Where Did Arch Linux Come From?

[@ActionRetro]

💾 Support these retro computing shenanigans on Patreon! www.patreon.com/ActionRetro

[@truxttondogyuun]

damn, you really need that revenue to buy your garbage Apple products huh?

[@samuelbanya]

Probably for better camera equipment and other stuff. I guarantee you he at least has a lighting setup as well. His attempt has been made, but I don't see any on your end to compete?

[@Likenow1245]

Don't waste your money on patreon!

[@paulluce2557]

The Nerdiverse needs an Action Retro and Cathode Ray Dude Collaboration....

[@csteelecrs]

Since Arch is a rolling release, I would like to see if it can be updated from 0.1 to the current release.

[@ActionRetro]

genius idea

[@zoomosis]

Unfortunately Arch dropped 32-bit x86 support a few years ago, but it might still be possible to upgrade it to a more recent version.

[@LouiesWorkshop]

@@ActionRetro You gotta do it!

[@csteelecrs]

@@zoomosis but is it possible to install 0.1 on 64 bit hardware and update it?

[@zoomosis]

@@csteelecrs I don't think you can easily install 64-bit Arch over the top of an existing 32-bit installation.

[@SockyNoob]

The Arch wiki is beyond useful for just Arch itself. It's the go-to wiki for pretty much any distro in general since a lot of stuff is identical to other distros.

[@AaronOfMpls]

Indeed, I'm on Manjaro myself (which is Arch-based). As useful as Manjaro's own wiki is, I do find documentation on the Arch wiki too.

[@OhhCrapGuy]

I'm on Debian Testing at the moment, and my go-to is still the Arch Wiki.

[@astroid99]

I love i for everything other than its system d related help, as I use runit. I often need to go down a rabbit hole just to do what would be a single line on systemd

[@AgentBurgers]

Man anytime I need help with arch stuff I just use chat gpt and it's come through fr me so much

[@deudz]

dont forget gentoos wiki

[@TurntableTV]

I use Arch version 0.1 btw!

[@milkywaydotmoe]

running sudo pacman -Syu on your system rn

[@oguzhan001]

@@milkywaydotmoe I invoke Punisher's no no no no.

[@theworstredstoner0950]

I don’t care.

[@Wigwamwham]

Lying for no reason is weird

[@jomargamerbrgameplaymunecraftT]

​@@Wigwamwham but its true tho

[@joe-skeen]

14:10 "I'm not really a computer guy" 😂

[@codg808]

Proceeds to install an entire OS and GUI from 2002.

[@squidjam]

Am I glad Arch exists? Yes, it saved my 2017 mac from obsolescence. Do I think it's a friendly distribution? No. You can do wonders with it, but most of it is non-trivial to the majority of computer users.

[@michaelheimbrand5424]

2017? My 2010 iMac runs OpenBSD (x2, the wife has the same setup), my 2012 runs Ubuntu Studio and the TV-Mac Mini 2012 is running Debian. Last but not least, my PowerBook G4 is on OpenBSD. Your 2017 has a bright future I think. ;) BSD & Linux Macs FTW!

[@samuelleandro2275]

As a Mint user, I love Mint because it comes with everything I need. And as someone who uses Arch on my secondary laptop, I love Arch because it comes with absolutely nothing. Meaning I can keep it as lightweight as I want it to. Thats the wonder of Linux, two completely different distros can perfectly serve the same person.

[@OhhCrapGuy]

I don't think anyone would call it a friendly distribution, I'd even go so far as to say that "friendly" implies "make decisions for the user so they don't have to understand the system configuration", and by that definition, being "unfriendly" is precisely the thing that sets it apart from almost ever other popular distributions.

[@sweepingmotion]

Fellow 2017 mac linux user here. Running void cause wanted to try something new. Too bad sound card drivers are a pain for my particular machine

[@cateatingbread]

2017 obsolete? My MBP from that year runs Sonoma really well too. Linux flies on the thing, but mine has a touchbar and that sucks for getting it to work.

[@thecrow3461]

Installing arch in 2002 was a lot easier than installing debian in 1998, that's for sure.

[@raven4k998]

Login as Root

[@Sayakas_Digital_Attic]

Fantastic episode! It's incredible to see how Arch Linux started with such a rudimentary installation in 2002 and grew into one of the most beloved distributions. I agree that its reputation for being "not for beginners" is often exaggerated, the wiki and installation guide are phenomenal resources for learning!

