I think Arch is a good distro to learn for new users who are interested in tech, it gives an amazing example of good documentation and teaches you a lot about how UNIX-Like filesystems work.
That being said for non-technical users with zero interest, my main recommendations are Mint if you are coming from or prefer Windows and Elementary if you’re coming from or prefer Mac.
This, I switched from win10 to Mint, the only issues I had with the transition were self-inflicted, or stemmed from me approaching it with a windows mindset rather than the mindset of learning a new OS.
I’ve settled in quite well now, and actively cringe when I’m forced to boot into my windows install for some reason or another.
I’ve been distro-hopping with my orangepi, however I can only do so much hopping on arm, I’m considering adding yet another drive to my rig with which to try out some other distros and see if I can find a better fit than (the already great fit) Linux Mint.
I would consider myself an intermediate-advanced user (not quite power user), do you think trying Arch is a good idea at this stage?
I’m actually attempting to convert my windows install into a VM these past few days, it’s most of the way there now, just need to get the VM to actually boot from that drive.
It was my original intent upon switching to Linux that I would VM my windows, however only in the last few days of trying (read: failing) to get mods for a few games working under proton, that I’ve really upped my effort.
If there are any resources you recommend, I’m all ears.
I would consider myself an intermediate-advanced user (not quite power user),
do you think trying Arch is a good idea at this stage?
Arch Linux used to be pretty difficult to install for new users, but now it comes with a build in installer it requires less reading than before.
btw There is Arch for ARM https://archlinuxarm.org/ maybe your orangepi is supported.
Distro hopping or just testing another Linux distro can be comfortable on SBC since replacing SD card or USB stick is usually easy.
I wasn’t aware Arch had builds available for arm, I will certainly give it a look-see.
Unfortunately the Orangepi 5 is somewhat shitty to hop around with, many builds either don’t support the RK3588 at all, or certain things just don’t work at all on most (I’m looking at you GPU acceleration).
On top of this, the SPI flash can be quite a pain to work with, due to orangepi doing the bare minimum to ship the product, I would really love to see dual-boot in future for it, though my expectations have been seriously tempered when it comes to orangepi.
The result of this, is that any distro I installed to the SSD removed boot priority from the SD slot, ergo, without formatting/overwriting the SPI flash, it will refuse to boot from SD, even with no SSD present. Some builds boot fine from having been directly flashed to the SSD, so far Batocera, Ubuntu and the J-Reik Rockchip Ubuntu have all booted flawlessly when directly flashed to the SSD, no luck with most others though.
I must admit though, that RK3588 is blazingly fast for how little power it draws. The hardware is top notch, I just wish the software weren’t lagging so far behind. If I remember rightly the incoming kernel should resolve many of these issues, I believe it’s still running 5.10 currently.
Apologies for the rant, during my writing of this reply I came across a repo on GitHub that someone’s been building for the Orangepi, I’ll give it a shot and hope for the best I guess! Seems to have rkbootloader paired with it, which might help dodge the bullet that the SPI flash can feel like at times.
The dual booting problems are enraging. I somehow have the opposite problem, that it will always boot from the SD if the SD is present during power on. How hard is it to make an alternative boot method button?
I wish I had known this beforehand, I’m sure there are other SBCs with sane booting. I am never buying an Orange Pi again.
It’s a ballache through and through. I am (cautiously) optimistic for the Orangepi 5’s future, Raxda and several others have release RK3588 powered SBCs, my hope is that through some level of market saturation and community development to prevail.
I hope so. From what I read, my problem is burnt in on some boot ROM, so it may not be fixable. I’m willing to try a different vendor using the same chip.
I’m not sure this will help, though I’ll suggest anyway that you poke around looking for (I hope I got this right) “rkdevtool”, I believe you can get it from somewhere in the Orangepi tools, I found it while looking into putting orangepi os (droid) onto it.
Do let me know how you go, I have a copy if you can’t find it that I’m happy to share. I haven’t yet tried it so I can’t speak to whether or not it works.
Oh, I see :/ Forgot that I’m kind of privileged with using Raspberry Pi (I don’t particularly endorse them actually.It just happened years ago). From time to time when I look at other SBC hardware options I do see that the software is not catching up as well as it does for the rpi. Good to hear your story.
I do actually have an RPi4, it’s on full-time Kodi duty at present. I’ll have to pick up a few more SD cards to load up and mess with.
I bought the Orangepi first funnily enough, because it was the peak of the RPi shortage and I didn’t want to spend blood money on an aging SBC, I did pick the RPi up the moment stock was available though, no regrets, it’s been rock solid since first boot, and even easier to work with than the community attests to.
I love that little fucker to bits, I just wish it had the power of the Pi 5 (orange OR raspberry), as it drops a fair few frames during 4k directplay, 1080/1440p runs butter smooth though.
It’s a shame really, I’d be first in line to buy the Orangepi Neo (their incoming 7840U handheld) were it not for the piss poor experience I’ve had with the Pi. Now I’m firmly planted in the “wait and see, but probably not” camp.
Absolutely this. Arch can be a first good distro, but only for a limited subset of new users with a very specific goal in mind.
Anybody who says it’s any more stable than Debian or mint is either delusional, very lucky or disingenuous. I’ve never had to chroot into my system to roll back a bugged grub update on fedora, Debian or Ubuntu, but on Arch yes.
And I’m saying that with love from EndeavourOS. I love my system to bits but I’m realist enough to acknowledge the reason why I am comfortable on it is that I have enough years of experience on Linux to not stress about what to do when something breaks.
