
Arch Linux: The Simple, Flexible (and Fast) Distro - linuxmag
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7469
======
psadauskas
I've been using Arch as my primary desktop for a couple years, after switching
from Gentoo. It reminds me a lot of the early days of Gentoo, the wiki is
great, and the community is helpful. There's been very little breakage from
their rolling updates, and when there is, there's usually a warning on the
news page about how to fix it, before the update is even released.

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JeremyChase
This link from the article was more interesting to me:
<http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_vs_Others>

~~~
_pi
Having been there and back again I laugh at the elitism on this page now.

"Arch doesn't offer such a facility as it goes against TheArchWay. SUSE,
therefore, is widely regarded as more appropriate for less-experienced users,
or those who want a more GUI-driven environment, autoconfiguration and
expected functionality out of the box. "

Such an elegant way of saying SUSE IS 4 teh noobz and i use arch kuz i'm
hardcore.

Having been there and back again I find myself on FC, because it's stable. I
know that I can update the fucking thing whenever, or not even update for a
year and it won't fuck up my install. Unlike Arch which if you don't update
for 1-3 month's you're guaranteed a fuckup because you missed 2 critical
updates and there's no way to get them unless you feel like manually finding
the actual packages and installing them.

That page misses an important aspect, Arch sucks for stability, programming,
and people who hate typing pacman -Syu every damn day. Arguably stability and
programming are finer points for the SUSE distro because, it's got a plethora
of development packages which are installable at various versions (yast/zypper
is a bit of a bitch about this though), as well as the fact that SUSE handles
concurrent versions way better than Arch.

"Fedora has a scheduled release cycle. Arch is a rolling-release system. The
Arch design approach is geared more toward lightweight elegance and minimalism
rather than automation/autoconfiguration."

I also love this perl of wisdom, no it's not. I can get a minimal FC11
install, or I can install CentOS and get the same damn minimalism and elegance
and lightweightness. How do you judge how lightweight a distro is? I can
remove every component from fedora and suse. I don't need their gui tools
installed, nor do I need their commandline-ncurses tools installed. If Fedora
decided to support kmod then it'd have more modular packages than Arch, so
what is this mythical lightweightness? Is Gentoo more light weight than Arch?
Or Is the opposite true, because Gentoo's ebuild directory can span anywhere
from 700mb (generous) to 2 gb.

Here's the bottom line, most OS comparison is FUD. In most distros moving the
ease of use up just makes the window of use bigger (a more inclusive user
base, ie people who only use the gui or people who only use the cli or a mix).

Also I enjoyed the fact that Arch pretty much says, we break patent law freely
because we don't have a backing company who one can get money out of with a
lawsuit:

"Fedora famously doesn't attempt to support the MP3 media format due to
perceived patent issues. Arch is more lenient in its disposition toward MP3
and other media."

Maybe I'm jaded from all the "ZOMG ARCH LINUX" crap on /r/linux, but Arch
isn't as 'teh awesome' as people make it out to be. In fact when you use
x64-bit distro all the speed ups (some more than others) that Arch used to
tout with i686 packages disappear.

~~~
psadauskas
I can't believe that you've actually used Arch. I had one server here that
hadn't been updated in over a year, and `pacman -Syu` worked perfectly, no
breakage at all.