[@Myo-jf7jx]

The start of "I use arch BTW" - Sent from my Arch machine [KEKW]

[@woldemunster9244]

N007-K3K!

[@CS_Mango]

I used Arch by the way. Now I'm on EndeavorOS because it's background looks pretty.

[@Myo-jf7jx]

@@CS_Mango That's neat, I still use straight up arch with the Zen kernel, works well for me and I made my own background, very proud of how it turned out owO

[@deudz]

of course the furry uses arch

[@Myo-jf7jx]

@@deudz Of course I use Arch, I'm a furry AND trans, it was meant to be

[@yorgle]

At 11:00 when your term goes into an alternate character set, try typing “reset” in the shell. It might reset your termcap. :)

[@zoomosis]

Yeah, "reset" usually works if the console/shell gets garbled. Another alternative is to switch to another virtual console with Alt+Fx, as seen earlier in the video.

[@yorgle]

@@zoomosis I’m not familiar with that key combo… I’m usually not directly on the console. Great suggestion tho! I’ll have to remember that for when I need it. Thanks!

[@piked86]

​@@yorglethe function keys + alt also works with a GUI open. Useful if your DE crashes.

[@Yotanido]

@@piked86 If you have X open, you need to use ctrl+alt+F* instead of just alt and an F key.

[@giphit]

@@piked86 when the DE is open it's ctrl + alt + function key. probably cause with DEs, there's usually stuff like opening krunner (alt + f2) or closing a window (alt + f4)

[@shadeofentropy]

I am a recent Linux convert, as recent as this weekend just gone. Absolutely loving it so far, even went with Arch as Windows-baby's first distro.

[@opposite342]

14:50 I saw enlightenment! That's a pretty cool WM. I think you should definitely try getting that running

[@seanys]

This is giving me PTSD styled flashbacks from the first PC I ever owned and couldn’t afford Windows. All I had was Slackware 3 on a CD that came with a book I bought. Coming from Amiga, that was some serious culture shock.

[@Leofwine]

My sympathies.

[@parastie]

LoL. I am right there with you. I installed Redhat from a Linux for Dummies book way back in the late 90's. That was fun!

[@ajsnz]

I first installed Slackware in 1993 but I didn't stick with it. I was downloading the install floppy images at University and I couldn't afford enough floppies for the X disk set so I never had a GUI. I tried it again in 1996 installing from a Walnut Creek CDROM from work. The install went fine but I wanted a newer kernel. Trying to compile the new 2.0.x kernel was when I found out I had to update GCC first. I think I gave up on that install and got work to order a newer CD.

[@minty_Joe]

This was one of the reasons I delayed the jump right into Linux. I figured the developers needed more time to simplify things. Btw, I like your avatar, @seanys.

[@alpzepta]

The thumbnail really kinda remind me of a 90s Amiga Workbench. I love Amiga to death wish it exist today

[@FrankKumro]

Would love to see more early Linux installs! How about Slackware next?

[@SpeccyMan]

Definitely. Slackware was my distro of choice back in the day.

[@GigaWhatt0]

Hell, install current Slackware. It's still fairly similar. That distro still does everything the old way.

[@emuhill]

@@GigaWhatt0 Well almost. The only difference is that you are not doing it with 3.5" floppy disks any more.

[@rmcdudmk212]

So glad Action Retro is keeping the tradition of Weird OS Wednesdays alive. ❤️ 😂

[@SixOThree]

As is tradition.

[@BilisNegra]

Remember when it all started? Ah, them good ole days...

[@DevynCairns]

When bad data corrupts your terminal, you can just run the `reset` command. It sends a bunch of stuff to your terminal to try to turn off anything that might have been turned on and reset it to a good state

[@jongeduard]

Yes, but are you sure that it was available back then in that old version?

[@mikechappell4156]

@@jongeduard reset has been around. It is possible to screw up an xterm so bad that reset doesn't fix it though.

[@GamingWithUncleJon]

​@@jongeduardsince i was using Red Hat back then... I am sure it was.

[@maikeru6158]

Gentoo next?

[@Jossandoval]

Only if he compiles all of it in real time on one of those single-core G3 PowerPC

[@samuel-rodriguez_]

​@@Jossandovalworld first 86799 petabytes video

[@DienerNoUta]

or void

[@nickwallette6201]

Yeah, as someone who has used Gentoo (btw) from about the same year as this .... Arch is supposed to be hard-mode? What, does Ubuntu not even make you compile the kernel or something? LOL-snort.

