Why Are Arch Linux Users So TOXIC?

Why is YouTube clickbait so cringe?

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Why is YouTube so TOXIC?? 🤔

see? I did the clickbaity thing too

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- Where's the Mr. Beast 😲 face, Elon musk, 5 red circles and 30 red arrows + explosion?
  
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Imagine giving a shit about what strangers use on their own computers

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I would judge someone for using Uwuntu or hannah montana linux though

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- Also TempleOS
  
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So I'm an Arch user since 2013 and I don't think I'm toxic. I am not really offended by this post but a bit worried. Why this hate against Arch (users)? I use Arch, btw is a meme that may has some truth, but like every good meme it is exaggerated. Arch users may have some pride in tunning Arch but most of the time they're (in my expierence) helpful and inclusive. The OS itself fits right to my expectations: community driven, pragmatic, highly customizable. And I think the community is doing a lot for the overall Linux community with the Arch Wiki and for the Arch-based family with the AUR.

Edit: I didn't seek help in the Arch fotum myself but read some threads there. Haven't encountered any bm there.

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meh... I have met a few true arch a-holes, however the arch wiki is a supremely useful info repository, so I generally give them a pass for their particular form of brain damage and hope the do the same for mine. as long as the arch wiki remains available, its a net wash. :-)

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To be honest, a-holes are in every community. In about 30 years on internet I never find a community without some of them

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A missed opportunity to call them archoles.

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- damnit! how right you are.
  
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Yeah, even as a non-Arch user, often many of the issues in looking into still end up at an arch wiki or with some other arch user who has an issue that similar enough to put me on the right track

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The arch wiki is pretty on point for general information about specifics and can often translate across distros.

But like one of the OPs said, a lot of the folks tend to be a bit gate keepy/defensive or very much fanboys of specific distros.

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Cringe lmao

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I've made a few posts to arch forums and never faced issues.

Perhaps it helps that I work in enterprise tech support so I'm used to providing a lot of verbose info about a given issue I'm facing when requesting help. I also show what I've done in an attempt to resolve it.

Many of the so called toxic responses I've seen on there have been to posts that I would say don't follow rules or just give very minimal info.

Trilby is also one of the best responders on there but have had a few blunt responses from others.

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It's kind mind boggling how often you have to ask the OP to actually post the command they tried to run or the full error message and some of them will actually try to argue that it won't help. The people that frequent the forums start to get a bit annoyed at having to beg for bread crumbs and they eventually either become toxic or burn out and leave the community.

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Arch is the past, the future wars of toxicity will be fought over NixOS.

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@elouboub @BearPear I mean having a declarative system ist kind of nice, but with a Fedora Silverblue like system you have most of the advantages of Nix as well.

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- Doesn't allow you to mix old and bleeding edge software in the immutable layer, it's everything or nothing
  
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- Don't you have to restart the system every time you install stuff because the base system is read-only?
  
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- How can you replace GNOME with Hyprland? Is it easy? And what if I want packages that can only be compiled from source on Fedora? Say I want to use the Starship prompt and I decide on using bspwm with bsp-layout. These are already packaged on nixpkgs, so I just add them to my config, do a rebuild switch, (and possibly an update) and I just log into BSPWM, without the need to restart for any of that. Simple. And if I have a complex configuration, I can just save the files and do vc via git and gitlab, and it's happy days. Also, automatic generation creation and the abilify to roll back if something breaks. And because the config is written in a declarative language, it means you will be told of any errors when you rebuild, but in case any others appear, you can still roll back.
  
  Now all the Silverblue and Kinoite users will start talking about UBlue, and fair enough, you do get a lot of the advantages of NixOS with UBlue, but you don't get all reproducible packages, and you don't get the breadth of packages that you would get with NixOS. And it's a third-party non-native program. While the developer seems trustworthy, it still just creates more work.
  
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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.

Edit: If curious, I switched from Arch to Debian Stable solely because Arch's bleeding-edge design no longer fit my usecase. Debian Stable + Flatpaks is just a better fit for me at the moment. If I need a bleeding-edge distro again I will be right back on Arch.

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I've been avoiding linux groups in general for the last 20 years because every time I dip in (slashdot, digg, reddit) I wind up asking a legitimate question I get hammered by someone who thinks they are better than everyone else. My last instance was trying to set options in grub or from the console to change the default CLI resolution -- the post was taken over by a mod who didn't even seem to understand what I was asking, and spent his time answering every post by berating me for having the gall for connecting a monitor to a server, because "a real server would never have any kind of display device connected to it." I finally found out why I wasn't getting any replies from the people that had tried to help, someone told me later the mod must have shadow-banned me from the group. That person had logged in under their mod account and noticed all my unanswered replies in the post which they hadn't been able to see under a regular account.

