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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)

#121

Post by nwah1 »

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…

Arch and Debian are both working on reproducible packages, but Debian is much further along in that process.

Arch build scripts are great, insofar as the entire packaging steps are open source and standardized, which in theory should make reproducibility easier.

I agree that Nix and Guix are superior in concept, but they don't seem production-ready.

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

#122

Post by jiggunjer »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #69
jiggunjer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 does indeed 'just work', it only doesn't if you fail to understand what rolling release means. There is usually a painless way to upgrade even after a long time, you just have to use pacdiff and read archlinux.org a bit more carefully than if you update daily/weekly. Also, how d…

When's the last time you had to read documentation to update your Mac? To most people "it just works" means crash free and hassle free, i.e. your grandma can use it. I never said it was inappropriate for Apple, though it was often implied competetitors don't "just work".

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

#123

Post by Hello71 »

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…

This sounds suspiciously to me like "I rewrote my program in new language and it was 20% faster and 200% easier!" in that yes, your new experience may be better, but that's not necessarily attributable to the new language/operating system, but instead that you just got rid of all the old cruft. It's entirely possible (and sounds to me likely, based on your story) that you could have just reinstalled Arch with the same positive effects.

Also, you may have lost features in the process. For example, if you rewrote your C program in Python, the code may be much cleaner, but also much slower. If you didn't need it to be fast in the first place, that might be a good compromise for you. If you did need speed, then making the Python program faster might require complicated work, like C FFI, and you might have been better off staying with the original C. Comparably, Arch's PKGBUILD makes packaging new programs very easy, whereas despite having spent a number of hours trying, I still do not understand Debian's packaging format(s). If you rarely use uncommon programs, that may not be an issue for you.

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

#124

Post by erikbye »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #94
skummetmaelk wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pacman -Syu a day keeps the doctor away. As long as you remember to check the website for manual intervention requirements....

Which is exactly my point. Put off updating for a couple of weeks because you're got better things to do? You may end up borking your system unwittingly. Not subscribed to the Arch news feed and intimately familiar with the packages installed on your system? You may end up borking your system unwittingly. Arch is good for dedicated power users, who want to tinker around. But most of us just want to get stuff done, no…

Stop perpetuating this myth that you have to mess around and tinker to keep Arch in working condition. It's one update command, and it's not something you need to do daily. You can put it off for weeks, all that will happen is you'll have a bigger download.

I use Arch exactly because I want to get shit done. My way.

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

#125

Post by AsyncAwait »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #113
AsyncAwait wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I honestly cannot remember how long I had Arch installed on my main system, but I replaced it with Mint about a year ago, and I have files in my home folder dating back to 2007, so give or take around 9 years. So I would definitely say I "got it", but I just couldn't be arsed to do it anymore. I'm not really into unpaid sysadmin work :-)

Yeah, sure, what I meant by 'get it' is not how long have you been using the system, (I still don't get Windows), but whether you connected with the way the developers meant it to be used, i.e. if it became second nature.

I am just sharing an experience that I had it similar, but not anymore, I definitely don't find it requiring sysadmin amount of work to maintain, my daily routine is: read archlinux.org, pacman -Syu, pacdiff, very occasional manual step that took me 5mins - I know it may not be like that for everyone, but not everybody also has the issues you described, is my point.

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

#126

Post by trevordixon »

kristerv wrote: post #119

For beginners https://antergos.com/ is a clean version of Arch just with a simple installer. So you get all the benefits of Arch with no bloat (like Manjaro) and don't have to learn installing the OS manually.

I may try that next time. I'm a beginner and used https://arch-anywhere.org/ to install. It was as easy for me as installing Ubuntu.

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

#127

Post by crocowhile »

jiggunjer wrote: post #44
crocowhile wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do understand your point of view. Technology hardly ever "just works". Probably the only device that never went guru meditation on me is my microwave.

Having said this, when it comes to updates, archlinux is really orders of magnitudes more efficient than any other distro I have ever tried.

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

#128

Post by Koshkin »

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…

> the simplest possible

I find Slackware easier to install. (IMHO, it's the sanest distribution of all. I have used many of them but kept coming back to Slackware.)

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

#129

Post by bartkmq »

I'm a big fan of the Arch User Repository (AUR). But Arch itself takes too long to configure and breaks from time to time so I switched to Manjaro which is based on Arch but has its own repos with more config files already prepared for you. Also it's not rolling release but updates once a week which allows the maintainers to check for errors before they reach the users.

Because of the AUR I actually think Manjaro can be more user friendly than distros like Ubuntu. While using Ubuntu I remember constantly having to deal with PPAs which were broken/outdated after every update. On Manjaro I can just hit 'Install' in the GUI and don't have to worry about PPAs. I even found a package specific to my university that sets up the Wlan and other things. On Ubuntu finding such an unknown, rarely used package would be much harder.

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

#130

Post by teekert »

whois wrote: post #106
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...

Thanx, I will try and follow your steps. At the moment I'm having a short affair with Solus (Budgie although I prefer their Mate implementation I didn't get acpi working there) which may turn into a full relationship by the looks of things. But if she lets me down Arch is always there for me.
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