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Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

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Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#41

Post by rantanplan »

Latty wrote: post #33
rantanplan wrote: post #10

I briefly considered Arch, a few years back that I was having a relationship crisis with my Fedora. Unfortunately it was a no-go for me for the following reasons, but the situation may have been improved since then: 1) Back then it was only recently that they had instituted package signing and verification for their official packages. Ouch! That was something that most distros had for years back then. So security was…

I think all of the 'other package managers' are just wrappers around pacman to give more functionality. I haven't seen any competing completely different package managers. Packaging, yeah, some stuff is only AUR, but that's generally a better starting point than "well here is the source". In general, 99% of what I use is available in proper packages. Obviously that'll depend on what you use.

> generally a better starting point than "well here is the source"

Definitely not when it comes to security. We are talking about packages, which means even legit, well-intended programs can be weaponized by the packager.

That's a hell of an attack vector.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#42

Post by towb »

erikbye wrote: post #28
towb wrote: post #24

I was using Arch with bspwm for a few years, until ~a month ago when I wanted a clean system. But this time I wasn't up for the whole installation process. I know what I need, I know how to do it, and I can do it pretty fast. But it is still a lot, so this time I went with Antergos. I had this idea that using Arch with a minimal window manager and nothing more would keep me off distractions from annoying UI features,…

Why didn't you just use Arch-Anywhere? https://arch-anywhere.org/ Besides, the manual installation process of Arch does not consist of that many steps; it takes but a few minutes (perhaps not the first time). To shorten it further you can write your own installation script or use extant ones, of which there are many (Arch-Anywhere being one). I harp on Arch-Anywhere because Antergos != Arch and Arch > Antergos and ot…

Maybe I'll try it next time. Not sure yet what Antergos will do for me, except the installer, but for this install, and so far, I'm happy with it. It's still mostly arch anyway.

It's not that it is too hard or takes very long time, but I still have to pull up my notes and do it.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#43

Post by tomsmeding »

mac01021 wrote: post #37
whoopdedo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

export CC=gcc -march=native

Can you explain? Doesn't "-march=native" just set the target CPU architecture to be that of the host you're running on? Isn't that the default behaviour anyway?

I believe that by default, gcc is somewhat conservative with its target architecture, ignoring a few of the newest features in favour of better cross-system compatibility. With that flag, and possibly -mtune=native, you get the full power of your CPU back.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#44

Post by jiggunjer »

crocowhile wrote: post #17
mariusmg wrote: post #3

So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? There's no "sellingpoint" in the article except this "dig" at the other distros : "apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk breaking everything)"

I have been an arch user for more than 10 years now and three things make the difference for me: - a very mature community of users. The arch docs and forums are really good. If you ever have a problem, you'll find a solution in no more than a few clicks - an extremely tidy package manager. The choice of packages is huge and - more importantly - creating and maintaining a package is extremely easy. Way easier than ma…

I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months. It wouldn't even boot because they changed to systemd in the meantime. So it only works if you sink in significant time.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#45

Post by rjeli »

towb wrote: post #24

I was using Arch with bspwm for a few years, until ~a month ago when I wanted a clean system. But this time I wasn't up for the whole installation process. I know what I need, I know how to do it, and I can do it pretty fast. But it is still a lot, so this time I went with Antergos. I had this idea that using Arch with a minimal window manager and nothing more would keep me off distractions from annoying UI features,…

I’ve really grown to like XFCE as a minimal, usable WM on top of Ubuntu if I want packages to work or Slackware if I want to pare down and tinker a bit

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#46

Post by jamespo »

rantanplan wrote: post #41
Latty wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all of the 'other package managers' are just wrappers around pacman to give more functionality. I haven't seen any competing completely different package managers. Packaging, yeah, some stuff is only AUR, but that's generally a better starting point than "well here is the source". In general, 99% of what I use is available in proper packages. Obviously that'll depend on what you use.

> generally a better starting point than "well here is the source" Definitely not when it comes to security. We are talking about packages , which means even legit, well-intended programs can be weaponized by the packager . That's a hell of an attack vector.

like COPR in fedora or PPA in ubuntu surely

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#47

Post by agumonkey »

foepys wrote: post #4

The post is from 2015. Since then the abs tool has been deprecated (use asp from AUR instead) and the i686 version is nearing end of life and will be unsupported by November 2017. If you still need 32-bit Arch Linux, you can use archlinux32 [1]. 1: https://archlinux32.org

thanks, I had no idea about this project

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#48

Post by rantanplan »

jamespo wrote: post #46
rantanplan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generally a better starting point than "well here is the source" Definitely not when it comes to security. We are talking about packages , which means even legit, well-intended programs can be weaponized by the packager . That's a hell of an attack vector.

like COPR in fedora or PPA in ubuntu surely

Which I haven't ever used because I never needed them? (Talking about COPR, I don't use ubuntu).

In contrast with AUR without which you don't have much of a useful desktop experience.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#49

Post by nextos »

s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #18

I fell in love with Arch about 5 years ago. I use it every day as my daily work machine: One of the best things about arch is its documentation - specifically its wiki. Arch lets you start off with a fairly simple installation, but you always have the option of moving off the beaten path and doing something different. It's that flexibility which allows people to create arch installs with a very low memory footprint,…

I usually describe Arch as the simplest possible binary distribution. It's just a thin layer (pacman mostly) on top of vanilla packages. This reduces complexity a lot. I understand most of what is going on in my install because I explicitly configured everything, and packages don't contain weird patches.

While I love Arch's ethos, I think the next step in distributions is to embrace declarative configuration, non-destructive actions and reproducible packages. NixOS & GuixSD provide this. And luckily there's still a lot of Arch ethos in their implementations. Namely, that your base system is totally barebones and you need to add (declare!) whatever you want to have.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#50

Post by erikbye »

Majestic121 wrote: post #35
Latty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest "just works" thing for me with Arch is that, because you configure everything yourself and set it up, you know what is in your system and how it's slotted together. Less magic, when something goes wrong, you have an idea where to look. It's obviously not going to be true for some, but for power users, it's surprisingly great. I've been on Arch for many years myself with the same story.

If you have to configure and set up everything yourself, it can not really be called 'just works'. I'm definitely a fan of setting things up and diving into config myself, but let's be honest : Arch is not a 'Just works' distribution. Ubuntu could be considered one, maybe elementary as well

This "configure and set up everything yourself" bit is overstated.

It's not like Ubuntu, or similar batteries-included distros, doesn't require configuration and tweaking to get it your personal liking, anyway. And it's not like you cannot make choices during installation that affect the final state of your system. The difference between the Arch manual installation process and Ubuntu's is simply that you use a CLI and start a few scripts instead of pointing and clicking.

The amount of configuration necessary is exaggerated, probably by people that want to portray Arch as this expert-user distro. Once you've done e.g. "pacman -S gnome gnome-extra sddm && systemctl enable sddm", you can just boot into your graphical desktop and start using it just the same as Ubuntu, no extra configuration steps needed.

And, like I've said, for the nth time, use Arch-Anywhere to get a similar installation to that of Ubuntu.

I've been very impressed by Arch. Yes, it's a rolling release, so you have to update your system now and then, but this is a good thing--install once and run an up-to-date system for years on end. Unlike Ubuntu, which is outdated already on install, and if you want to upgrade, good luck with that process if you've installed a sundry of packages. Eventually, with an Ubuntu system, I've always started suffering from package-related problems, breakage, dependency issues, etc.

I won't detail all the problems I've had with other distros, suffice to say I've had none of those using Arch.

These supposed to "just work" distros haven't lived up to that in my experience.

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