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?
plymouth
Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
191–200 of 284 posts
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#192The post is from 2015. Since then the abs tool has been deprecated (use asp from AUR instead) and the i686 version is nearing end of life and will be unsupported by November 2017. If you still need 32-bit Arch Linux, you can use archlinux32 [1]. 1: https://archlinux32.org
abs has been deprecated, yes. But asp has been promoted to [extra]
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#193I've been a Linux user since early Slackware. Arch is the only distro I will recommend, and, contrary to its image as a tinkerer's distro, it's the only Linux install I've had that "just works" and works. Install once, and never again. Minimal, stable. Packages are updated promptly, and I never had a problem using user repo packages.
You're recommending a rolling distro? I remember some people at work using Arch they did it for couple of month and then switch back to Ubuntu because random things would break afters updates, dhcp, printing, X server ect ... Arch is great for home / hack stuff, for work you want something stable.
In my experience this is no longer the case, anecdotal of course.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#194Does Arch still releases unsigned packages? remember that in the old days that was my deal breaker but surely for a desktop pc is miles better than Ubuntu.
Everything is signed these days. The current goal nowdays is reproducable builds.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#195I like arch Linux, I just wish they had a simple installer -- these days I tend to have lots of vms hanging around, and I haven't found a super simple way of making a quick arch VM. There doesn't seem to be any official vagrant boxes for example. I can believe the lack of a simple installer is what has kept the quality up -- it is a way of signalling users should be prepared to use the terminal.
Arch Anywhere. https://arch-anywhere.org/
Please don't recommend Arch Anywhere. It uses an unsigned package repo as part of their install.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#196I 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…
>manual convoluted update procedures and Pacman tricks to function correctly
Maybe it's just me, but I've never had to do this once in the past two years (since I started using Arch). Literally every single update has been perfect.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#197I fell in love with Arch about 5 years ago. I use it every day as my daily work machine: One of the best things about arch is its documentation - specifically its wiki. Arch lets you start off with a fairly simple installation, but you always have the option of moving off the beaten path and doing something different. It's that flexibility which allows people to create arch installs with a very low memory footprint,…
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…
>NixOS & GuixSD provide this.
Yes, as a decade+ user of Arch, these two are the only new distros that have made me consider switching, sort of waiting for some spare time (like a free weekend) to give each of them a try.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#198I've been a Linux user since early Slackware. Arch is the only distro I will recommend, and, contrary to its image as a tinkerer's distro, it's the only Linux install I've had that "just works" and works. Install once, and never again. Minimal, stable. Packages are updated promptly, and I never had a problem using user repo packages.
You're recommending a rolling distro? I remember some people at work using Arch they did it for couple of month and then switch back to Ubuntu because random things would break afters updates, dhcp, printing, X server ect ... Arch is great for home / hack stuff, for work you want something stable.
I have been using archlinux for close to a decade now. Updates were never a problem as much as people make it out to be. But even then I don't notice as many issues since I switched to an LTS kernel on my machines.
If your hardware is old enough, I recommend using the LTS kernel and kernel modules.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#199Earlier 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.
I did a reinstall recently of Arch and the only thing I did was to copy the user folder from my old computer to the new one. Everything worked out of the box.
Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
#200Earlier 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've done that a couple of times over the years, on Debian systems. Largely as a result of moving from UML->KVM.
This is roughly the guide I followed, which has existed for a good few years.