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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)

#241

Post by AsyncAwait »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #231
AsyncAwait wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a lot more updates on Arch that require manual actions to be taken in order to work correctly, when compared to Mint or Ubuntu. Similarly, the config file merging process on Arch is basically 100% manual (I know pacdiff makes it a little easier, but still).

> There are a lot more updates on Arch that require manual actions to be taken in order to work correctly, when compared to Mint or Ubuntu.

There's more, but I don't think a lot more. Also, if the automatic config in Ubuntu fails you, it's a lot harder to get in and manually override their settings.

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

#242

Post by Tajnymag »

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?

google-drive-ocamlfuse: for simple fuse access to Google Drive

firefox-dev: as someone else has already mentioned Firefox Nightly

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

#243

Post by tscs37 »

I'm personally quite in love with Arch on my Desktop machine.

It's an almost pure developer setup, I quite regularly install bleeding edge (-git from AUR) of various software, I tinker around. Arch makes that rather easy.

When something goes wrong, I can usually rather easily tell what just exploded, it's kind of like when you have build yourself a car and now you can tell by the hum of the engine how much oil it has.

Though there are some issues with it; most notably, I hold back the kernel for a long time because updating the kernel is always a bit of a hassle and sometimes you need manual interventions, which you can easily be notified of via email and RSS in advance.

On the other hand, my servers all run either CentOS7 or up-to-date Ubuntu Server installs, I'm not that in love with Arch.

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

#244

Post by axaxs »

erikbye wrote: post #233
axaxs wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/4uzev2/antergos_...

Antergos installs arch. It has a repo to provide certain packages that aren't provided by Arch repos.

Support I agree with. If you have a problem installing Antergos or one of its packages, ask us, not the arch forums.

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

#245

Post by zamber »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #234
zamber wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eno…

I've updated both my desktop and my laptop from 18 to 18.1 to 18.2 with absolutely no issues at all. Or are you talking about major versions?

Yep, though I've been upgrading that system since Mint 14 (with Cinnamon). Compared to Arch the maintenance cost is orders of magnitude lower. Compared to Ubuntu (2y, at work, upgraded from 16.04 LTS -> 16.10) it feels higher mainly because stuff is less tested and can also break with regular updates (unless they fixed their workflow to remedy that).

- For mortal-level usage -> Ubuntu

- For mortal-level usage when you don't like Ubuntu -> Mint

- For Linux junkies -> Arch

EDIT - formatting

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

#246

Post by mcgrath_sh »

I have been running Arch for 9 months. The only re-install I had to do was when I wiped the drive completely to get rid of the Windows partition. I have been running that install for about 7 months now. I have not had a single breakage. Granted, I am probably a light user (XFCE, lots of Docker containers, a couple other small programs), but I have never had a breakage. I -Syu once a week or every other week.

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

#247

Post by chmln »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #235
erikbye wrote: post #26

I'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.

Seriously? Arch has always been "works now, breaks every couple of weeks in a spectacular and time consuming way" for me. It reminds me of my Gentoo days when I was a student and had time to burn on endless sessions of configurations and debugging. Every few years I let some avid fan convince me that it has gotten really better. Always ending in the same time consuming nightmare. When I was a freelancer, that time wa…

What exactly breaks for you every couple of weeks?

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

#248

Post by int_19h »

jwilk wrote: post #115
int_19h wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the biggest point in favor of Arch is that it is a binary distro that seems to be closest to "vanilla" - meaning that packages are generally built directly from upstream, without heavy distro-specific patchsets applied by maintainers. There's still plenty of patches, mind you, but they're usually there to ensure that it builds and installs correctly in Arch environment, not to change functionality. I also fin…

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

At the point where that was done, there was no formalized convention on it. Arch maintainers decided that it's preferable to default to the latest and greatest (which seems to be the general policy, and it meshes well with a bleeding-edge rolling release IMO). It was a mistake for Python specifically because of idiosyncrasies of Python 2 vs 3 story, and they have since corrected that mistake.

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

#249

Post by saghm »

lunchables wrote: post #140
sevensor wrote: post #86

Earlier 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 agree, except for the installation. Manjaro I think would be a great compromise.

Personally, I prefer dealing with Arch's installation process to other distros. Most graphical installers I've used are extraordinarily inflexible with filesystem options, e.g. dual-booting with full-disk encryption or full-disk-encryption with a non-ext4 filesystem.

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

#250

Post by saghm »

nextos wrote: post #49
s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #18

I 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…

> While I love Arch's ethos, I think the next step in distributions is to embrace declarative configuration, non-destructive actions and reproducible packages. NixOS & GuixSD provide this. And luckily there's still a lot of Arch ethos in their implementations. Namely, that your base system is totally barebones and you need to add (declare!) whatever you want to have.

Probably the only reason I haven't given NixOS a chance beyond fiddling with it for a day or two is that I can't run binaries that weren't built from nix packages. I understand that this is essentially the whole point of the distro, but there are some times when using a downloaded binary is essentially unavoidable for me, so I'd love to be able to just say "let me use this binary, and I'll accept the fact that it'll get removed if I ever rebuild my system from scratch or go back to a previous build (even one that was built after I installed it)". It's possible that this is feasible but I just don't know how to do it, but unfortunately it's somewhat of a dealbreaker for me.

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