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Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

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Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#61

Post by tshanmu »

rmbyrro wrote: post #38
pantalaimon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid simple and easy don't go well together. You either have automation to make things easy to the user, but then it's no longer simple. Or you require the user to do everything manually, but then it's no longer easy.

True. Maybe there's a viable middle ground between Ubuntu & Arch. Perhaps with a focus on the audience (e.g. a web dev distro), it becomes viable to make sensible compromises on both (easiness & simplicity) that result in a good combination for the user.

kali

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#62

Post by JonChesterfield »

rmbyrro wrote: post #29
bradrn wrote: post #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.…

If we could combine Ubuntu's easiness of use with Arch's simplicity and performance, that'd be my ideal distro for work. I love Arch for its simplicity and performance. But it just wasn't productive for me to get everyday tasks done. I'm not advanced Linux user, occasionally I'd need hours to get seemingly simple stuff done. For a hobby desktop, fine. For a work tool as a developer, I moved back to Ubuntu (though I h…

I've been installing Ubuntu this week. Checking download updates during install gave me a broken libc dependency graph which blocked installing ssh or gcc. Libpci-dev conflicts with gnome as far as I can tell, installing that took down X and the network. Changing to the server iso of the same version gave me an OS that can't use the builtin intel NIC, though the desktop version can. The driver errors on modprobe, -2.

I'm going to try again with a different Ubuntu release as soon as I can find the patience. Where prior lessons have taught me to vandalise automatic update or it'll brick itself in the future.

Ease of use has not been the defining characteristic of Ubuntu.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#63

Post by amadeuspagel »

massysett wrote: post #5
amadeuspagel wrote: post #3

Interesting to see the documentation emphasized here. I don't use Arch, but I often see the arch wiki in google results for linux stuff I look up. Makes me wonder why wikis aren't used more for documentation.

Wikis take a lot of maintenance by a determined core of contributors, or else the pages deteriorate into a pile of incoherent edits. Occasionally I see this even on the Arch wiki. Main text says “do this.” That’s followed by some text saying “I tried this and it didn’t work.” That’s followed by a text box saying “that method is deprecated.”

But that's still better then just having the main text saying "do this" where "this" is wrong. And that's often the case for non-wiki documentation.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#64

Post by MegaDeKay »

bradrn wrote: post #23
hutzlibu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For this reason, I’m planning to install Debian instead on the new laptop I’ve ordered" Maybe have a look at manjaro, it is based on arch, but comes prepackaged, so you can just boot up the luve image and install, if everything works.

I’ve heard of Manjaro, but on the occasions when I’ve brought it up in conversation, people have almost unanimously warned me off from it in fairly strong terms… not entirely sure why, but that alone makes me reluctant to use it.

Manjaro is like Arch but not exactly like Arch. If you have a problem with Manjaro and then go to the (stellar) Arch documentation to try to figure out why it doesn't work in a case like this, that documentation won't help you.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#65

Post by luxcem »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #40
bradrn wrote: post #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.…

> 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. Honest question: why days? I have installed arch multiple times in the past decade and I don’t remember anything exceptionally out of the ordinary. You just follow the step-by-step instruction and you are good to…

I've installed arch a number of times, and every times I want full disk encryption I struggle a bit on dm-crypt config and bootloader. Other than that it's pretty straightforward.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#66

Post by megous »

ddevault wrote: post #6

Small? No. Simple? No. Great documentation? Yes.

Core of the distribution is the package manager/building tools. Compared to the babylon of eg. Debian packaging tools, where you'll have trouble figuring out basics like automatically installing build dependencies if you don't already have the target package built (lol, wtf? :)), Arch Linux's makepkg/PKGBUILD ecosystem is uniform, fully featured, and fairly simple.

There may be simpler packaging solutions, like Slackware's or whatever postmarketOS uses, but those are limited, and you'll have trouble figuring out how to do things like selecting files you don't want the package manager to ever overwrite, or preventing installation/updates of specific packages, or other things you might need that go slightly beyond basic installation/updates.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#67

Post by ilyt »

candiddevmike wrote: post #39
bradrn wrote: post #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.…

You can install Debian the same way you installed Arch (manual, CLI) via debootstrap. It's not really advertised, Debian really wants folks to use their installer. I built a tool that does this, you can look through the code and see how I do it--it's just bash spaghetti. Download a Debian live ISO (or use my tool to create an Arch-like minimal live USB) and you can install it however you want. https://github.com/cand…

there is also [1] preseed, we use it to install our servers/VMs. It is a bit quirky tho, especially partitioning.

* [1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#68

Post by ilyt »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #62
rmbyrro wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could combine Ubuntu's easiness of use with Arch's simplicity and performance, that'd be my ideal distro for work. I love Arch for its simplicity and performance. But it just wasn't productive for me to get everyday tasks done. I'm not advanced Linux user, occasionally I'd need hours to get seemingly simple stuff done. For a hobby desktop, fine. For a work tool as a developer, I moved back to Ubuntu (though I h…

I've been installing Ubuntu this week. Checking download updates during install gave me a broken libc dependency graph which blocked installing ssh or gcc. Libpci-dev conflicts with gnome as far as I can tell, installing that took down X and the network. Changing to the server iso of the same version gave me an OS that can't use the builtin intel NIC, though the desktop version can. The driver errors on modprobe, -2.…

I'm now firmly confirmed that it is Ubuntu that fucks something up. Upgrades seem to work much better with plain Debian.

We've seen many failures during upgrade, from both novice and advanced linux users, meanwhile one of our sysadmins accidentally upgraded Debian by two releases at once (From Debian 9 to 11) and it still "just worked"...

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#69

Post by ilyt »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #3

Interesting to see the documentation emphasized here. I don't use Arch, but I often see the arch wiki in google results for linux stuff I look up. Makes me wonder why wikis aren't used more for documentation.

In before that was Gentoo wiki, no matter what problem the Gentoo wiki was likely and good search result.

... till they had a failure and discovered none of their backups was working.

Check your backups kids.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#70

Post by pantalaimon »

tshanmu wrote: post #61
rmbyrro wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Maybe there's a viable middle ground between Ubuntu & Arch. Perhaps with a focus on the audience (e.g. a web dev distro), it becomes viable to make sensible compromises on both (easiness & simplicity) that result in a good combination for the user.

kali

That's just Debian
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