[@kumarp3074]

@@Jossandoval Just think on how optimized it will be!

[@a1batross_]

11:05 when your terminal gets broken like that, `stty sane` usually helps. It saved me a lot of time and I didn't knew about it for years, so I hope this information will be useful. :)

[@binarydinosaurs]

Saved me a lot of grief back in Ultrix32 days on DEC MIPS.

[@kerbolax]

'reset' also works

[@shadowj5639]

Picking the IBM Deathstar 40 gig out of all those other drives was certainly a choice...

[@SirWobbyTheFirst]

"I don't like reiserfs" - Someone's hankerin' for a murderin'.

[@srazash]

i'll be honest, when you said "the original version of arch linux" i was not expecting to hear the year 2002

[@horacegentleman3296]

Wait until you find out about slack

[@SeishukuS12]

👍 FYI, when the CLI gets messed up like that, just type "reset" and hit enter, it'll reset the terminal and fix that corruption.

[@BobSockTwo]

14:08 - "I'm not really a computer guy" *installs Arch*

[@deudz]

its not hard as long as you follow the manual

[@BobSockTwo]

@@deudz Sure, Megamind

[@M1szS]

@@BobSockTwo you can literally just use archinstall, which does everything for you, you just need to choose the options you want

[@renatoriolino]

Nice video!!! Btw, at 9:04 (when editing fstab) I think it should be /dev/diskds/disc0/part2 for rootfs, since part1 was your swap. Too bad you didn't tried englightenment... it was my favorite wm at that time.

[@ssokolow]

Very nostalgic. That was around the time I switched to Gentoo Linux after spending a year or two on Mandrakelinux as the first distro I daily-drove. I didn't realize LILO had an option for a menu though.

[@nickwallette6201]

Me either. Been grub since day one, though. (Also Gentoo, also beginning from about 2002.)

[@mikechappell4156]

I thought LILO was easier to configure than grub. I had a pretty nice setup with multi-booting DOS, 98SE, Win2K, FreeBSD and Linux. I still don't know my way around grub/grub2.

[@MonsterMovieTV]

To answer a question from the previous episode. I also have a plastic container with old IDE hard drives in it.

[@2xtreem4u]

Oooh IBM Deathstar !

[@colinstu]

Old Gentoo / Slackware installs next. Also dig into Enlightenment maybe? the OG eyecandy DE/WM.

[@mgoddard23]

Seeing Enlightenment screenshots in whatever Linux for Dummies book I was flipping through in Barnes and Noble in like 1999 or 2000 was what got me to set up my first Linux install. I don’t remember if the first one was Slackware or not but that’s what I ended up using up until like 2005 or so.

[@domoncar6782]

Old Gentoo on Sun Sparcs for hard mode. For the nightmare mode, get X running on them.

[@sockterrier]

@@domoncar6782 man do i wish i kept my dual 66mhz/1mb cache sparc pizzabox i had back in 2002. a 5 iirc, and i think i ran whatever version of netbsd was current then on it.

[@SolaFideSolusChristus]

really showed your chops here im impressed with how smoothly this went.

[@northof-62]

I just got Serpent OS working on my Thinkpad. It's been in the works for some two years now by the creator of Solus Linux. Apart from only having Gnome atm. and only supports US, UK kbd. it runs pretty quick and surprisingly stable , (pre alpha). Thx for sharing your retro experiences. You're always so bright and cheerful and fun to watch.

[@terminalterminus]

Makes me homesick for the original Gentoo...

[@fredjones100]

Still got my Gentoo 1.4 cd somewhere (and still running Gentoo AND Windowmaker on my main PC!)

[@TatsuZZmage]

I ran it on a ppc g3 red imac you had to stage 2 install it

[@darknetcs]

Huh, I was thinking that it will be more complicated, but it was quite straightforward. Having a walkthrough was definitely helpful

[@BrodieChree]

Action Retro: I don't like ReiserFS Narrator: Hans Reiser is a convicted murderer.

[@nickwallette6201]

Does using the driver mean you have to be friends with him? ;-)

[@BrodieChree]

@@nickwallette6201 It’s also currently deprecated Reiser4 is it in 2024

[@nickwallette6201]

@@BrodieChree Well that's a fair point, then.

