> Liam Proven Tue 15 Mar 2022 // 10:25 UTC
Yep, that's me. Surprised but happy to see this resurface now.
Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
11–20 of 153 posts
Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
#12Small? No. Simple? No. Great documentation? Yes.
>Great documentation? Yes. Compared to BSD's, mediocre and subject to dramatic changes by nature.
I disagree, actually. (For clarity, I wrote this article, 9 months ago.)
This year I have done short reviews of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. IMHO the docs for Arch are more helpful than any of theirs.
Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
#13Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
#14Small? No. Simple? No. Great documentation? Yes.
Small is relative. Small compared to most Linux distros, macOS and Windows. You also have to remember most installers have a lot of packages that may never be used in the user installs. If you're installing KDE then don't expect it to be tiny but using Sway you'll get a pretty minimal but fully functional WM without the bloat unless you pull in a package that has a large dependency graph.
Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Great documentation? Yes. Compared to BSD's, mediocre and subject to dramatic changes by nature.
I disagree, actually. (For clarity, I wrote this article, 9 months ago.) This year I have done short reviews of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. IMHO the docs for Arch are more helpful than any of theirs.
How short?
help #in the terminal.
man afterboot
Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
#16While some may see it as a learning tool I have used Arch on my workstations for 14 years. The last time I remember having to manually fix things was when it migrated to systemd. I am a linux sysadmin so I might be biased but I think people overestimate the effort required to get exactly what you want and nothing more out of an Arch setup.
Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
#17Small? No. Simple? No. Great documentation? Yes.
Care to elaborate in a sentence or two? I mean, I have a decent idea who you are, so I think you have some authority on things Linux - but I'm curious regarding your reasoning :)
I think especially the metrics for "simple" are very use(r) dependent. Simple for you or me means something entirely different than e.g. my Grandma (who has no computer). Personally I run four Linux machines, so they're customized anyway and "simple" for me means "I understand everything that's installed, because I installed and configured it". Someone running 4000 machines would probably have a slightly different opinion on what's "simple".
Small, well, it's not an embedded Linux with a small libc and -Os for sure. But I never felt Arch bloated.
Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
#18What I really like about Arch is how minimal & fast it can be without resorting to 'exotic' software or libraries. I recently installed Archlinux32 on an old Pentium II machine just for the fun of it and was pleasantly surprised that it still feels reasonably responsive (I didn't get X11 to work yet though as the GPU driver for that machine apparently never reached mainline or was removed in the meantime). Everything…
Arch is not minimal. Debian netinstall does the same. Alpine is. If you think Arch is fast, try Alpine x86. On X.Org, VESA works everywhere.
Can you elaborate? In what way is Alpine more minimal than Arch? (I really just don't know)
Also are you suggesting that Debian netinstall is not minimal?
Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
#19> The installation process, and the documentation behind it, lead to the third virtue: a complete installation tends to be very small and simple, because you only install the bits you need. If you don't know what bits you need, the documentation will help you to work it out, and the result is something that is both fairly minimal and that, with luck, you understand. You know what's in there because you installed it.
I feel this gets to the core of why I like Arch so much. I’m a Linux novice, so for a long time I ran Ubuntu VMs when I needed to do stuff on Linux (this being before WSL). It worked well enough, but I never really felt that I properly knew what I was doing.
Then I tried installing Arch in a VM… and it took me several days and several attempts, but when I finally got it working I felt, for the first time ever, like I actually understood the system I was using. Now I have a webserver running Arch, and only a week or two ago installed Arch on an old PC to see if I could get a desktop working.
Of course, Arch is not easy, especially for a non-expert such as myself. Sometimes I have no idea how to solve a problem, or even what kind of software I need in the first place. For this reason, I’m planning to install Debian instead on the new laptop I’ve ordered (to replace my ~10 year old machine running Windows), in the hopes that it might have more stuff working out of the box. Still, I’d say that trying out Arch has immeasurably improved my knowledge, not just of Linux but of the underlying concepts behind modern computing.
(Oh, and the documentation’s amazing too!)
Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
#20What I really like about Arch is how minimal & fast it can be without resorting to 'exotic' software or libraries. I recently installed Archlinux32 on an old Pentium II machine just for the fun of it and was pleasantly surprised that it still feels reasonably responsive (I didn't get X11 to work yet though as the GPU driver for that machine apparently never reached mainline or was removed in the meantime). Everything…
Arch is not minimal. Debian netinstall does the same. Alpine is. If you think Arch is fast, try Alpine x86. On X.Org, VESA works everywhere.
I think it's more appropriate to say Arch is "simple" instead of "minimal". It does not sacrifice features. It does things in the simpliest way.