• Oh man, yeah I’ve been there with the arch networking issues. To be fair, I do think you sign up for some messing around when you decide to install arch, although it wouldn’t hurt to make networking a bit easier. Troubleshooting on windows isn’t very fun either, although you might not need to do it as often.

    While it might be true that a lot of people are scared away by linux weirdness (or not, for all I know picking a beginner friendly distro and not doing anything weird might be a pretty decent experience, I’ve been using arch and doing weird stuff the past couple of years), most people don’t even get far enough to install linux in the first place so the selection happens before that. Part of it is probably software compatibility, part of it might be that most people advocating linux are techy people who mostly talk about the techy reasons for why you should get linux, which aren’t that appealing. Part of it could just be that people are resistant to change because it’s annoying to have to learn a new system.

    • Yeah, I’m definitely opening myself up to issues by having installed Arch instead of Ubuntu, but as much as I’ll bitch about these problems existing, I really do enjoy the process of fiddling and troubleshooting.

      I find Ubuntu can be used right out of the box for productivity depending on your workload and general productivity tools - personally my shop primarily uses Gsuite stuff so I can access everything within the browser, making most of what I do generally agnostic to environment. The main thing I liked about Ubuntu is all the changes MS have made to it, including things like having cloud connectivity for GDrive and OneDrive out of the box, instead of needing some kind of hacky weird solution. I find Ubuntu with all the MS contributions has become a very good productivity OS on top of being a solid server to be using with Hyper-V.

    • Maybe I’m lucky as shit but I’ve tried Arch Linux on many different systems with quite different hardware, and I’ve never had a networking issue that wasn’t my fault (for not installing dhcp for instance)