

Arch Linux turns 10 - AbyCodes
http://www.archlinux.org/news/arch-linux-turns-10/

======
phzbOx
I love Arch. Best distribution by far in my opinion. Sadly, I had huge
problems one week ago when I did a full system upgrade (took me 2 days to fix
everything that was corrupted and lost lots of money because of it) but then
it was my fault. (Never use --force with a system upgrade!) To be fair, there
should be a warning when you try to execute the command as it's probably not
what a user would want to do.

~~~
jon6
I have a bunch of painful stories about using Arch but the best one happened
most recently.

I had some outdated package that I wanted to update so I asked in the #arch
irc room how to just update that one package. I was told upgrading a single
package is generally a bad idea and its better to just update the entire
system. I have had a server running Gentoo for ~5 years and I frequently
upgrade single packages at a time so I saw no problem with this but ok, I'm
not an Arch expert so I followed the #arch people's advice.

I invoked the upgrade command and I see it wants to upgrade the linux kernel
to 3.2 and a bunch of other stuff. After the upgrade completes I rebooted the
machine (or it rebooted itself, I forget). It wasn't able to boot up. I put in
a rescue cd but I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

This is _exactly_ why I don't do 'emerge world' in gentoo anymore. It has
backfired on me more than 50% of the time (when I used to do it). I simply do
not trust these bleeding edge distro people to get everything working all the
time and I am annoyed at the zealots who constantly advise to just upgrade as
if nothing could possibly go wrong.

~~~
NeutronBoy
> I frequently upgrade single packages at a time so I saw no problem with this
> but ok, I'm not an Arch expert so I followed the #arch people's advice.

Imagine your window manager relies on libX as a dependency. You update
CoolNewApp, which relies on an updated version is libX. So it installs that
from your repos and CoolNewApp works great. However, your WM needs an update
to be compatible with the newer version of libX, and that update wasn't
installed, so the next time you go to login, bam, broken system.

~~~
Spakman
I imagine the GP means "upgrade single package, including dependencies". This
is very common, at least on Gentoo.

------
bitwize
Arch rules. It is literally just what I wanted from a Linux distro: the dead
simplicity and austere Unix-ness of Slackware combined with the up-to-the-
minute-ness and easy source package integration of Gentoo. A true gem and
reminder of what Linux is and can be, when Ubuntu makes it seem like we've
lost our way...

~~~
Deinumite
Ubuntu is the best distro around... for what it's purpose is.

Ubuntu isn't around to cater to power users, the whole idea behind it is
shipping a distro thats so easy your grandma can install and use it.

~~~
chimeracoder
Honestly, I'm not sure Ubuntu even excels at that anymore.

When I switched my parents over to Linux, I installed Mint, not Ubuntu. This
was well before the Unity debacle, but even besides that, I'm glad I did. Mint
looked familiar to them (coming from Windows), and while it may be heavily
bloated from a _software_ perspective (the stuff that makes Arch users cringe,
since they ship everything by default to maximize configuration-free
compatibility), it _feels_ very lightweight from a user perspective - like
what Windows might be like if they stripped out all of the stuff that people
really don't care about.

~~~
old-gregg
No need to bash Ubuntu just because it lost the coolness/freshness factor.
It's still a great distribution, and the only one I know which serves
_excellent_ font rendering out of the box.

I love Arch as much as the next guy, but their default font experience is
awful. The biggest headache of using it was constantly fighting/maintaining
patched cairo/freetype from AUR (because they'd occasionally conflict with a
newer version of some other package). And on top of that you'd have a ton of
other packages with baked-in broken fonts like Firefox, xulrunner and Open
Office.

When it comes to fonts and text rendering, all users firmly belong into two
groups: the 1st group would post a screenshot of their screen where the 'd'
and 'p' are rendered with double line thickness at the tip of their curves,
and then claim "my fonts are fine". The 2nd group would consider that
unusable.

What Ubuntu excelled at (and still does) is to bring Linux to the 2nd group of
people, which is a lot larger than the 1st one. All Canonical's questionable
achievements like Unity, upstart and Bazaar have been easily eclipsed by them
noticing and taking care of the elephant in the room: readability of text on
user's screen. They fixed it by patching freetype, providing sensible defaults
for fontconfig and by developing an excellent set of default fonts.

Sorry for the long rant, this is Arch birthday after all. Arch rocks! Long
live Arch! :)

~~~
demetris
For folks who want Ubuntu’s font rendering on Debian, there is a simple hack
you can try:

Get Ubuntu’s /etc/fonts directory, remove or rename your own /etc/fonts, and
put Ubuntu’s in its place.

I’ve been using this hack in Debian Sid, I have applied it to several
machines, and it always gets the job done.

Apologies for veering off topic.

~~~
beamso
I install iceweasel from <http://mozilla.debian.net/>. As part of the
dependencies for this iceweasel, the patched fontconfig comes through with the
nicer font smoothing.

------
ditoa
Congratulations to all those past and present involved with Arch. Over the
past few years Arch has become my favourite personal distro due to how much
control it gives me over my system without being _too_ complicated.