[@ModusOperandi]

It's a real "better known for other work" moment

[@TheDemocrab]

@@nickwallette6201 No it doesn't, but the funding for maintenance dried up after the conviction leaving only a handful of dedicated volunteers which has very real implications when it comes to usability and stability.

[@lucolesco]

Crazy to see how Firefox had sidebar tabs support, but it doesn't nowadays.

[@larrythemagicdragon58]

I know there are a lot of "I use arch BTW" jokes, but I'm a longtime viewer of the channel, and I actually use arch as my daily driver. It feels like this video was made for me. I haven't watched it yet, but my week has been pretty shitty, and seeing this in mt feed feels like an act of providence

[@martijnvds]

How do you know someone is an Arch user? Don't worry they'll tell you.

[@larrythemagicdragon58]

@@martijnvds I was only saying that to tell that this video is relevant to me specifically. If this wasn't about arch Linux that'd be fair, but I'm literally the core demographic this video appeals to, I'm a long time viewer of the channel, and I use arch Linux on my personal computer. I know "funny ha ha he uses arch btw" but in this case that seems quite out of place and unreasonable to even mention

[@Nikolai508]

@@martijnvdsI started using arch a year ago and I just can’t explain it, there is a truly inexplicable need to tell people that I use Arch, there must be subliminal mind control phrases in the install guide to make us proselytise it.

[@SetOfAllSets]

I use Gentoo btw

[@george1717]

I kinda use arch btw

[@prozacchiwawa]

A handy thing to know about vt100 terminals (linux' console emulates it). The reset escape sequence is ^[c which you can emit to the terminal by running cat in a pinch. It resets almost all parameters of most vt100 emulators so the font at least will return to ascii.

[@PRKLGaming]

The upbeat jazz is a really nice touch! Fits the video quite well

[@VitorMadeira]

Fantastic video and also, a small UNIX lesson in any way. I loved it. Greetings from Portugal.

[@deltara2106]

As an Arch user myself I am VERY happy to see this! I'm most accustomed to Arch and it will be my distro of choice for years to come.

[@mikescholz6429]

When a kernel and a package manager really love each other…

[@AnonyDave]

2002 wmaker is such a flashback for me, I used it for a couple years around that era. Was hard to beat then

[@sryx]

You should try the Enlightenment window manager. It was a glorious late 90's early 2000's Linux experience :)

[@DavidHuffTexas]

Wow, what a blast from the past! My first Linux install was RedHat 5.something on an old AST 486 machine, using a stack of 3.5" floppies at my old job at Texas Instruments. Formatting hard drives, configuring LILO, editing Xfree86 configs,...fun times. I actually ran wmaker for quite a while, along with the xmh mail client.

[@75slaine]

Nice trip down memory lane, thanks Sean. It was a great time for Linux back then.

[@RarefiedError]

Can't wait to see him try Redox OS

[@pjmq]

hahaha holy crap this was a blast from the past. Hours spent in my school dorm trying to figure out why my mouse input wasn't working, why my drives wouldn't mount etc. The dark ages but fun times to be sure. Wild to me that the first Ubuntu came out what, like 2 years after this did? A fantastic time to get into Linux.

[@treighpedroche1516]

Best video yet! Slackware 1.0 on real hardware next??

[@59withqsb12]

Sooo interesting to see these early versions, shows how far we've come. Thanks Sean!

[@Contmotore]

That was very interesting to watch! My first Linux distro was Debian with WindowMaker, but nowadays I run Arch, btw.

[@CheshireNoir]

What a lovely PowerMate. I used to wokr for NEC just before these were released.

[@hblaub]

I installed core Arch Linux the very first time, because my single board computer from Odroid had an old kernel, while someone in the Arch community had compiled the newest one, including the newest software of course. It was a bit more involved than any other Linux I had installed (creating partitions, filesystems, everything manually), but it was worth it. Oh and their Wiki is maybe the best resource for anything. I even found some Pulseaudio problem which I had on Ubuntu.

[@michaelpiotrowicz6100]

Glorious stuff. Great watching you do it

[@LordHonkInc]

I think installing linux "by hand" is something everybody should try at least once (in a VM like VirtualBox if you want to just scrap things quickly if/when you mess up) because it's pretty much the same regardless of distro (yes, you can install even Ubuntu without the installation wizard) and getting familiar with things like partition layout and chroot is a great skill to have if you ever need to troubleshoot a system that isn't booting correctly. Also, it's fun and gives you that "yeah, I did the thing" feeling when you finally manage to get things running, if you're the kind of person to get a kick out of that sort of thing. I totally understand that there's people who just want to work _at_ their computer and not _on_ it, and that's fine. But if you're interested in the part that comes between turning your PC on and opening youtube in your browser, it's definitely an interesting and educative way to spend an otherwise boring afternoon or two.

