pacman command.

I use Artix repositories plus Chaotic-AUR (sometimes).
The few apps I didn't find on the system, world, and galaxy repositories, or on chaotic-aur, I installed using trizen or yay from the AUR repositories.

I use the LTS kernel which is more stable.
And since I don't play games, I only use Alsa for sound:
https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,4318.msg27848.html#msg27848

I rarely had serious problems:
Sometimes a package can't be updated because of a missing dependency, so I wait a bit and report it to the developers after a few days. But in general, this type of problem is quite rare and if it happens, it is corrected quickly (24 hours).

It may happen that we encounter problems with PGP signatures, especially if we take too long (a few months) to update the system.
But by following the instructions on the wiki, this problem is generally quickly resolved:
https://wiki.artixlinux.org/Main/Troubleshooting#Invalid_or_corrupted_packages_.28PGP_signature.29

P.S. My wife also uses Artix and enjoys this distribution.

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #2 –
Im no expert but have you any experience using virtual machines like virtualbox or vmware? Im assuming you are on a windows machine? Using a vm first to check out the distro would be my first step these days. Give the text based cli installation a try first, its a good way to learn about artix/arch. I also use xfce4, as tintin says, light weight and easy to configure, does the job and gets out of the way. Ive never had any issues with xfce4 except for the issues ive made for myself.

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #3 –
Yeah, I'm on windows right now.  I was debating spinning up a vm for it, but thought it might be better to just install a copy on a usb for troubleshooting purposes.  That way I could iron out hardware problems that might end up masked by a vm.  I'll probably try that some time this week and see how far I get.  My desire to research all the commands beforehand to try and understand the architecture might end up causing installation to take quite a while though...

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #4 –
Most of the Artix iso's are live iso's, so a good first step could be to put some you like the look of one by one onto a usb and see if they boot OK on your hardware, and try out a few different desktops like that. On your own install you would probably alter them from the standard config, rearrange the panel layout and general look , add or remove software and so forth, especially on a base install, but it would give you some idea what to expect. As you probably know USB stick's usually run slow, an external usb hard drive isn't so bad. Many of the iso's include gparted and you can easily create a few different partitions with that on an external drive to try out various installs. Don't worry (or be surprised) if your first attempts don't work out exactly as you planned. It's not so much that it's difficult, there are just many alternatives to try out before you decide on what you like best.

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #5 –
Well, after reading through the installation instructions and doing my best to understand what all was going on for all the commands, I decided to try out installing it to a usb.  Downloaded the openrc cinnamon iso, flashed it to a separate usb, and booted to it.

Everything seemed to work fine, and I decided I'd try out the gui installer first to see if I could learn anything about how it worked, but the installer actually failed.  grub-install threw an error for some reason, the installer said
"The installation command <pre>grub-install --target=x86_64 --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=Artix --force</pre> returned error code 1."
and the session log just said
"grub-install: error: efibootmgr: not found."
While I found the session log, I couldn't figure out if grub-install logs anything anywhere.  I did find a section on the arch wiki about installing to removable media, and that you have to use the --removable option when you invoke the installer, so maybe that's the problem?

There were also quite a number of other errors and warnings in the session log that seemed concerning, but since the install scripts deviate quite far from the basic installation instructions, I'm already not sure what all was happening yet.

It tried to "which" a handful of different packages which weren't found for some reason, dracut, and plymouth 3 different times.  It also failed to enable cupsd and lightdm for some reason, and gave "service enable call in chroot returned error code 1"

Seems like I probably already did something really dumb, or there's something up with me trying to put it on this usb stick.  The installation process took almost a couple hours which seemed extremely slow to me, but I guess that's just due to doing it over usb.  I'll probably just try doing it via vm next and see what happens, and if that goes through without issue maybe I'll try doing a manual install or just dual boot on my windows drive.  Figure I'll learn something if I just tinker with it long enough, lol.

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #6 –
I haven't tried the cinnamon iso, but I have successfully installed the xfce and lxqt isos to a usb stick using the Calamares gui installer. I have never had to add any special commands, as long as Calamares recognises the usb as an install location, it is very straightforward.

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #7 –
If you thought it was a problem with the iso you could try another Cinnamon iso, there are "weekly" and "stable" versions, or if that doesn't help try another desktop iso, you can always install Cinnamon later and uninstall the other desktop. Sounds like you are making progress anyway.

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #8 –
Quote from: rayburn – on
I haven't tried the cinnamon iso, but I have successfully installed the xfce and lxqt isos to a usb stick using the Calamares gui installer. I have never had to add any special commands, as long as Calamares recognises the usb as an install location, it is very straightforward.

