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I stopped using Arch 2-3 years ago because their x86_64 packages were minimal. Was this improved?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
care to shed more light on the subject?
That's really all there was to it. It was about... 2 years ago? I forget what exactly was broken about the packages. But the bug was from upstream and was known to the Arch Devs at the time they OKd the package built upon broken sources to roll out. It got pulled in by just updating the system. I asked what was going on and got directed to a message about it that I didn't fully understand and when I asked, I was told…
I stopped using Arch 2-3 years ago because their x86_64 packages were minimal. Was this improved?
I switched from Ubuntu to Arch on my servers and linux desktops a while back. Here's are the key benefits from my perspective: - shallow mental model: I know where everything is, I know all the moving pieces - pacman: outstanding package manager. - aif: dieter has done a great job making a modular install framework. - AUR: compared to PPAs, AUR is simple and easy to contribute to (both commentary and packages) It rea…
AUR is definitely one of the best thing for me, along with the rolling release scheme, the simplicity and the wiki. But you say you use it on your servers? I'm not sure I would do it because Arch doesn't focus on stablity like Debian does, and sometimes update to core packages can break other packages, so... Not a big deal on your own computer but on a server? I would be happy to know if you have good reasons to use…
I first set up a basic webserver on Linode since they had images for Arch. I was skeptical particularly because I've screwed stuff up on Arch systems during an "aggressive" update.
It's been rock solid and I deal with updates through a basic test methodology. I keep a mirror of the system on a VM and update that first. I am also very conservative about what packages I update.
I'm only running nginx and a couple basic services along with Haskell related packages to update my static website, so I can't speak to anything more complex than that, but I've been very happy so far.
The big advantage for me is the single mental model between my personal and server systems.
I stopped using Arch 2-3 years ago because their x86_64 packages were minimal. Was this improved?
What do you mean by 'minimal'? If you're talking about wine and flash, there are 32 bit builds available to be installed in 64 bit.. But that's the way it has always been.
I recently switched from 32bit Arch to 64bit and it works great so far, multilib included.
I stopped using Arch 2-3 years ago because their x86_64 packages were minimal. Was this improved?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's really all there was to it. It was about... 2 years ago? I forget what exactly was broken about the packages. But the bug was from upstream and was known to the Arch Devs at the time they OKd the package built upon broken sources to roll out. It got pulled in by just updating the system. I asked what was going on and got directed to a message about it that I didn't fully understand and when I asked, I was told…
If I remember the same incident that you're talking about, it was a single file that had to be manually removed, and the fix was displayed right on the home page of http://archlinux.org for months..
And the fix should come in through the right channel, like the package README or ChangeLog. Not sure if the home page of the whole distribution is the appropriate place for a fix like this.
I really like this distribution. Pacman (the package manager) is super fast, the system is much easier to configure from the command line than Ubuntu and the best thing is Arch's documentation. All the information you need to know can be found from the Arch wiki. No need to browse blog posts or forums, the wiki is so good.
My setup is very lightweight. I have only the minimal Arch installation with Xorg and xmonad, vim, RVM and Firefox. This distro is made for command line use and there it really shines.
Here's a screenshot how I want my work desktop to look. Nothing fancy, no distractions and fast usage without mouse. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2402047/screenshot3.png
For me, the best thing about Arch is simply how flexible it is. It feels more like a toolkit for building your own custom OS than anything else. That's obviously not for everyone, but it's definitely for me. I've got a trimmed-down, keyboard-driven, and CLI-focused interface that would not appeal to the average user, but it was fun to configure and I've learned a ton from the experience. My computer behaves exactly the way I want it to, with virtually no compromises, and that was a far easier goal to attain with Arch than with any other system I've tried.
Also, as a bonus for anyone interested in Haskell, there's a rather large Haskell community within the Arch community. In fact, there's a vast user-maintained repository of Haskell packages built for Arch (a large portion of the packages available from Hackage) which you can enable just by adding a line to /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.
For anyone who likes to tweak and tinker, and who loves having full control over their computing experience, I highly recommend it.