[@WIImotionmasher]

I've been avoiding Arch but your recommendation here is making me consider it. I have used an Arch-based distro in Garuda. But I figured Arch would be annoying.

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

Shaka, when the Archs fell...

[@paultapping9510]

Temba, his arms wide

[@costelinha1867]

I UNDERSTOOD..... I understood the reference....

[@WIImotionmasher]

I just watched this episode for the first time on Netflix lol

[@AndrewKeifer]

My first pc was an IBM 8088 with 512k of RAM, two 5.25" Floppy drives, no hard drive and a 4 color monitor with a CGA graphics card. I can't be certain, but my first operating system was either DOS 1.2 or 2.1. I played games like Azure Bonds and Falcon 2.0 (I bought a CH Products serial port joystick). Back then, I would surf bulletin board sites on my dad's computer using his 1200 baud modem. My primary download protocol was xmodem. My dad's computer had a monochrome monitor and I wanted to see if I could run my color monitor on his computer (his Epson Equity 1 was superior to mine in processing power, plus it had a hard drive). So I left all the cables connected and took the case cover off of both computers. Then I swapped out the graphics cards and monitors. It worked like a charm! Thereafter I became a hard core computer nerd.... wait, no, actually I didn't, but I did enjoy computers as a hobby and have built several of my own over the years.

[@binarydinosaurs]

Aside from Tim's Window Manager, you've reminded me of the other favourite window manager of mine back in the 90s - fvwm. Typing that makes me feel SO OLD.

[@postiemania]

After 4 attempts to install Arch I finally got my install working. The first attempt caused me to bail out as I decided I needed to do some reading. I started again with the second attempt being finished by a mains power blackout. The third attempt I installed every thing except the Display manager, by this time I was getting familiar with the process and proceeded to do the fourth and final install. It works as intended and I am using Libre wolf as my browser now.

[@netkrash]

oh wow this takes me back, I dropped Slackware in favor of Arch around that era because I wanted to try the newly released gnome 2 :) I remember doing that same install!

[@danl2073]

Great video. I recall installing Redhat way back in the 90's on my Pentium 2. Loved the BEos video as well.

[@caoimhechaos1093]

Nice video idea! Also, running X and a browser as root 😱

[@JohnPorter4096]

I love the choice of Music in your video.

[@jakubpolomsky]

An arch user here! (Backed by retro windows, apple, commodore and atari machines)

[@TomZelickman]

I'm suddenly missing the fvwm desktop... That was fun to watch!

[@YaroKasear]

For reference, when your terminal gets messed up like that after catting a binary, you don't have to reboot, just use the "reset" command.

[@annieworroll4373]

Arch is interesting and the documentation is absolutely amazing. I've used their docs to figure out problems with Ubuntu and Debian that weren't documented well over here. I've installed it on a VM, it was easier than getting Red Hat 5.2 working though part of that was my graphics card being all sorts of pain.

[@misterjeffa2128]

love the psu brand being hipro. i had hipro branded chocolate mousse today. unrelated of course. but very random

[@TechnologyNToys]

I like your funny words, magic man

[@Plagueheart]

11:38 brings back nostalgia. I haven't had to peek into the system in years to get chipset

[@szr8]

5:35 Kind of weird that it uses "disc" instead of "disk" to refer to an HDD. As a long time Linux user, I also forgot that there were distros that didn't use /dev/hda, /dev/sda, and similar format.

[@LaurentCourtin]

Canadian spelling?

[@lordofenron]

This is pretty cool. Great weekend project :) Thanks!

[@airwolf1337]

6 Months ago, i installed Arch on my Lenovo T500, because i have a steamdeck (which uses arch). it was painful, but now, i learned a lot on partition tools and mount points under linux. Nice to see the roots of this os. BTW my first pc was a P2 233 with a ATi Xpert@work, which had a ATi Rage Pro Chip. Later i paired it with a voodoo 2 8mb from diamond.

