I left my cousin with ArchLinux, he liked it alot, so much that he still used it 6 months later. At that time he wanted to install a new program, well, from then on he stopped using arch. Because he had to call me to help him fix his system, issuing the pacman -S programname failed, so he did pacman -Sy followed by pacman -S programname again, and this time his entire system was about to be updated, he answered yes on all questions... and suddenly his entire desktop was differnt from what it was before. All the programs get updated! He didnt want that!
This is people who think that a computer is broken if the taskbar on the desktop is accidently moved to another position by children. Of course they think they broke thier computer, and it did since their settings and gadgets on the plasma desktop stopped functioning, and some just changed. Without asking the user, just changed! That is a pure and simple WTF. Thats when I realized linux will never ever succeed on the desktop if it doesnt change fundamentally.
ArchLinux is a very poor distribution to leave with someone who doesn't have the knowledge to fix these problems.
When you do pacman -Syu you should be looking on the front page for update news, you should be looking at the list of packages to be upgraded. It's not a distribution that will hold your hand, because there are some of us around who don't want our hands held.
It's a pity, I can't imagine I'm the only person in the world who shudders at the idea that my computer should be made 'easy' for me (at the expense of flexibility and power). I'm a type of customer, just as much as the so called 'average user' is.
You left your cousin with arch installed but didn't tell him that it's necessary to keep a rolling release distro up to date?
Hell, I have to keep up with the mailing list and the news page on the website just to keep my OS working update to update.
It's worth it for me because of my needs but Arch is very very specifically NOT for the average user.
You basically set your cousin up to fail. And it's not like the branding and messaging isn't clear about any of these things. Why on earth did you pick Arch for this use case?
He tried Fedora earlier, we couldnt get it to work with his wireless-networking, SELinux always getting in the way as soon as he took his laptop with him somewhere, I got tired of pushing against a wall as I was becoming his support, and then he asked what Im using, how does it work for me. So Arch it was.
I suggest Linux Mint in that case. Ubuntu based, but no unity.
I totally understand where you are coming from, I love Arch and want to share how awesome it is from but all those problems were entirely based on a very poor suggestion for his use case. Arch doesn't "suffer" from this problem at all.
I left my cousin with ArchLinux, he liked it alot, so much that he still used it 6 months later. At that time he wanted to install a new program, well, from then on he stopped using arch. Because he had to call me to help him fix his system, issuing the pacman -S programname failed, so he did pacman -Sy followed by pacman -S programname again, and this time his entire system was about to be updated, he answered yes on all questions... and suddenly his entire desktop was differnt from what it was before. All the programs get updated! He didnt want that!
This is people who think that a computer is broken if the taskbar on the desktop is accidently moved to another position by children. Of course they think they broke thier computer, and it did since their settings and gadgets on the plasma desktop stopped functioning, and some just changed. Without asking the user, just changed! That is a pure and simple WTF. Thats when I realized linux will never ever succeed on the desktop if it doesnt change fundamentally.