As for development, its much better than debian- or redhat-based distros,
because you don't ever have to install any -dev (or is it -devel?) packages,
or go hunt down someone else's repo, because the version of a package you're
using is obsolete and missing a feature you need, and won't be updated in
mainline for another 4 months, if they even do it then.

~~~
_pi
>I can't believe that you've actually used Arch. I had one server here that
hadn't been updated in over a year, and `pacman -Syu` worked perfectly, no
breakage at all.

Desktop packages are way more finicky, obviously you didn't use it when they
switched from devfs to udev (Between 0.7 and 0.8 releases, I've used it on-n-
off for 5+ mo at a time since 0.4) as other major infrastructure overhauls
like the PAM overhaul 3. Then again it wasn't cool to use arch at that time.

Since Judd Left the team the releases have gotten a bit lazier, they used to
come out every 4 months now it's every year if that.

>As for development, its much better than debian- or redhat-based distros,
because you don't ever have to install any -dev (or is it -devel?) packages,
or go hunt down someone else's repo, because the version of a package you're
using is obsolete and missing a feature you need, and won't be updated in
mainline for another 4 months, if they even do it then.

Enjoy working on something moderately complex then, when it automatically
updates it for you it'll fuck up your entire code base, so this happens
several times a year and you're fucked. So unless you want to do maintenance
as you're trying to actually code something rolling release isn't for you
unless you like pulling hair. Not only that but culling of features happens
much more than addition.

Also your lack of understanding of -dev packages shows you've never really
used other distros, SuSE, Fedora, and Debian support group installations of
packages such as development packages, development tools, IDE's etc, as well
as wildcards in their package managers. So that's a very very moot point.

Not only that but SUSE which is designed with the programmer in mind has
several different repos which contain different versions and the most up to
date versions of packages.

Oh and by the way, that whole ROlling vs Staged release thing only shows a
difference when major architecture is overhauled the lines in reality between
those two release styles are blurring, especially with the expansion of OSS
and people who work with it. Example: FC11 has kde 4.3 in updates-testing (not
rawhide), it originally shipped with 4.2.2, and right now 4.2.4-rsomething is
stable. Also Arch isn't as bleeding edge as it lets on some updates have been
withheld for months because the developers are too lazy to recompile stuff.

Oh and if you don't have a package you do what you do in Arch, you either make
a spec file for it and compile it yourself or go to 3rd party repos (Arch has
like 1 actual 3rd party repo I think, unlike the 5-6 for Fedora).

~~~
psadauskas
Yes, I've developed on both, and find the redhat ones to be much, much worse.
Perhaps its a different development area, I do mostly Ruby and other dynamic
languages. The -dev is a PITA when I want to install the mysql ruby gem, but I
can't because it can't find the headers, so I have to go hunt down if I want
mysql-client-dev, mysql-devel, or something else. With Arch, if I have mysql
installed, I have the headers. Done.

I find the 1 3rd party repo to be a far better situation. I've never even
needed it, everything is in the main pacman repos, or AUR. If I need the
latest git, I have to decide if I need Dag, or EPEL, or some other one. And
compiling your own is trivial in Arch, a ~10-line description file vs the
nightmare that is rpmbuild. I don't have any experience building .deb, so I
can't comment on that.

~~~
_pi
Then you install packages the wrong way.

IE, yum install mysql* ruby* gem* will get you everything

> And compiling your own is trivial in Arch, a ~10-line description file vs
> the nightmare that is rpmbuild.

Now you're just trolling.

------
bhrgunatha
I'm planning on switching to Arch the next time I rebuild my machine.

I've been using Ubuntu for about 18 months now, but I've become disenchanted
with certain things. After playing around with Arch in a virtual machine for a
few weeks now, I'm really happy with how much I've learned about how things
work, I've also been using KDE so the news about splitting into smaller
packages has finally sealed the deal.

The documentation on their wiki is also another big plus.

~~~
Legion
I used to use Slackware and then Gentoo, but have been on Ubuntu for a while
now.

I gave Arch a shot a few weeks ago, and I struggled to find a real advantage
to using it.

What I did find instead, however, were a ton of broken packages because Arch
had moved on to libjpeg7, but the packages hadn't.

------
Confusion
Oh joy, a distro advertisement: nice fuel for a flamewar. Considering the
username: double advertisement.

------
tom_b
For those interested, I have enjoyed using Arch Linux on an old T23 Thinkpad
with limited (512MB) memory. With one of the light-weight windows managers, it
kept the machine nicely usable as a dev/fun environment.

~~~
JeremyChase
For what it's worth any of the Linux/GNU or BSD's will run on older hardware;
provided you don't go overboard with X. If you forgo Gnome or KDE in favor of
FVWM2 or XFCE the system will run very well on less than 256Megs of ram.

Unfortunately, if you are forced to run Firefox the system resources
immediately become a problem. Seamonkey is a viable alternative, but is dated.
Chrome may be the way to go, but that is yet to be proven.

~~~
dtf
Chromium dev builds are working great on my older laptop. Plugins aren't that
stable but you'd probably want to avoid them anyway. The Arora browser (also
WebKit) is worth a look too.

------
thunk
... with _the_ most perfectly named package manager ever. Period.

~~~
locopati
Period.Period.Period.BIG PERIOD.Ghost.Chomp.

------
gaia-forming
Check out linux mint, too.
<http://www.linuxmint.com/img/screenshots/gloria/15.png>

~~~
steiger
Screenshots just tell absolutelly nothing about a linux distro.

------
c00p3r
It's all done. Redhat wins enterprise (server) market, while Ubuntu "just
works" on desktop.

