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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)

#141

Post by KozmoNau7 »

erikbye wrote: post #124
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I ran Arch for ~9 years, and there were several cases of OS/boot-breaking updates, requiring me to boot from a USB stick and manually fix things when the updates decided to shit all over the system. Having to manually cross-reference an update list with a list of "oh damn, you need to do these manual steps or you'll break everything" errata from the Arch news feed is not my idea of a good time.

The only reason the Arch forums are so informative, is because people run into stupid issues on a regular basis.

Mint updates itself and gets out of my way. That makes it ideal for actually getting shit done.

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

#142

Post by nextos »

Koshkin wrote: post #128
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…

> 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.)

Why do you prefer Slackware to Arch?

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

#143

Post by KozmoNau7 »

lettergram wrote: post #89

Ive gone through a lot of distros Mint, Ubtuntu, Debian, Fedora, mint (again), Debian (again), etc. However, when I finally got to Arch I did so because I had no choice. I recently bought a new graphics card and it was the only one supporting many of the new features out of the box. The Linux kernel is always up-to-date, and I haven't had an upgrade problem in the 2 years I've been using it. It's been interesting, be…

Arch and Debian use the exact same kernel (Linux...), so they support the exact same hardware.

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

#144

Post by _vufv »

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…

Your criticism is valid, but only temporarily. Lack of the packages in those 2 (in particularly Nix) is because the distro is pretty new in comparison and the community is not nearly as big as the ones of major distros.

On the other end, Nix's way is obviously a future in terms of package-management systems in comparison to the package-managers of the past - to a degree that I haven't seen anyone who read the docs ([1]) saying anything negative about the core ideas - I'd imagine that most people get blown away and become converts.

[1] https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html

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

#145

Post by striking »

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…

There's a difference between running on the [testing] repos, which do what you say, and the regular default repos, which wait for packages to graduate from [testing] before rolling them out.

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

#146

Post by KozmoNau7 »

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…

"Oh it just works, as long as you read the documentation before every update and follow the update news feed, which usually has a bunch of information on packages your either don't use or don't care about. And you may have to fix shit manually. So yeah, it Just Works."

With Mint (or Mac OS or Windows or Ubuntu), it updates automatically. Or if it doesn't, it flashes an icon, I click the icon, it updates for me.

That's what "it just works" means.

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

#147

Post by kochthesecond »

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…

The systemd transition was literally hell and nearly broke me. Took me nearly a year to go back to Arch. But I came back for how easy I can modify aur packages and still have them versioned by pacman.

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

#148

Post by KozmoNau7 »

zdkl wrote: post #79
arc_of_descent wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Arch Linux around 4 years back. I did a routine upgrade and it broke my system. What is this rolling release fiasco? Even Ubuntu, which I use now has a "release" (technically an pt-get upgrade), almost every other day. But I've never had it break my system. If you keep your Ubuntu updated a dist-upgrade works just fine. I might try Arch again, but for now I'm sticking to Ubuntu.

No judgement, I've been in the same place. What you describe sounds like the consequence of installing a lot of packages. Arch "prefers" when you strip it down to what you need , if only because that way you don't need to worry about too many version mismatches.

So if you actually try to use the system for more than a handful of things, it tends to break? That's not very reassuring.

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

#149

Post by andrewflnr »

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.

What kind of bloat does Manjaro have?

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

#150

Post by kazagistar »

lunchables wrote: post #140
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 agree, except for the installation. Manjaro I think would be a great compromise.

For those who don't know, Manjaro is a distro based on arch with a full graphical installer and such. Easy to install Arch.
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