I think Arch is a good distro to learn for new users who are interested in tech, it gives an amazing example of good documentation and teaches you a lot about how UNIX-Like filesystems work.
That being said for non-technical users with zero interest, my main recommendations are Mint if you are coming from or prefer Windows and Elementary if you’re coming from or prefer Mac.
This, I switched from win10 to Mint, the only issues I had with the transition were self-inflicted, or stemmed from me approaching it with a windows mindset rather than the mindset of learning a new OS.
I’ve settled in quite well now, and actively cringe when I’m forced to boot into my windows install for some reason or another.
I’ve been distro-hopping with my orangepi, however I can only do so much hopping on arm, I’m considering adding yet another drive to my rig with which to try out some other distros and see if I can find a better fit than (the already great fit) Linux Mint.
I would consider myself an intermediate-advanced user (not quite power user), do you think trying Arch is a good idea at this stage?
I would get started with virtualization
I’m actually attempting to convert my windows install into a VM these past few days, it’s most of the way there now, just need to get the VM to actually boot from that drive.
It was my original intent upon switching to Linux that I would VM my windows, however only in the last few days of trying (read: failing) to get mods for a few games working under proton, that I’ve really upped my effort.
If there are any resources you recommend, I’m all ears.
Arch Linux used to be pretty difficult to install for new users, but now it comes with a build in installer it requires less reading than before. btw There is Arch for ARM https://archlinuxarm.org/ maybe your orangepi is supported. Distro hopping or just testing another Linux distro can be comfortable on SBC since replacing SD card or USB stick is usually easy.
I recommend not using the installer if you want to learn how Linux works well.
I wasn’t aware Arch had builds available for arm, I will certainly give it a look-see.
Unfortunately the Orangepi 5 is somewhat shitty to hop around with, many builds either don’t support the RK3588 at all, or certain things just don’t work at all on most (I’m looking at you GPU acceleration).
On top of this, the SPI flash can be quite a pain to work with, due to orangepi doing the bare minimum to ship the product, I would really love to see dual-boot in future for it, though my expectations have been seriously tempered when it comes to orangepi.
The result of this, is that any distro I installed to the SSD removed boot priority from the SD slot, ergo, without formatting/overwriting the SPI flash, it will refuse to boot from SD, even with no SSD present. Some builds boot fine from having been directly flashed to the SSD, so far Batocera, Ubuntu and the J-Reik Rockchip Ubuntu have all booted flawlessly when directly flashed to the SSD, no luck with most others though.
I must admit though, that RK3588 is blazingly fast for how little power it draws. The hardware is top notch, I just wish the software weren’t lagging so far behind. If I remember rightly the incoming kernel should resolve many of these issues, I believe it’s still running 5.10 currently.
Apologies for the rant, during my writing of this reply I came across a repo on GitHub that someone’s been building for the Orangepi, I’ll give it a shot and hope for the best I guess! Seems to have rkbootloader paired with it, which might help dodge the bullet that the SPI flash can feel like at times.
The dual booting problems are enraging. I somehow have the opposite problem, that it will always boot from the SD if the SD is present during power on. How hard is it to make an alternative boot method button?
I wish I had known this beforehand, I’m sure there are other SBCs with sane booting. I am never buying an Orange Pi again.
It’s a ballache through and through. I am (cautiously) optimistic for the Orangepi 5’s future, Raxda and several others have release RK3588 powered SBCs, my hope is that through some level of market saturation and community development to prevail.
I hope so. From what I read, my problem is burnt in on some boot ROM, so it may not be fixable. I’m willing to try a different vendor using the same chip.
I’m not sure this will help, though I’ll suggest anyway that you poke around looking for (I hope I got this right) “rkdevtool”, I believe you can get it from somewhere in the Orangepi tools, I found it while looking into putting orangepi os (droid) onto it.
Do let me know how you go, I have a copy if you can’t find it that I’m happy to share. I haven’t yet tried it so I can’t speak to whether or not it works.
Oh, interesting. Worth a shot, thank you for the tip.
Oh, I see :/ Forgot that I’m kind of privileged with using Raspberry Pi (I don’t particularly endorse them actually.It just happened years ago). From time to time when I look at other SBC hardware options I do see that the software is not catching up as well as it does for the rpi. Good to hear your story.
I do actually have an RPi4, it’s on full-time Kodi duty at present. I’ll have to pick up a few more SD cards to load up and mess with.
I bought the Orangepi first funnily enough, because it was the peak of the RPi shortage and I didn’t want to spend blood money on an aging SBC, I did pick the RPi up the moment stock was available though, no regrets, it’s been rock solid since first boot, and even easier to work with than the community attests to.
I love that little fucker to bits, I just wish it had the power of the Pi 5 (orange OR raspberry), as it drops a fair few frames during 4k directplay, 1080/1440p runs butter smooth though.
It’s a shame really, I’d be first in line to buy the Orangepi Neo (their incoming 7840U handheld) were it not for the piss poor experience I’ve had with the Pi. Now I’m firmly planted in the “wait and see, but probably not” camp.
Absolutely this. Arch can be a first good distro, but only for a limited subset of new users with a very specific goal in mind. Anybody who says it’s any more stable than Debian or mint is either delusional, very lucky or disingenuous. I’ve never had to chroot into my system to roll back a bugged grub update on fedora, Debian or Ubuntu, but on Arch yes. And I’m saying that with love from EndeavourOS. I love my system to bits but I’m realist enough to acknowledge the reason why I am comfortable on it is that I have enough years of experience on Linux to not stress about what to do when something breaks.