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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)

#211

Post by mezuzza »

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…

I've used Arch since at least 2011 and I know exactly what you're talking about. When I first started using it, it had the stupid blue install script (pacstrap was it?).

Around that time, I had to reinstall arch ~4 times for some reason or another. It was not a great experience. It made me learn a lot of Linux stuff just to keep it up and hitting `pacman -Syyu` was always a scary thing to do. You could never hit yes to prompts without first going to archlinux.org first to make sure that there was no arcane ceremony to conduct before you upgraded your system (I probably know enough now that it would no longer be arcane, but, hey, we all have to start from nothing).

My experience since around 2014 has been drastically different. Things have been incredibly stable and I've never had to reinstall arch in the past 3 years. I don't really know what caused the change - maybe it was just maturity - but I do welcome it and working on arch has been amazing. I'm saying this not to convince you to go back, but to allay others' fears that Arch is unapproachable or impossible to deal with. At this point, it's still a hard Linux to work with, but it's no harder than any Linux in which you have to work on the command line.

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

#212

Post by CJefferson »

fyskij wrote: post #6
CJefferson wrote: post #2

I 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.

Here you go: https://antergos.com/ In opposition to Manjaro (which is an Arch fork), Antergos is Arch + install GUI with default desktop env.

Thanks, I will give it a try!

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

#213

Post by striking »

rantanplan wrote: post #54
Latty wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant more as in "as someone wanting to use something", rather than the security aspect. Most AUR packages I have seen have been incredibly easy to read - if you really don't want to use them, it's still a good framework for making your own packages much more easily, so you can install from source without dumping unmanaged stuff into your system.

I think Debian has a better process in which they vet packagers. It's a bit more tedious but I'd put my trust more easily in such a system. > Most AUR packages I have seen have been incredibly easy to read It's not about quality, but rather more about quantity. I don't have the time to vet every package.

Vetting a package is as easy as reading through its PKGBUILD. Here's a sample one: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=pacau...

makepkg pulls source files and possibly patches, and then compiles them and installs them according to the instructions. It makes life simple.

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

#215

Post by rhinoceraptor »

pavanky wrote: post #198
Thaxll wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm running linux-lts on my kaby lake i7-7700k and it works fine. I haven't used linux-lts in the past, but I opted to do a ZFS on root install so I wanted it to be more stable.

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

#216

Post by bbv-if »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #71
bbv-if wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To name a few: when systemd was introduced; when there were changes made to the file structure (moving everything to /usr); when kde4 was replaced with kde5. And there were more issues, I just don't remember all of them. Reading the news before the update could have helped sometimes but I don't do that every time I execute `pacman -Syu` for various reasons; and sometimes problems are unexpected or just bugs fixed on…

I will second this, I faced these exact same issues, for the same reasons. If you don't subscribe to the Arch news feed, you're taking a chance on every upgrade, that your system will not boot correctly.

For me, a simple alert "Hey, this update can break things, do you know what you're doing?" in case of a risky update would be enough.

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

#217

Post by axaxs »

erikbye wrote: post #28
towb wrote: post #24

I was using Arch with bspwm for a few years, until ~a month ago when I wanted a clean system. But this time I wasn't up for the whole installation process. I know what I need, I know how to do it, and I can do it pretty fast. But it is still a lot, so this time I went with Antergos. I had this idea that using Arch with a minimal window manager and nothing more would keep me off distractions from annoying UI features,…

Why didn't you just use Arch-Anywhere? https://arch-anywhere.org/ Besides, the manual installation process of Arch does not consist of that many steps; it takes but a few minutes (perhaps not the first time). To shorten it further you can write your own installation script or use extant ones, of which there are many (Arch-Anywhere being one). I harp on Arch-Anywhere because Antergos != Arch and Arch > Antergos and ot…

Antergos IS Arch, depending on how you look at it. It's not like the Ubuntu->Debian relationship. Installing Antergos gives you a fully functional Arch install.

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

#218

Post by lettergram »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #143
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.

Except, Debian doesn't regularly release updates for theirs - where Arch is always up-to-date.

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

#219

Post by axaxs »

CJefferson wrote: post #2

I 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.

Antergos dev here. Come give it a try, that's exactly what our initial goal was (in cinnarch). If you have any questions, or run into issues, please try out the forums or file an issue in Github. The community and devs are super helpful (excluding myself in that statement).

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

#220

Post by zamber »

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…

From my 4 years with Mint on a light usage PC I can say is no better than a rolling release. The main difference is that you can be sure Mint will break after a version upgrade. Arch on the other hand will make you copy/paste wiki issue solutions after each update. Also there's systemd, netctl, choosing a DE, etc. Also there's no way to reliably do non-interactive updates on Arch because otherwise it's not secure enough (I guess?).
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