In my Arch Linux Install for n00bs I gave details on how to install Arch linux and then suggested LARBS as a way to get up and running with your new installation. In this article I detail why I find LARBS particularly useful and address some points brought up by haters.
Sensible Defaults
The number one reason to use LARBS is to experience with sensible defaults for a keyboard centered workflow. LARBS offers an out-of-the-box setup of many nice things that can take a long time to set up manually: a tiling window manager, vi-like line editing (via zsh), a PDF reader (Zathura).
Furthermore, LARBS comes bundled with software you probably want: e.g. a
privacy-respecting browser (Brave), git, some programming languages and
compilers. The yay tool is already setup to help you grab even more software
from Arch Linux's AUR repositories.
But real Linux users set these things up themselves
Practical people want good tools readily available to them. If you begin learning guitar on a really poorly made instrument you are more likely to become discouraged and give up. On the other hand, if you have a more experienced friend (or shop) set up your instrument when you are getting started, you may make a lot more progress, more quickly in actually learning how to play.
Furthermore, many aspects of installing things randomly often are annoying and don't involve much learning. The arcane details of how to run some program you are probably going to run only very rarely are perhaps better offloaded to automation (e.g. the shell scripts LARBS uses).
But using someone else's setup is lame!
LARBS does not constrain how you set things up later---it's just a shell script to get you started.
For instance, I use emacs a lot, and Luke Smith (who made LARBS) doesn't. Many
tools in LARBS I don't care about or use (e.g. vifm, vim-like file manager)
because I just use dired in emacs.
Pros and Cons
What LARBS is not good for
Obviously, if you require applications that require Windows or some other OS, you are out of luck.
If you are doing complicated things with sound, hardware, etc. LARBS only gives a basic desktop setup. It may be much harder to adjust these settings in LARBS compared with a well-established Linux distribution, such as Lubuntu or Manjaro (two others I have tried with older hardware).
It is hard to set up typing in CJK; I'm still figuring out how to get this well integrated and will upload a guide when I am able to do so nicely.
What LARBS is good for
LARBS is good for getting a decent general computing and programming environment set up quickly.
For a user coming from a more traditional desktop setup, LARBS allows you to explore ideas like...
- Tiling windows for more efficient screen space usage
- Remapping CAPS LOCK for happier keyboarding
- Editing config files to change settings
...without the trouble that might come from tweaking another installation (e.g. modifying default Ubuntu) or doing everything from scratch.
While on the one hand, there is definitely learning to be done in doing things yourself from the start, why shouldn't we reuse good defaults and stable software set up by more knowledgable people? Studying the LARBS config files is a good way to start writing your own configs.
Summary
If you wanna try out a tilling window manager, just install Arch and LARBS. It is not even that bad and you can customize it more later as you find out more about what you want.