Here is to another amazing 10 years for Arch as well as everyone working on
other Linux distros. You are all pretty damn amazing in my opinion. Thank you
for all you do and please don't stop =D

~~~
stock_toaster
> Congratulations to all those past and present involved with Arch

Thanks! I still feel good about being listed on the fellows page as a past
developer. :)

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Vergle
Happy birthday! And...

A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the
basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a
distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when
I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be
as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?

~~~
hollerith
Unlike Debian, Arch Linux has what they call a "rolling release schedule,"
which means that the only choices you have are (1) refrain from using Pacman
at all to update your software, which of course leaves security
vulnerabilities unpatched and (2) opening yourself up to major changes to
major subsystems, like Gnome, any time you use pacman to update your system.

In contrast, on Debian, major changes to e.g. Gnome are mostly limited to when
a new version of Debian comes out, and you get a lot of leeway as to when to
upgrade to the new version, and in particular, sometimes you have the option
of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an
option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.

And I got the impression that updates of Arch Linux broke things that required
my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.

Still it is a very compelling distribution because of its "elegance".

I probably spend just as much time maintaining my OS X box as I did
maintaining my Arch Linux box: e.g., when I upgraded from Leopard to Snow
Leopard and from Snow Leopard to Lion, I had to install a bunch of stuff (a
dict client, Gnu coreutils, Carbon Emacs, even wget IIRC) to get a comfortable
environment, and the installation took a lot more time than it would have on a
Linux distro. E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep
mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates
most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I
have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of
waking only on key press or mouse button click.

~~~
lloeki
> And I got the impression that updates of Arch broke things that required my
> manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.

Maybe it looks more 'frequent' but when it does so it's in a much, much more
limited scope each time. It's more like small, discrete steps vs a whole batch
at once.

> you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your
> version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.

That's because Arch subscribes to the opinion that upstream knows best, and
puts emphasis on as much vanilla as possible (which contributes to its overall
simplicity, leanness and elegance). Hence security update means version bump
from upstream. Contrast with Debian which actively back ports security patches
to the pinned version in each release.

> E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such
> that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the
> value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask
> on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only
> on key press or mouse button click.

Ironically (although I did not notice that particular behavior myself) this
would restore the pre-Lion behavior.

~~~
dsrguru
I've been using Arch for about five years, and I can tell you that things
break more frequently than with any other distro I've used for a suffiently
long amount of time. Things break more frequently when you're tinkering with
things, but sometimes even on routine updates. If you want something more
stable, use Debian Testing or Slackware. That being said, Arch is great. Try
it!

~~~
lloeki
> things break more frequently

Yes it might be more frequent, yet each time it is of a more limited scope
since it concerns a single, maybe two packages. Following the news and maybe
the forums helps a lot. Example regarding the scope: I upgraded some machines
Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10, and so much breakage occurred that the machines
required such an extend of work that they simply were declared unrecoverable
and reinstalled from scratch.

> use Debian Testing

In the months following a release, Debian testing essentially == Sid, and
breakage is infamous.

~~~
dsrguru
Yes, following the news is incredibly useful for preventing breakage on
updates, and the forums are especially useful for repairing breakage since
other people will often have had the same issue on a big update. Probably half
the time something "breaks" on a `pacman -Syu' for me, it's just a quick fix
that was the result of me neglecting to read the front page news.

------
sho_hn
What I don't like about Arch is that it doesn't provide debug symbol packages,
which makes it useless for providing crash bug reports for programs written in
compiled languages unless the user is willing to recompile them. IMHO general-
purpose distros have moral (or at least pragmatic) imperative to support the
development of the software that they ship, and making sure users can file
decent bug reports easily is an important part of that.

Meanwhile, other distros have gotten to the point of automatically installing
the right debug symbol packages right from the crash reporter built into app
suites like KDE's to generate useful backtraces.

------
w1ntermute
After experimenting with countless distros over the years, Arch is by far my
favorite. It combines the customizability of Gentoo with the simplicity of
Slackware. Long live Arch!

