Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by anthk » Fri, Nov 25, 2022, 6:47 PM UTC

gnull wrote: post #21

kadotus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Alpine base rootfs is just a few megabytes, while Arch is like 100-200MB. I usually encounter Alpine in Docker containers when people want to wrap just one specific service and have save space on things that are not essential for it (it would be wasteful to ship your 20MB app in a 200MB Arch/Debian container). I didn't know Alpine was useful as a working machine though.

It works fine on older machines. setup-xorg after the installing process, add a light WM such as wmaker or jwm for parent commenter's pentium II and he/she is done.

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

#152

Post by green726 » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 1:05 AM UTC

dvratil wrote: post #72

What I miss mentioned here is AUR and the fact that almost any software that you can think of is packaged there. You read about some cool software (like git-bug I learned about today here on HN), you do `yay -S cool-software` and it's there. On Ubuntu or Debian? Not so much...

I agree. The AUR is one of the biggest reasons I use an Arch-based distro (endeavour). If it wasn’t for the AUR, I, a pretty quick learner but also lazy person, would be using fedora or something.

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

#153

Post by archi42 » Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 12:31 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #123

archi42 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The simplest system uses the fewest moving parts to accomplish the goal. Some of Arch's ideas, like PKGBUILDs, are pretty simple. But ultimately Arch is just another typical mainstream Linux distribution with glibc, GNU coreutils, systemd, PAM, etc. These tools are all severely bloated and over-complex, and many simpler alternatives exist which solve the same problems with much less. As for "small", well, it varies,…

I see. Yes, many of these tools aim to be rather universal, which is detrimental to "leanness". OTOH all these bloaty tools are relatively well understood. E.g. being able to write unit files that heavily up the security of random daemons is really something I learned to value the last years. But I only used init.d as an alternative, so my horizon is a bit limited in that regard. Not using glibc, well, I was under the impression this causes a lot of pain for a general purpose Linux.

Regarding the "growing" OS, hm... I've manually checked what's installed on my Debians using aptitude, and removed old stuff. Similarly, I could let pacman produce a list of installed packages to audit and check which are not required anymore. Either case needs manual action, because the automatic tool will not know if I still need that random python lib I manually installed, or if it can be removed (truth be told: neither do I!). Now for unused dependencies this is different. Pulling in lots of stuff is a problem, yes. I think this could be solved by building those packages with a modified PKGBUILD locally (making it more like Gentoo), but for my "Linux on a big machine" I never saw the need to try that.

Anyway, I didn't read it like you were claiming Arch to be a poor choice :)

Thanks for the reply, I really appreciate the perspective. I don't want to drag you into a discussion over details, especially since I don't feel like "you're wrong". So feel free to just let it stand like this. OTOH, what are your favorite glibc/coreutils/systemd/PAM replacements?