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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)

#161

Post by AsyncAwait »

j7ake wrote: post #134
Hello71 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also keep your configs in git and just pull.

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

#162

Post by pizza234 »

auxym wrote: post #78
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…

The main reason I stay away from anything debian based these days is apt. I've been stuck in apt-hell a few too many times. Antergos (arch-based) seems to be treating me well.

What do you refer to apt-hell exactly? I've been using Ubuntu for years, and I can't remember any problem with the package manager.

The apt-related annoyance is that some PPAs don't carry updated packages (for all the recent Ubuntu versions), but has nothing to do with apt itself.

Maybe you refer to distro upgrades? To be fair I have little experience with those, as I never upgrade, only perform fresh installs.

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

#163

Post by ausjke »

In the old days I played with gentoo, linux-from-scratch, redhat, debain,ubuntu,slackware, even *BSDs...you name it. I was young and had time then. Nowadays I settle down on ubuntu for the desktop, Debian for the server. That's it. Good enough for everything I need, so I can focus more on the stuff I need develop instead. It is also easier to coordinate with teams.

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

#164

Post by catpolice »

I used to love Arch wholeheartedly. The systemd transition left a bad taste in my mouth, and I haven't felt like I've had full control of my system since then, but I periodically try other Linux distributions but I always end up coming back to Arch. My experience with other distributions always goes something like this:

Oh this is nice and easy

Hm, there isn't a package for this thing I love. I guess I'll build it myself...

[Several hours pass]

Ok, looks like I just need to get XYZ working and I'm good, lemme google how to do that for this distro

It looks like this is automatically configured using some Windows-style control panel hidden somewhere. Google suggests seven different places I could look for this option, corresponding to previous versions of the distro...

Wouldn't editing a config in /etc/ be easier than this? I'm reinstalling Arch...

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

#165

Post by keenerd »

tgummerer wrote: post #111

> It just works and during all these years my system was never left broken after an update I find that very hard to believe. While I am still running Arch (gotta love those shiny new features), updates did break something minor fairly frequently due to occasionally incompatible updates, e.g. a missing symbol in a shared object. Luckily there was only one time where something major broke which took me a few hours to f…

> updates did break something minor fairly frequently due to occasionally incompatible updates, e.g. a missing symbol in a shared object.

That should never happen with official packages and full updates. I've seen it happen maybe twice in 10 years and it was fixed within an hour.

If you shoot your foot off by performing a partial update (pacman -Sy foo bar baz) or forget to rebuild your AUR packages, then it might happen. But that is on you, not the distro.

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

#166

Post by anotherevan »

I love Arch, personally. Have been using it for quite a few years now as my desktop and love the rolling release paradigm.

That said, when setting up machines for others I pick the current LTS release of Kubuntu and install unattended-upgrades to ensure security updates get maintained. It provides a much better ongoing maintenance story for machines that are less "pets" and more "tools".

§

Due to a disk crash, I recently had to reinstall Arch for the first time in quite a few years. IMO the install process has become more opaque. I seem to remember the wiki use to have a newbie install guide which was really helpful and explained a lot of things as you go, or at least what the common practices were or the pros and cons of different options. That seems to be gone and anything that may be an opinion seems to be excised from any install instructions, and you're left to stumble around different pages a lot more, which is a bit of a shame.

I guess that's were arch anywhere and similar ones mentioned may have filled the gap. I will have to try them out.

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

#167

Post by AsyncAwait »

keenerd wrote: post #156

Volunteer from Arch Linux here. I ask this whenever a big thread comes up: are there any packages in the AUR that you'd really like to see be made into an official package?

Hi, Arch user here, thanks for your work.

I'd love to see VSCode[1] in the official repos, Atom is there and VSCode is arguably becoming even more popular now.

1 - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/visual-studio-code

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

#168

Post by vortico »

Doesn't look like this has been mentioned, but the package names in Arch are beautifully done. No more `libwhatever-2dev` or `whatever9.6-libs`. Just `whatever` and everything you need is installed. That package manager is also one of the fastest of all the distros I've tried.

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

#169

Post by levesque »

catpolice wrote: post #164

I used to love Arch wholeheartedly. The systemd transition left a bad taste in my mouth, and I haven't felt like I've had full control of my system since then, but I periodically try other Linux distributions but I always end up coming back to Arch. My experience with other distributions always goes something like this: Oh this is nice and easy Hm, there isn't a package for this thing I love. I guess I'll build it my…

So what is the issue with systemd? Any strictly better alternative out there?
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