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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)

#131

Post by adrusi »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #114
sevensor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thought Arch was easy, and then I tried an actual mature well thought out desktop distro ;-)

I tried Debian about a year ago hoping to share your insight, but I discovered that if I wanted to understand how to configure some piece of software, I had to look at both the Debian documentation and the upstream documentation for it, and I found that creating custom packages was harder, or at least harder to learn (when I made my first arch package, it took me less than an hour to figure out how ABS works, and packaging a deb seemed much more arcane). I stuck with it for a month, but ultimately found it to be an inferior experience.

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

#132

Post by tbrock »

blux wrote: post #117

I have been using Arch both for my work and private desktop for about ten years now. It is an absolute joy to work with. The biggest drawback is the very occasional breakage after doing a system upgrade. I would estimate such an upgrade breaks the system once or twice every year on average, although everything is much more stable for the last few years. I upgrade my system at least once per week. Overall, highly reco…

Subscribe to the breakages mailing list and this will never happen again. Will get <10 emails a year.

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

#133

Post by jryan49 »

I love Arch Linux. I'd say though there is a huge learning curve before you become comfortable/productive. However, in the end it's the most comfortable, because you are pretty aware how most things work, especially if you like to heavily customize things.

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

#134

Post by j7ake »

Hello71 wrote: post #123
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 sam…

Reinstalling arch Linux means that you have to reconfigure everything. Arch does not work right out of the box.

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

#135

Post by bartkmq »

sevensor wrote: post #112
discreditable wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The…

> I even migrated my install in-place from x86 to amd64 after upgrading the CPU My hat is off to you -- I would have guessed that wasn't possible!

I guess that's the magic of the Arch Wiki¹. Even if not using Arch I often find it far more useful and up-to-date than the wiki of my own distributions (Ubuntu and Manjaro).

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Migrating_between_archi...

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

#136

Post by megous »

blux wrote: post #117

I have been using Arch both for my work and private desktop for about ten years now. It is an absolute joy to work with. The biggest drawback is the very occasional breakage after doing a system upgrade. I would estimate such an upgrade breaks the system once or twice every year on average, although everything is much more stable for the last few years. I upgrade my system at least once per week. Overall, highly reco…

That's probably very system dependent and usage dependent. I've been running a desktop workstation with Arch for 11 years, and experienced serious breakage (kernel didn't boot) perhaps once and some annoyances a few times (systemd migration, freetype2 rendering changes, wayland becoming somehow default and being hard to change back to Xorg). The bulk of the issues is with a need to manually upgrade non-desktop software. (PostgreSQL migrations between major versions, that need to be planned more carefully, etc.) Pacdiff helps greatly here, for config updates, too.

Over 11 years I've done only one re-install when moving to SSD. (It was not really necessary, I could have just as well copied rootfs content over and be done with it. But I wanted a clean slate after 7 years or so.) No need for big upgrades is absolutely the biggest benefit of Arch Linux for me. Understanding and being able to fix stuff myself is another one. Close second is makepkg/PKGBUILDs being simplicity itself and a joy to work with. And then wiki/docs.

Though, I was a Slackware and Linux From Scratch user before Arch, so I might be blind to things that other people would call breakage. :]

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

#137

Post by catnaroek »

Here is why I use Arch Linux:

(0) I'm somewhere at the middle in the spectrum between a noob and a power user. My parents think of me as the latter, but most technically competent people I've met think of me as the former.

(1) I'm lazy when it comes to computer stuff: If I'm given a bare-bones system, I won't bother installing and configuring more than is strictly necessary to start getting work done (not necessarily in the most efficient way). And conversely, if I'm given a bloated system, I won't bother removing what I don't need to use. Even worse, I often end up rationalizing that “I might need it someday”.

(2) I want stuff to both just work and be easy to understand. Alas, software that works automagically is usually complex, so a compromise is needed. The compromise I've settled for is that I'm willing to put just enough effort into learning from online guides and fora, so long as I'm not confronted with too much complexity. If I can't learn how to configure your software in 30 minutes, I won't use it. (The only exception is Emacs.)

Arch fits my needs pretty nicely: It provides good defaults for the low-level system stuff that I don't want to bother learning, and it provides no defaults whatsoever for the user-facing stuff that I do want to control.

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

#138

Post by KozmoNau7 »

Hello71 wrote: post #123
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 sam…

Sure, I could have reinstalled Arch, but 1) that sort of breaks the whole "install once, update forever" ideal many Arch proponents trot out, and 2) that would still require me to install everything manually, set up the base system manually, fiddle around with config files and so on.

In comparison, to install Mint, I popped in the USB stick, ran the installer and that was it. The most complicated thing was the partition manager, and only because I have four hard drives and a Windows partition to take into account.

And that was it, 20 minutes and I was up and running on a desktop with a browser, with automatic updates, and every driver working correctly.

That's what I want from my computer these days. I want it to work for me.

I'm not a kernel hacker, I'm not even a developer (aside from some monitoring scripts at work). I want my web browser and my media player and my various little utility apps. I have no desire to be a sysadmin, I've been there and done that, and now I find it a waste of time.

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

#139

Post by KozmoNau7 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #125
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't get me wrong, I definitely get the Arch way of doing things, if that's what you like and how you want your system to work.

My daily routine was exactly the same as yours, except I experienced several boot-breaking errors over the years, where I had to spend hours getting my system running again. I consider that a waste of time.

In contrast, Mint takes care of itself, which leaves me to get on with my life in peace.

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

#140

Post by lunchables »

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 agree, except for the installation. Manjaro I think would be a great compromise.
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