[@r.g.c.3897]

I used Arch for a couple years around 2005-2008, not sure exactly as that was a while back. I really liked it at the time but at the time one of their big things was they didn't patch software you got it in its "vanilla" form or as the developers of the software released it. That was really cool until something broke the system and you had to use a crippled OS until the software was fixed by the original developers. It didn't happen often and I'd say in 2 years it only happened twice so it wasn't a chronic issue.

[@TimStCroix]

In Bash, if you want to cd into a directory you just created you can us '#cd [ALT+.]' (ALT + dot {period}) ALT+. recalls the last parameter of the previous command. Repeating ALT+. goes up in history recalling last parameters of even more previous commands. This feature of Readline's EMACS mode is the only reason I don't switch to it's VI mode. I use it constantly for many purposes, not just the example I just gave you. I've trained my left thumb to tuck under my palm to hit the ALT key in order to keep my fingers on the home keys. It's now a finger macro for me.

[@JoshLiechty]

This takes me back to the days of trying to compile Gentoo on my then-current AMD K6-2. These days I daily drive Fedora atomic desktops, but you're making me want to dig out an old PC and try an Arch install (BTW)

[@Derpingtonshere]

By gawd that thing is beautiful! Brings a Arch Linux Version 0.1 tear to my eyes. I use arch btw.

[@jose.inestroza]

Great content!

[@Zarkovision]

That reminds me on my first steps in Linux with Slackware in the mid 1990s... In 2002 I think I was using SuSE Linux, which was very user-friendly with installation tools like Yast and KDE 1.0 as GUI... Two years later I was using Debian (and Morphos 1.4x) on a Pegasos 2, which was an exotic, but phantastic machine. Today I've installed Icaros on an old Intel Atom based PC. Runs very good on this old and slow hardware.

[@JeffTiberend]

Been cool if you could have run enlightenment as a desktop environment. I always thought that it was pretty cool. Love your videos. I hope I can meet you one day a VCF gathering in the future!

[@iO-Sci]

I don't have a clue when it launched in 2002 b/c I don't have any memories but despite this Linux computer O.S. looks serene and explored nostalgia.

[@momentomoridoth2007]

i have been using linux for 20 years now. Arch is not hard. you just have to be curious enough to google things when something breaks. The documentation is outstanding.

[@quinks]

Yes, you could reboot after your terminal starts displaying garbage... or you can use the 'reset' command. Or you can be creative and realise that your terminal got messed up because some semi-random output contained some ANSI instruction or whatnot to mess it up in the first place and instead of going about it the right way, you can just do the same thing to get it back. 'cat /dev/urandom' is what I immediately thought of when it first happened to me, followed by a Ctrl-C. Possibly run it two or three times if it didn't work. Worked well enough for me to have become my habit for about two decades now.

[@0xTJ]

Arch has been my choice on both my laptop and desktop for the last 5-6 years! I definitely don't think it deserves its "hard" reputation. The documentation is so good that it's often the best place to go for problems that aren't about Arch. I've also never experienced any issues with updates breaking your system. Having needed to use Ubuntu (which was my first full-time Linux distro) in a VM recently, I found it a bit painful. I'd almost rather have installed and set up Windows 10.

[@johnruschmeyer5769]

Impressive video. I'm amazed that you managed to find a still-working IBM DeskStar (a.k.a. DeathStar) 40GB. As for window managers, I would imagine that the big alternative to twm was probably fvwm.

[@Mantikal]

Tons of people will not take it upon themselves to do a raw Windows install. They would rather just buy the next device put on the market for them (the companies just love them). Opening up a device or taking the bull by the horns when it comes to an OS is either too scary for them or too boring. They'd rather do something they consider to be more fun. Then there's the people who will take it upon themselves to do a Windows install. They think they're being "techie" by being able to go into a devices BIOS and change a few settings and seeing that the Windows installer options are not greyed out and then just hitting the install button, sitting back and letting the program do all the work and decision making for them and finally rebooting. For those people who are used to the installer doing all the work and thinking for them - oh, hell yeah - doing an Arch install is extremely hard!!!! I know first hand. I was one of them. It was overwhelming for me many years back. My reaction then "WTF is all this shit and why are they making me do this?!!! Arch was forcing me to do something that I was not used to with an install process - THINK!!! (what companies don't like consumers doing)

[@PearComputingDevices]

Notice the huge daughter board within that computer? It's called an NLX platform. Companies like NEC and Gateway used them in the late 90's, it was in many ways a major upgrade to the LX platform that systems used prior that allowed things like AGP video cards and Pentium II cpus. Something the LX platform and it's layout wouldn't allow because of lack of space and cooling. Personally I loved the NLX platform, it was supposed to provide cheap motherboard upgrades to cut down on E waste and if more manufacturers got on board it probably could have. We made a deal with Gateway years ago to develop a BeOS based computer on this platform. On paper it was a great idea. Our small company shared some of the development cost and got a ready made system. All we had to do was deploy our custom image to it and sell and we did for a short time. Too short to be honest.