------
drostie
It's a couple days too late to wish Arch happy birthday, but if you're very
quick, you can still wish Albert Einstein happy birthday. He'd be 133 today.
Unfortunately there's no real location of his corpse that you can visit as he
was cremated, but last I heard, his eyes are kept in a safe deposit box
somewhere in New York, there's a couple slides of his brain at the Mütter
Museum in Philadelphia, and the majority of his brain is somewhere in
Princeton.

~~~
_sh
If you can, try and track down the documentary _Einstein's Brain_ by Kevin
Hull[1], an amusing yarn about a Japanese professor's trip across the US in
search of the great man's grey matter.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relics:_Einsteins_Brain>

------
badboy
3 machines running on Arch Linux and no major issues up to now.

It's just perfect for me. I love how easy it is to quickly build a new package
(not that I need to write PKGBUILDS myself often, most things are available in
the AUR)

Happy Birthday!

------
jack12
I'm not sure exactly when I moved over to Arch from Crux, I'm sure the
distribution was at least a few months old by then, but it's been a great
distribution as long as I've known it.

It does suffer the occasional dip into making things more complicated than
they need to be, some element of the distribution straying towards the "SysV"
darkside and away from the "BSD" ideal, or an upstream's configuration system
just getting too insane to work around any longer, but everything always works
back to some sense of balance after a few years. And it does feel like
upstreams come around to the Arch way of thinking more often that the other
way around.

I do wish it was a bit easier to automatically build or just download pre-made
packages with some of the more popular compile flag variants, ports- or
portage-style, but not so much that it casts a shadow on all the other
benefits of Arch.

Still, it would be nice to be able to install a console vim with python and
ruby interpreter support without having to install gnome too, or being able to
install java on a headless server without having to stick half of X11 on
there, or not having to install Apache because you want to change nginx's
modules. It's always possible to change the PKGBUILD and recompile, but it
seems like just changing one enable/disable switch to ./configure should be
easier than it often is (vim is especially a pain to keep a custom PKGBUILD
of, the ABS PKGBUILD seems to undergo massive revisions every few months).

But really the distribution is just great, the best out there. It lets you use
pure Linux and avoid all the hoop jumping other distributions make you do in
order to keep their package managers happy, while still giving you all the
benefits you want from a distribution like automatic pre-compiled upgrades.
And that's enough to make it the best balance of a distribution out there for
me.

~~~
rufugee
I've been using debian based systems (including ubuntu) for over a decade now,
and I can't think of more than a handful of times time I've had to jump
through hoops to keep apt and dpkg happy. You may not always have the latest
version of the software, but the productivity compared to compile.everything
or rpm-based systems is significant. Almost everytime I need a piece of
software, it's one command away.

~~~
hollerith
It is hard to see what your comment has to do with Arch Linux since it is
neither a compile.everything nor an rpm-based system.

But yeah, for users willing to adapt themselves to a system, as opposed to
adapting the system to their desires, the debian-based distros are probably
the best Linux distros.

~~~
rufugee
My comment was in response to "avoid all the hoop jumping other distributions
make you do in order to keep their package managers happy, while still giving
you all the benefits". Personally, I believe those hoops to be a myth.

------
javadyan
1.5 years on Arch here and I pretty much refuse to use any other distro on my
laptop. Great work.

------
yabai
Arch is what I have been running (since around 2006). I love the simplicity.
When things do break, there is an amazing community waiting to provide
support. The Arch community rules! I think Arch is quickly becoming what
Gentoo was...(hopefully I dont start a war!).

~~~
leif
What do you think gentoo was? When I used it (2005-7ish), I think it was a toy
for brat haxxors. At the time, I was a brat haxxor, so it worked well.

~~~
beza1e1
During a certain period the Gentoo wiki was one of the best resources for
configuration and debugging, even if you used another distro. The downfall
might be coincide with the Big Wiki Loss [0].

[0] [http://eddiedu.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/gentoo-wiki-
gentoo-p...](http://eddiedu.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/gentoo-wiki-gentoo-
portage-down/)

------
PsyGeek
Like others, I also love Arch and have been using it since 2007. Although I
started with Slackware, I find myself using Arch as my primary Linux
distribution these days because I feel it is the best of Slackware, Crux,
FreeBSD and maybe Gentoo to an extent. As power users, I'm sure we can all
appreciate Arch for what it has become. I look forward to using Arch in the
coming years.

Happy Birthday Arch Linux!!

------
karolist
I'm using Arch on the desktop lately and liking the bleeding edge updates and
simplicity however I'm still loving Gentoo more on the servers, the portage
system forces you to build everything just according to your needs where by
default with Arch I'm getting pre-compiled stuff.

Anyone running Arch on servers, how does it compare to Gentoo in your opinion?

------
akurilin
How would you compare Arch to Mint? Which one would you recommend for people
wanting to get deeper into Linux?

~~~
zokier
I think they are in quite the opposite ends of Linux desktop distro spectrum.
Mint attempts to provide nice out-of-the-box experience and Arch is "tweak
everything". Mint being based (more or less directly) on Debian includes far
more distro-specific patches than Arch which has fairly vanilla packages
(afaik).

As for my recommendation, imho you should learn the system you are going to
use. If you want to learn Debian, use Debian (or Mint, or some other close
Debian derivate). If you want to learn Arch, then use Arch. Every major distro
can be poked and prodded, tweaked to no end, and you can look what happens
under the hood.

------
kiloaper
It's the community that really makes Arch a great distro in my opinion.
Because of them we have an excellent well-moderated forum with technically
competent and helpful members, an outstanding wiki and a huge amount of
software available in the AUR.

------
bougyman
Happy birthday, my beautiful Arch! I've only been a devotee since October,
2010, and I don't know how I got along without it. While others are fighting
with old. outdated bugs, I get to fight only the newest, shiniest bugs.

------
arc_of_descent
Just tried out Arch a week back now, and I was quite happy with it. Here's to
10 more years!

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jeez
wow, 10 years. I've been using it for a couple of years now.

But I do occasionally find it hard/difficult (from a mental POV), and I fall
back on Fedora. I'll be a true *nix guy when I can stop doing that. :)

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zobzu
10 years and still simple and awesome. Thank you guys. Really.

------
known
Arch has the best documentation.

