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My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

sadanand-singh.github.io

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Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#51

Post by majewsky »

microwavecamera wrote: post #14

Question for all the Arch peeps, what's the goal/purpose of Arch? As an outside observer it seems needlessly complicated and most of the complexity being specific to Arch. Why not just run Slack or Debian if you want a barebones full distro? Slack and BSD's are closer to old school UNIX. Arch is after my time, am I missing something?

It's funny how you complain about Arch being "needlessly complicated", then suggesting to use Debian instead. I'm building packages for Arch all the time (mostly for personal use). The one time I tried to build a Debian package, I gave up after spending multiple hours of going through all the ceremony that's involved in that.

I'm not saying that Debian is hopelessly overengineered. All the complexity is there for a reason, because Debian strives to cover 100% of what everyone needs. Arch is content with achieving 95%, if it means that you can avoid a huge part of the complexity that comes from catching the last 5%.

For example, some Debian packages use a dialog system to set themselves up during installation. Arch avoids that complexity and instead expects the user to read the wiki on how to configure the application in question.

Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#52

Post by majewsky »

broodbucket wrote: post #21
microwavecamera wrote: post #14

Question for all the Arch peeps, what's the goal/purpose of Arch? As an outside observer it seems needlessly complicated and most of the complexity being specific to Arch. Why not just run Slack or Debian if you want a barebones full distro? Slack and BSD's are closer to old school UNIX. Arch is after my time, am I missing something?

Latest stable software (this is such a massive deal), it's as lean as you want it to be, and you have the AUR where you can install pretty much any piece of software on the internet in one command. Once you get it running (which doesn't take long once you know what you're doing), it does exactly what you want it to do, is always running the latest and greatest, and in my experience lets me get what I want done faster…

For the "you have to update it every once in a while" problem, I built a small cronjob that automates the updates, but allows me to intervene. Source is at [1], and it talks to me via XMPP. [2]

[1] https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master...

[2] https://github.com/majewsky/xmpp-bridge

Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#53

Post by majewsky »

viraptor wrote: post #34
Tomte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Arch community packages are "released" without even cursory testing whether it works (missing dependencies)? And you feel that's a good thing?

Mixing names. Community repo is different from AUR. The first has rules, the second one is a free for all. AUR steam was missing dependencies in a way that specific installed apps weren't functioning right, but that's not something you could figure out from the binary itself. For example Portal depended on texture compression which wasn't included by default. Without buying everything in the Steam store you wouldn't…

This is also Arch, but I just yesterday reported a bug to the distro maintainers because the upgrade to Perl 5.26 broke my monitoring. A fixed package was published into the repo within 3 hours: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/54322

I guess I got lucky though. A turnaround time that short for community projects also depends on whether the contributor in question happens to be at his desk at that point.

Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#54

Post by majewsky »

bhrgunatha wrote: post #39
nice_byte wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE 4 happened

To be fair KDE4 _was_ a disaster when it was released but in time it came to be as stable and usable as the much loved KDE3. The path to plasma was also somewhat rocky (but nowhere near as bad as the KDE3 - KDE4 transition). I used to enjoy using KDE but I feel they lost their way and are overly attracted by "shiny new things" like workspaces, activities, or semantic desktop - virtually everything being dependent on…

Akonadi was the main reason why I ditched KMail for Thunderbird six years ago. I recently went back, and it's marginally better. But it's still pretty outrageous that a service that only gives one user-visible extra feature (mail checking and calendar reminders as a background service) costs 330 megabytes of RAM. Most of that for the MySQL instance that it's using; no idea why they have to use anything else than SQLite for a mailbox with maybe 100 mails. Stopping Akonadi is a thing that I just have to do before launching Minecraft on my notebook.

  $ free; akonadictl stop; sleep 15; free
                total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
  Mem:        3934720     1227872     1296492      253868     1410356     2203068
  Swap:             0           0           0
                total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
  Mem:        3934720      897308     1626924      249452     1410488     2538072
  Swap:             0           0           0
I'm still sticking with KMail for now, though. The UI is a bit nicer (esp. w.r.t. GPG), and mail checking as a background service is nice.

Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#55

Post by majewsky »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #13

Arch is just too much time for me doing sysadmin and keeping up with breaking changes (it's a rolling distro, so all kinds of system configurations are possible, many are untested or just bleeding edge). If you like using an unstable bleeding edge system where you have to configure everything yourself by hand with absolutely zero tolerance for user error, use Arch. If I'm on a tight schedule with doing mission critic…

Cannot agree. I have 5 machines on Arch (a notebook, a desktop, three servers), and the administrative cost is pretty much negligible (unless, of course, I decide to install a new application or something like that). Maybe 3 minutes a day total for interacting with the guided auto-update cronjob and reading the system health report.

Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#56

Post by btschaegg »

majewsky wrote: post #51
microwavecamera wrote: post #14

Question for all the Arch peeps, what's the goal/purpose of Arch? As an outside observer it seems needlessly complicated and most of the complexity being specific to Arch. Why not just run Slack or Debian if you want a barebones full distro? Slack and BSD's are closer to old school UNIX. Arch is after my time, am I missing something?

It's funny how you complain about Arch being "needlessly complicated", then suggesting to use Debian instead. I'm building packages for Arch all the time (mostly for personal use). The one time I tried to build a Debian package, I gave up after spending multiple hours of going through all the ceremony that's involved in that. I'm not saying that Debian is hopelessly overengineered. All the complexity is there for a r…

This.

Plus, makepkg is awesome. If, say, I need a specific font installed, I have no trouble with whipping out a short PKGBUILD that downlads, checks, and installs the files - providing me with the option to manage it using Pacman.

Its simplicity seems so essential to me that I can't imagine why there are so few distros providing tools like it.

Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#57

Post by btschaegg »

favadi wrote: post #48
qarioz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only complicated for the first time. My setup is running just fine for 5+ years. Compared to when I use Ubuntu, have to upgrade every 6 months and suddenly I got headache because all custom configuration doesn't work anymore or custom repository doesn't work anymore because the maintainer is missing. Slackware is fine, but Patrick and a bunch of guys is only a small team, and custom package can only do so much.…

Ubuntu LTS is supported for 5 years, so you don't have to update every 6 months.

Except if you are relying on current changes in certain software for your development work - current meaning newer than two years ago.

Unless, of course, you add a public PPA that randomly stops working in the future and/or will screw up your next distupgrade.

Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#58

Post by anotherevan »

microwavecamera wrote: post #14

Question for all the Arch peeps, what's the goal/purpose of Arch? As an outside observer it seems needlessly complicated and most of the complexity being specific to Arch. Why not just run Slack or Debian if you want a barebones full distro? Slack and BSD's are closer to old school UNIX. Arch is after my time, am I missing something?

I love Arch, personally. Have been using it for quite a few years now as my desktop and love the rolling release paradigm.

That said, when setting up machines for others I pick the current LTS release of Kubuntu and install unattended-upgrades to ensure security updates get maintained. It provides a much better ongoing maintenance story for machines that are less "pets" and more "tools".

§

Due to a disk crash, I recently had to reinstall Arch for the first time in quite a few years. IMO the install process has become more opaque. I seem to remember the wiki use to have a newbie install guide which was really helpful and explained a lot of things as you go, or at least what the common practices were or the pros and cons of different options. That seems to be gone and anything that may be an opinion seems to be excised from any install instructions, and you're left to stumble around different pages a lot more, which is a bit of a shame.

Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#59

Post by makepanic »

roadbeats wrote: post #42
makepanic wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like yaourt, check out pacaur. There are other alternative aur wrappers that have more features: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_helpers#Comparison_...

I'll try it, looks neat. Cower is not building due to PGP errors at this point though.

you have to import the teams gpg key

Re: My Arch Linux Setup with Plasma 5

#60

Post by onestone »

microwavecamera wrote: post #14

Question for all the Arch peeps, what's the goal/purpose of Arch? As an outside observer it seems needlessly complicated and most of the complexity being specific to Arch. Why not just run Slack or Debian if you want a barebones full distro? Slack and BSD's are closer to old school UNIX. Arch is after my time, am I missing something?

The truth is almost exactly the opposite of what you say actually. Yes, Arch is more difficult to install and configure the first time because it requires you to actually understand the steps it takes. But the top quality documentation really makes that not so difficult.

Arch is actually much _easier_ to maintain afterwards (once installed and configured) than almost anything else. This is because it does not add layers of useless abstraction, very much unlike DEB and RPM based distros. Packages are very close to upstream, with only minimal patches when really necessary, unlike RPM/DEB distros which heavily customize and patch most packages. Packages are also very easy to create, you can learn to do that in minutes, again very much unlike DEB and RPM which are needlessly overengineered and have whole ecosystems of helper scripts aiming to help with that complexity, but you have to spend a lot of time to actually learn them as well.

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