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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

#112
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other distros have wikis but tend to focus more on documentation the distro specific details. Since Arch packages have very minimal modifications from upstream, this means much of the content from the ArchWiki is applicable across distros. But then once you have one wiki covering the generic advice, there's less motivation for others to duplicate that effort anyway.

I use gentoo, and still have arch wiki in bookmarks as go-to place to look for docs

In fairness, the Gentoo wiki is my second favorite wiki that's largely applicable to all Linux distros:)

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not aware of critical issues, but there was indeed a time of confusion, when the dev leadership changed. So sources please for current flaws?

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4inrut/manjaros_ssl_... The link for the post is dead, but they've let their SSL cert expire multiple times. While it happened a few years ago, I find that a hard thing to come back from.

I think the most recent incident was a few months ago...

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

#114
Arch isn't just simple, it is smart too. With alpm-hooks [0], it is possible to run specific commands pre or post-install/upgrade of packages. E.g re-sign secure UKIs with my keys after the intel-ucode package updates.

This example and more such refined tools such as the AUR that add massive quality of life improvements to the overall Linux user experience is what keeps me happy at Arch.

[0] https://archlinux.org/pacman/alpm-hooks.5.html

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

#115
post #107
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.…

> 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. I love hearing that, because it was a goal of Arch from the very beginning: to stop fearing the commandline. And I was the first alpha tester, in that I wanted to learn more about how the sausage was actually made, so to speak. I was comfortable using things like Linu…

Thanks for starting it! I dabbled with Ubuntu, Debian and SUSE in highschool and would occasionally see things from the Arch Wiki when troubleshooting problems. Learned about its philosophy when at a highschool computing competition and my team captain was raving about one of our opponents using Arch.

Started a CS degree the following year, and I decided I wanted to take Linux more seriously, so I wiped Windows off my laptop and threw Arch on it to force myself to learn, and it's been my daily driver now for the last decade!

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch is minimal in the sense that the default system consists of very little. If you install nothing but the base metapackage, you won't get a usable system out of it at all. The purpose of Arch is to fill out a complete, working system by making your own choices. If you follow the installation guide, then you start out with base, linux, and linux-firmware. Base is a metapackages that consists of archlinux-keyring, b…

Is apk a classic package manager in that it installs packages to the file system or does it use overlays? The line > Alpine Linux is designed to run from RAM in the wiki almost makes it sound like OpenWRTs opkg where the root fs is readonly.

Alpine can do both, actually; a "sys" install does a traditional root filesystem, but Alpine also can run... I think a ro root with a single rw overlay with all added packages(?)

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

#117
I run arch on my VPS. Before, I ran Debian, but if you need a special package version, or something, it just feels almost as hard as getting a newer IIS version on Windows. I got sick of it, removed Debian, and installed Arch from scratch.

My Linux experience was pretty minimal. Some trying out on desktop in the early 2000s and later again after Ubuntu became a thing, but I always got weird errors. Then some in university, and again a bit to administer my VPS or rPi.

Arch was a breath of fresh air, not only could I get current packages, everything was so well documented! The wiki is, as the article rightfully says, amazing. Now, even when I’m not using arch (I have a small Proxmox server with Debian and Debian containers), I still use the archwiki as I know it will help me for everything but Debian specific things. My first arch install (before that, I never installed an OS without an installer) took maybe 2 hours.

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

#119
post #91

The main benefit of Arch Linux to me is that when you do a drive-by patch to some software project, it is not unthinkable that the fix reaches you through upstream and an Arch package update in a matter of hours. This flow is not possible with distributions that run pretty out of date software and have long release cycles: the version that's included with the distribution is usually too old to be able to check out th…

> This flow is not possible with distributions that run pretty out of date software

I use Debian Stable and Fedora on my systems and I have the latest versions of all of the software of which I want the latest versions because I can install software from source like a big boy. And my installers don't have version numbers hard-coded in them like PKGBUILDs do, so I get the latest versions immediately.

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