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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)

#51

Post by Latty »

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.

I meant more as in "as someone wanting to use something", rather than the security aspect.

Most AUR packages I have seen have been incredibly easy to read - if you really don't want to use them, it's still a good framework for making your own packages much more easily, so you can install from source without dumping unmanaged stuff into your system.

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

#52

Post by Latty »

rantanplan wrote: post #48
jamespo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just not true. My desktop is Arch and I run maybe 5 or so AUR packages - and they are all for dev tools. You can definitely run a completely functional desktop without them.

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

#53

Post by Latty »

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

As I said, it's a different definition of "just works" - obviously no non-technical person is going to run Arch - it's never going to be Ubuntu and it's not trying to be. I wasn't trying to make that claim.

As a power-user, Arch "just works" for me far more than other distros have, because I know the system and it's simple, I've never had a problem where I didn't have a handle on it.

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

#54

Post by rantanplan »

Latty wrote: post #51
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.

I meant more as in "as someone wanting to use something", rather than the security aspect. Most AUR packages I have seen have been incredibly easy to read - if you really don't want to use them, it's still a good framework for making your own packages much more easily, so you can install from source without dumping unmanaged stuff into your system.

I think Debian has a better process in which they vet packagers. It's a bit more tedious but I'd put my trust more easily in such a system.

> Most AUR packages I have seen have been incredibly easy to read

It's not about quality, but rather more about quantity. I don't have the time to vet every package.

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

#55

Post by agumonkey »

bbv-if wrote: post #12
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)"

And he didn't mention that in Arch a routine upgrade can break everything which rather doesn't happen in the release-based distros. It has happened to me more that once over the last 8 years. I still use it nevertheless, but it's definitely not for everyone.

In years I might have had 3 breakage, it didn't feel like a specific issue because for instance ubuntu upgrade install didn't work well enough either.

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

#56

Post by rantanplan »

Latty wrote: post #52
rantanplan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just not true. My desktop is Arch and I run maybe 5 or so AUR packages - and they are all for dev tools. You can definitely run a completely functional desktop without them.

Well then, that's what I wanted to hear.

Next thing would be for Arch to officially support SELinux and we're good to go :D

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

#57

Post by Already__Taken »

nextos wrote: post #49
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-des…

Nix and Guix node packages are 8.2 and 8.1 respectively. Nix can't seem to find a couchdb package and guix is 1.6.1

Arch package have node 8.5.0 and couch is 2.1.0

When I read blogs about new software and I can't just packagemanager install/update it on I don't really see any more value than living on windows installing exe's from websites.

Every distro I've used except arch has a real case of documentation not living up to what's actually happening. I've used fedora a lot and it's sometimes hard to find current version docs. But what's worse it hard to know if 2+ versions ago docs are ok because that particular bit hasn't changed.

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

#58

Post by AsyncAwait »

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

It's meant as in what packages go in, what DE you use, which mirrors do you pull in from etc. so that you know what is going on in your system, despite this, it still 'just works', that's the beauty of it.

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

#59

Post by KozmoNau7 »

I fell in love with Arch, after having used Gentoo for years, and Debian before that.

The straightforwardness appealed to me, it's a binary distribution with a rolling release cycle and no custom-finagled packages.

But after a while, I got tired of manually configuring everything, doing all kinds of weird house-keeping and having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences. And this was while running the supposedly "stable" update branch. I also got tired of the countless updates that required manual convoluted update procedures and Pacman tricks to function correctly.

Maybe this was because my install was relatively old, and thus had stuff like Pulseaudio and Systemd grafted on top of it, but I never had any issues immediately after those updates.

So around a year ago when Linux Mint 18 was released, I made the switch and I haven't looked back. I know it's a hackneyed phrase, but Everything. Just. Works. I have not had to do anything at all on my refurbed T420, I just installed it, and it just works, it's wonderful.

I cannot be arsed to mess around with configuration files and whatnot on my computers anymore, I have much more interesting things to do than mess around trying to keep my personal computer running correctly.

I was also a hardcore KDE-head for years, but Cinnamon has really grown on me. It does what I need, the way I want it (I grew up on Win9x, so that's the interface style I prefer), without getting bogged down in obscure configurations or arcane frameworks.

Maybe this all marks me as fallen from the ranks of the Linux cognoscenti, but I don't care. I just want to get on with my life. In the same way that I see a lot of people gush about Mac OS, Mint simply gets out of my way and lets me get on with stuff I actually want/need to do.

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

#60

Post by KozmoNau7 »

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,…

"One of the best things about arch is its documentation - specifically its wiki."

I don't know how it is now, it's been about a year since I needed the Arch wiki, but back then it was stuffed full of outdated articles, which were useless or even counterproductive in the context of current package versions.

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