The linux groups here on Lemmy are my first positive experience with any linux groups, and I really hope it stays that way.

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- Ok but that reddit mod (it was /r/Linux right ? ) was eventually booted for being an utter arse and I'm 98% sure he didnt run Arch (he had a foss purism thing going and iirc was on debian)
  
  I mean toxicity at reddit is why most of us are now on lemmy right ?
  
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I'm currently using Arch and doing the same thing. I learned more than a decade ago not to even bother with asking questions to the community at large. Bunch of self righteous dicks they are.

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- you seem nice though /s
  
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Any thoughts on which distro has the friendliest community?

I looked this up a few months ago when I was changing from Fedora to OpenSUSE.
OpenSUSE itself was mentioned as having a friendly community, which I thought was great since I was switching to it anyway.

But my first experience asking for help on their official forums was ehhh—I asked about some guidance I'd read in the official docs (basically a blurb that said FYI, you can do this another way), and was told, condescendingly, that "no one does it that way."

That's fine—the sarcastic or condescending tone I mean—maybe it's a European or a German thing that's rubbed off on its users.

The distro itself it great though. I've been able to solve most other issues myself.

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- Ubuntu or mint (which is just Ubuntu tbh) would be my guess.
  
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- EndeavourOS, Mint, Fedora. I was a part of EnOS forums for a year, these people are saints. Just say hello or make a help request and five different people will greet you.
  
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- 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.
  
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What are the arch forums?

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- https://bbs.archlinux.org/
  
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Same experience, but on the ubuntu forums more than a decade ago. Those people who can't get recognition IRL seek it online. It doesn't help that they socially awkward due to being ostracized IRL. So they have to spend a lot of time alone teaching themselves stuff / the hard way: through experience and by being belittled by other people who are a few years down the same experience.

They are just like Catholics: I had to suffer, so you do too. The lack of physical presence dehumanizes the interlocutor and makes it easier to be a dick and a compounding factor is one cannot punch somebody through a screen for being a twat.

The less fortunate discriminating against the even less fortunate because for once they have power. It's very human and as many things human, very detrimental.

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In the worst case, you go to a forum of Arch Linux or an Arch-based distro and

You are kindly told to do research. This happens if the problem is too simple or common ie. caused by a recent upgrade and affecting many people.
You are warned because you have been told to do something and you have replied without doing that.

If you get punished, more often than not it is deserved because the helpers don't want to waste their time if help requester doesn't cooperate. Meanwhile OP, are you the creator of the video?

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I'd disagree about that being the worst case scenario.

When I used to use Arch and asked a question on the Arch forum, they removed my post because they saw I was using Pamac so they assumed I was actually on Manjaro. They didn't ask me if I'm using Manjaro or anything, they just assumed I was and removed it.

I reposted the question and clarified that I was using Arch, but that got removed again due to it being a duplicate of a removed question.

I made a meta post about what I should be doing in order to not get my posts removed and that got removed as well, though I don't remember the reason they gave for that.

That was the last time I posted on the Arch forum and shortly after, I switched to Void Linux.

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- Sorry to hear that. Any sort of AUR helper, which includes Pamac, is not supported. If your question was related to Pamac, that may be why your post got removed. If you ever use Arch or a derivate again, try hitting EndeavourOS forums this time. They don't care which derivative you use as long as it isn't Manjaro. My points apply to present, I assume Arch became infamous when this was a more serious issue in the past.
  
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I am happy to help you with your experiment, toxic though it is.

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Regardless of the click-baiting generalization in the title (that's the YouTube game, folks) and the annoyed basement dwellers downvoting OP for it, there is some truth to it. Just like Stack Overflow community is similarly toxic.

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It’s not like any place on the internet is all that friendly once it grows more than a couple dozen people.

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- sure, yet some are more friendly than others despite the number of users. Hell, we can even see that in "sublemmies" here.
  
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I'm trying to figure out what demographic would be downvoting this to hell. Arch users getting triggered by a clickbait title? Arch haters trying to cope with a somewhat charitable take on arch users? Or are we all just downvoting for the meme?

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Nobody watched the video and the down arrow is there for when you disagree, simple as.

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- I don't understand why people assume everyone reads or watches the content.
  
  I can see how it's annoying... But it's more annoying seeing people complain about it because for some reason they can't possibly fathom that people post without reading/watching. They just seem like control freaks... It's the internet, not a private school or courtroom under oath.
  
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I downvote because he asked how many he can get. Otherwise, I'm neutral to it, as I'm not gonna watch a video in public rn.

Also, I use Arch btw

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Arch users getting triggered by a clickbait title

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