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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)

#171

Post by honestoHeminway »

a3n wrote: post #66
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…

Similar Mint fan. I used Arch for awhile, and enjoyed learning how FDE and other things work (because I had to), but it's nice not to have to. My only concern with Mint is, what happens when Ubuntu goes away or becomes nonviable as a distro base? Canonical seems intent on making Ubuntu cool in some area, and even more intent on monetizing Ubuntu, and there's a risk that their pivots, and forward and back steps, could…

I know its a little early, but what are the ubuntu plans for AR?

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

#172

Post by calcifer »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #167
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

Hi, I'm the maintainer of that package! Unlike building from source [1], that package uses the official binary distribution and is not MIT licensed. So it might be a better idea to move the source build [1] to [community].

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

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

#173

Post by Koshkin »

nextos wrote: post #142
Koshkin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

1) Absolute stability (in my experience).

2) No dependency hell (you do not install what you will never use; one could use pkgsrc, if desired).

3) Does not use the rolling release paradigm (with the need to stay up to date, more or less, in order to avoid breaking the system).

4) More minimalist, saner feel. (It has to be more minimalist, as the maintenance team is small.)

5) No systemd (so far; not that I care much, but still feels nice).

6) Good community support.

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

#174

Post by KozmoNau7 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #157
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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'…

a. There's no need to 'read the documentation' before every update a quick glance at the news feed will do. b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system. c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in s…

"a. There's no need to 'read the documentation' before every update a quick glance at the news feed will do."

That is part of the documentation. Users shouldn't have to subscribe to a news feeds in order to correctly update their systems. Do you subscribe to Microsoft's or Apple's update news feed? If you do, you're unlike 99.999% of users.

"b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system."

Mint does. Ubuntu does. A large number of other desktop-oriented distros do, without requiring their users to read news feeds for instructions on manual procedures.

"c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad."

Shit happens. Shit just seems to happen a lot more often on Arch (and Gentoo, for that matter).

"d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch."

I used Arch for ~9 years. I've had systems where it worked fine, and systems that required a lot of fiddling to work.

In contrast, Mint and Ubuntu has worked flawlessly, on those same systems.

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

#175

Post by KozmoNau7 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #161
j7ake wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because that's perfectly reasonable to expect. After all, everyone has a git repo, right?

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

#176

Post by auxym »

pizza234 wrote: post #162
auxym wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was not able to update anything anymore due to some complex dependency problem that could not be resolved and seemed to be circular. This happened twice with Ubuntu and another debian-based distro.

Granted, I admit I mess around a bit with debian sources. I sometimes pin things, and often times pull packages from sid or unoffficial repos to get fresher versions.

With arch though, packages are always fresh, and the AUR has always worked well for me when I needed something not in the official repo. No issue so far.

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

#177

Post by styren »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #175
AsyncAwait wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because that's perfectly reasonable to expect. After all, everyone has a git repo, right?

Oh okey, dropbox then? Do you mean we can not assume that arch users have a way to store away their config files?

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

#178

Post by Ig0rK »

Archlinux based distros are cool, until updating to a supposed "stable package" and the system is broken and you have to solve it to be able to boot again. When this happens the 3rd time you just give up on rolling releases and move onto something like Debian for stability.

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

#180

Post by jwilk »

bartkmq wrote: post #160
jwilk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making /usr/bin/python point to Python 3 doesn't sound very vanilla to me.

He defines 'vanilla' to mean 'build from upstream with little distro-specific changes'. So what does this have to do with making Python 3 the default python interpreter? I bet this symlink is not even part of the python source code; it's always a choice made by the distro maintainers. Arch is known to be always cutting edge even if this sometimes means breaking stuff so this decision is not exactly surprising.

Removing an API that vast majority of Python programs were using (at that time), and replacing it with something incompatible is not a "little distro-specific change".
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