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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)

#101

Post by discreditable »

sevensor wrote: post #86
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #59

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 co…

> 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. Interesting -- this is what I would say about Arch. I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big oppo…

> I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big opportunity for breakage.

I've had a server running for several years on Arch. The systemd transition wasn't bad. I didn't have any custom init scripts to migrate, so it was mostly update & reboot. Arch is a great install once and update forever system. I even migrated my install in-place from x86 to amd64 after upgrading the CPU. There's a wiki article for it! https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Migrating_between_archi...

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

#102

Post by KozmoNau7 »

discreditable wrote: post #88
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #59

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 co…

Regarding Linux Mint, how do you feel about their issues surrounding timely delivery of security updates? https://www.infoworld.com/article/3182824/ Another problem with any Ubuntu-based distro is that packages in Universe don't receive security update support.

I don't see any issues there at all. The update manager specifically lets you choose your update strategy and tells you the risks/benefits of each choice. As far as receiving timely updates, they come straight from Ubuntu/Debian, so Mint is updated exactly as quickly as the mother distros.

I get that there is a lot of hate for Mint because it's not a h4rdc0re h4xx0r distro, but the accusations are simply baseless and often based more in personal convictions than anything else.

If you read the linked Reddit thread, in between the rapid haters, there are a couple of posts that lay it out in a very sensible way. Worst-case a Mint user is going to be a couple of days behind an Ubuntu user. Not exactly the end of the world. If ASAP updates are critical for your systems, you probably shouldn't be running a purely desktop-focused distro anyway.

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

#103

Post by AsyncAwait »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #59

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 co…

> 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

Honestly, this was my experience in the first months with the distro, back in 2011, but then I started feeling like I 'know' Arch, like I understand how to use pacdiff, what news to pay attention to and what commands to run, as well as what not to forget to avoid trouble and honestly, it's been the most stable OS I've known.

So yes, there's a 'bump' you have to overcome with Arch, but once you 'get it', it becomes second nature.

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

#104

Post by zdkl »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #93
zdkl wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that's the point of Arch: teaching new blood to RTFM when it's patchday. You can trivially fubar an arch install by updating your base install+user additions if you're not in the loop with the releases of whatever you installed.

That also makes it a bad distro to choose unless you want to be a hardcore sysadmin and micromanage your personal system. That's generally what distro maintainers are supposed to minimize for the end users. I see people recommending Arch for newbies, who maybe just want to dip their toes. They're figuratively thrown into the deep end, and I just don't think that's a particularly good idea for most people.

Yeah if you're looking for easy and risk free, yiu should stay with windows or mac. OTOH, if you want linux to stop being a black box, install arch. Just don't expect it to be your stable day to day workhorse with no effort.

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

#105

Post by KozmoNau7 »

Wheaties466 wrote: post #91
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #59

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 co…

I felt and feel the same way about Arch. If you are still feeling slightly adventurous I would suggest you try manjaro. It seems to be Arch but with the Mint feel of it just working.

I've used Linux as my primary OS for ~17 years now (Mandrake->Debian->Gentoo->Arch->Mint with a few experiments here and there, eg. Fedora and Elementary). I have absolutely no desire for OS tinkering anymore.

I basically need a web browser and the desktop Spotify client. That takes care of ~95% of my computing needs these days.

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

#106

Post by whois »

teekert wrote: post #96

I also love Arch, the only thing off putting is how hard it its to realize full disc encryption. I used Arch Anywhere but it works only with when choosing bios emulation and full disc encryption didn't work, Antergos makes too many choices for me, the base Arch image is to much work to install (where I have Solus or Ubuntu running in 20 min). I did like it better when they still had their own minimal installer. I don…

I have this wiki page where I documented everything I did to setup my arch system. Disk encryption included: https://github.com/Noah-Huppert/.dotfiles/wiki/System-Instal...

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

#107

Post by KozmoNau7 »

enobrev wrote: post #76
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #59

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 co…

I honestly have this experience with plain Ubuntu, provided I wait at least a month to upgrade (my triple-monitor setup does not play well with brand new releases, but does fine soon after). I have it running on two laptops (which I never have an issue upgrading) and my desktop and I almost never deal with maintenance, nor do I ever want to anymore. I've considered Mint, but even just switching to another "Just Works…

I'm sure Ubuntu delivers the same general experience, I just don't like Unity and what they've doing with their DEs in general.

Ubuntu MATE may be better for me, but I've found myself very comfortable with Cinnamon, so just like you I am not in a hurry to switch distros :-)

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

#108

Post by emsy »

I fell out of love with Arch after the 3rd time I had to fix my system after an update (and this was NOT because I didn't read the release notes). I still very much like Arch's approach, but I'm a bit of a burnt child and won't use it on my main machine.

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

#109

Post by sevensor »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #95
sevensor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can affirm that. I don't understand how Arch gets this reputation for breaking during an upgrade. In the four years I've been using Arch on a variety of systems, I've never had anything break in a way that didn't have a trivial, obvious fix, and most of the time pacman points out potential problems during the upgrade. Arch has allowed me to spend way less time on system administration than I used to before I switch…

Do you understand the difference between Arch and distros like Debian? When GNOME ships a new version, it almost immediately hits the Pacman repos. Do that for every package and you're going to have integration issues. Your users also get to be the guinea pigs for new releases. Ship buggy packages and sooner or later your users' systems will install a critical package with bugs. This is why Arch gets "this reputation…

Right, this is what people always say about Arch. And yet, in practice, on a variety of hardware, I've had nary a problem in the four years I've been using it. Contrast this with big-release distros, where I've literally never had a successful upgrade between major versions. But maybe the key point is in your second sentence. I've never had a problem with Gnome breaking because I have no interest in running a DE, and even on those systems where I've got one installed, I boot to the console and start i3 or sway. If Gnome was broken, I'd never notice.

And this might be the key point: if a package like Gnome is broken, I personally blame the package rather than the OS. I don't see a GUI desktop as integral to the operating system, so when I say that Arch has been trouble-free, I mean that I'm always able to boot to a usable system console and get my work done. So that's my disclaimer, and probably the big reason people shouldn't use Arch: if you rely on a DE, and see the system as broken without one, you're probably going to experience way more breakage than I've reported.

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

#110

Post by DiThi »

Already__Taken wrote: post #57
nextos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 livin…

Nix has node 8.4 in its unstable channel, and it seems very easy to change[0].

I don't know about couch but it has 2.0 and the change to 2.1 shouldn't be big.

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/c699694cbf4400480fe4...

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