[@CommodoreFan64]

the beginning of a truly great distro, but having said that I'm so thankful these days we have things like Manjaro that makes using Arch to a much wider user base who would not have the patience for an install like this.

[@potcleanx7693]

Arch is so easy this days

[@jongeduard]

Really fascinating how much similarities there are. Of course there are some differences, but it's all in the details. Alright you had to build the kernel manually. And you needed to do a lot more hardware configuration especially to get the X Window stuff fully working, but the idea is generally the same on many aspects. I am also not surprised about missing dependency management in a 0.1 version of something. Watching this video on Arch btw. :)

[@temetka]

I also use Arch btw. I loved the "linux from the void" line.

[@another3997]

That is the stuff of nightmares! I moved from 8 bit Sinclair and Atari machines onto the Amiga 1200. When I got a PC, a mid range 486DX2/66, I thought using DOS and Windows 3.1x was a big step backwards. I got to know DOS pretty well, but never liked it. Then I tried some kind of Linux... and suddenly DOS 6.22 seemed user friendly. By then, Windows 2K and XP were out, and highlighted everything wrong with Linux. Even today, whilst much better than back then, the Linux world is still a mess. I wonder why Linux didn't win the desktop OS wars? 😂

[@realKushy17]

Very interesting video! Love seeing it! MORE ARCH videos! BTW, (you already know...)

[@Lazaralis]

wow i completly forgot about the whole cat the mouse to glitch your terminal font bug. good nostalgia here!

[@starlingmelody4284]

i just installed arch for the first time the other day and i've been loving it so far! unfortunately it's on an old desktop with no wireless card, and i have no other desktops to mount the internal drives in, and i don't have home internet since we just moved.... the solution (that somehow worked?) was to boot off the arch USB on my laptop connected to my phone hotspot, connect it by ethernet to the desktop, and mount the drive i was installing on over sshfs to my laptop. couple hiccups but overall worked really well it is kinda interesting how similar the install process is from your video. although the biggest difference i appreciate, given the process i went thru, is how functional is used to be to install without an internet connection. i kinda get that internet is more widely available nowadays, but there's definitely a fair share of edge cases and exceptions and i wish more linux installations didn't assume by default that you have a stable internet connection off the bat has been wonderful though! it's an older desktop (intel core 2 duo i think? and 2GB RAM) that choked on my debian 12 USB, and i only wanted to use it as a home server anyway so i really wanted something minimal and without a desktop environment

[@KangJangkrik]

FYI: if ur terminal messed up, just use "reset" command instead of reboot

[@50-50_Grind]

Very impressive! Subscribed.

[@doockis]

That spot on the left side of the wall is killing me...

[@postnick]

I'm a fan of the ARCHINSTALL script that comes on arch now days.

[@mgoddard23]

As much as I don’t miss having to manually configure XFree86, OSS sound, and compile the kernel (and reconfigure and recompile), there was a sense of accomplishment you got after getting it and everything else on your system working that’s missing from modern distros.

[@DanaDoesStuff]

ahh, good ol' Weird OS Wednesday... why, I remember that time back in the day when this series started, with a fun little jaunt into the world of Arch Linux on an old Pentium II...

[@miasma82]

My first linux distro was red hat. I remember the pain and sweat to get x to work

[@mgoddard23]

And sound. And networking.

[@asimplenameichose151]

Similarly here ... RedHat and Debian, first as servers, then as DEs - what a long way all this has come

[@ne0ne0]

Yes, same here! RH 4.2.

[@joelg6740]

Red hat 9 was my first daily driven linux install back in '03 at 10 years old. While Debian 3 ran my file server. Then in '04 when Ubuntu and CentOS were released I had them on other machines to learn. But also played with PClinux, Suse, Fedora, Gentoo, DSL, Arch, Puppy, Mint and many others