I fell in love with arch for a year. Then a system update broke glibc. Then I gave up. (2012)
Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
181–190 of 284 posts
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Cool, yeah, definitely looks like a better package for inclusion. Thanks for maintaining the package!
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly have this experience with plain Ubuntu, provided I wait at least a month to upgrade (my triple-monitor setup does not play well with brand new releases, but does fine soon after). I have it running on two laptops (which I never have an issue upgrading) and my desktop and I almost never deal with maintenance, nor do I ever want to anymore. I've considered Mint, but even just switching to another "Just Works…
I'm sure Ubuntu delivers the same general experience, I just don't like Unity and what they've doing with their DEs in general. Ubuntu MATE may be better for me, but I've found myself very comfortable with Cinnamon, so just like you I am not in a hurry to switch distros :-)
I've been giving Ubuntu MATE a try for a couple weeks, and with the "Redmond" panel style it's pretty much frictionless for me.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#184Void Linux[1] has a lot of the upsides of Arch, and many general similarities. It feels "lighter", though, adopts LibreSSL by default, has a different package manager, and is systemd-free. Most of the Arch wiki (which is a great asset) is more directly applicable to it than to e.g. Debian.
[1]: https://voidlinux.eu
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#185Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Ar…
YMMV.
Mint packages tend to be quite old, even older than Ubuntu. This is no good if you want to run close to, or, upstream versions, which Arch excels at. Of course, you can install software not using your package manager, but that defeats the point of having centralized package management in the first place and can cause problems.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
But the perception that "shit happens way more on Arch or Gentoo" is your subjective opinion, because that's how it happened to you, others see it differently, I still remember the very first Ubuntu I've tried (6.10) being garbage on my hw compared to Mandrake, but that didn't seem to be the case for a lot of people evidently since it became so popular.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#188Volunteer 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?
Another Arch user here - thanks for your work! A few packages that I'd like to see brought over from the AUR would be git-cola (Git GUI), corebird (Gtk Twitter app), and tilix (Gtk terminal with advanced features).
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#189Earlier 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 switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big opportunity for breakage. I experienced that transition and while you had to read the wiki somewhat carefully, I remember being a bit 'disappointed' afterwards as to how smooth/uneventful it was, it sounded way more scary than it actually was.
Well, just yesterday, I had to go back a release from Ubuntu 17.04 to 16.04 because of some oscure DNS related systemd-resolved bug which I spent all day trying to fix.
Mind you, this bug has been under active discussion for a while now.
Since my 16.04 server is just a day old now, I'm thinking I'll bite the bullet and switch to a troublefree distro recommended in this thread.
(Not a Linux cognoscenti.)
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#190I 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?
Last time I did the research there wasn't a striiiictly better alternative to systemd, which is rather unfortunate. There are flame wars beyond number on the subject and I'd rather avoid starting another one. For my two cents: I don't like how it's gobbling up all the functionality that used to be owned by separately maintained and tried/tested processes, in a way that seems to limit my ability to put together a minimalistic system, and the developers' attitude toward security and how they've handled criticism is not so great. I'll use it, but I don't like it.
For me, there are ecosystem/adoption reasons for why any alternative is a tough sell - any distro basically has to have the startup system baked into their package manager, if you're going to be able to install packages that depend on daemons, etc. So if updated package availability is a concern (and it is for me), I need a popular enough distro. And basically all the popular distros use systemd. So unless I want to make some pretty big compromises or do a ton of work, I'm stuck with it.