Huh, weird, maybe the usb was misbehaving somehow then. Wonder what went wrong, it was definitely installing to the correct location. The stick started out unformatted and Calamares partitioned the stick into boot sector/main volume and installed most of the packages.

I experimented installing to a VM last night and had more success. Calamares didn't seem to run into any of the numerous errors that resulted from trying on the usb stick, but I was somewhat surprised that the cinnamon iso didn't install cinnamon. Is it normal to also have to install man-db/man-pages? I knew the non-community iso's were pretty barebones, but I didn't expect no man pages, lol.  That was my first adventure in learning pacman was figuring how to install man. Next I tried installing lightdm before realizing sddm was already installed, which taught me how to uninstall packages. Now I have to figure out the process to register cinnamon with openrc.
 

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #9 –
Quote from: ArtificerProdigy – on
but I was somewhat surprised that the cinnamon iso didn't install cinnamon. Is it normal to also have to install man-db/man-pages?
The weekly iso's now offer the choice between 'Online' & 'Offline' installation. (Or at least the last one I used did)
This seem like odd nomenclature as 'Offline' acts like a standard iso install whereas  'Online' allows, maybe requires, advanced customisation of the packages to be installed.
I don't know a lot about this. I just noticed it recently installing to a VM to test something.
So from what you have written I suspect you chose 'Online'. If I'm right try again with 'Offline'.

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #10 –
Quote from: gripped – on
The weekly iso's now offer the choice between 'Online' & 'Offline' installation. (Or at least the last one I used did)
This seem like odd nomenclature as 'Offline' acts like a standard iso install whereas  'Online' allows, maybe requires, advanced customisation of the packages to be installed.
I don't know a lot about this. I just noticed it recently installing to a VM to test something.
So from what you have written I suspect you chose 'Online'. If I'm right try again with 'Offline'.

Huh, interesting.  Yes, I definitely chose the online option.  Just kinda assumed that if I had a connection, online would be preferable so it could pull down the latest packages.  Let me try reinstalling using offline instead real fast.

As a side note, it looked like cinnamon didn't come with an init script, which meant I couldn't register it with openrc.  I also didn't see an openrc version of the cinnamon package available.  I assume people don't spend the time to write their own init scripts like 99% of the time, so I'm guessing I missed something obvious.

Edit:
Yup, looks like offline is a more comprehensive install.  Booted right into the DE after install this time.  Looks like I was being an idiot with regards to cinnamon, I guess the DM is the service, whereas the DE is not one.  Might try using the offline install on the usb stick also, see if it has any better luck.

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #11 –
Quote from: ArtificerProdigy – on
Just kinda assumed that if I had a connection, online would be preferable so it could pull down the latest packages.
I think it's a fair assumption.
'Online' & 'Offline' doesn't well, or at least fully, give a clue to the difference. Not to me anyway.

Re: Artix as a first distro

Reply #12 –
Hmm, well, when my VM install went fine, I decided to go ahead and dual boot for a bit to finish testing.  Managed to work through the various issues I had until I got to a pretty thorny one:

I'm following the arch wiki instructions to try and get my nvidia drivers working, and while I did manage to get the kernel to stop loading nouveau, the nvidia module never seems to show up in the modules list.  I'm running the regular kernel, and my card is a 3070ti, so it should just require the standard drivers as far as I can tell. The packages I installed are nvidia, nvidia-utils, lib32-nvidia-utils, and nvidia-settings.  Removed kms from the hooks array, ran mkinitcpio -P, and I thought that was sufficient to get the drivers installed.  From what I was reading nvidia-utils is supposed to blacklist the nouveau module, but when I rebooted it was still trying to run nouveau as the driver, and my x didn't boot. 

Dug around for a while before deciding to just reinstall the OS and try again in case I missed anything.  This time I also tried adding nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to the kernel module parameters, and I think that was responsible for preventing nouveau from loading, but now I just don't have a display driver instead.  I feel like I'm missing something fundamental about how modules interact with the packages fetching, but haven't been able to find anything helpful online to explain what I'm seeing.  lspci shows my card, but doesn't list nvidia as an available module.  I looked around in the modules directory and saw a bunch of nvidia stuff, but don't know enough to figure out what should or shouldn't be there.  I did see a modules directory for a kernel version number a couple higher than my kernel though, which had like 5 nvidia modules in it, which I thought might be the problem?  I have no idea at this point. 

If anybody has some idea of what dumb thing I did, it would be much appreciated.  Since my display driver is missing I'd have a hard time posting logs, though for logs with small enough relevant output, I could just copy it manually.  I could also just start from scratch again if necessary.

Edit:
Uhh, yeah, nevermind, I'm just an idiot.  Updated all my packages and it booted back up fine.  Can't believe I wasted so much time on this, lol.