The community has become quite aggressive and elitist lately, they now remind me of the days of gentoo.
You should have seen the community 7+ years ago! They've done a lot to make the community more friendly and inclusive.
On switching to Arch Linux
91–100 of 174 posts
Re: On switching to Arch Linux
#92Oh wow so this is like 2002 gentoo then?
Isnt gentoo still like that? I have been using gentoo since I got into using and learning about linux (cant really remember how long now). And it seems pretty much the same.
Re: On switching to Arch Linux
#93Oh wow so this is like 2002 gentoo then?
Alternatively, you could say this like every other linux distro at some level.
I started back at about Redhat 5.0, used a lot of distros over the years, currently I use ubuntu because it 'mostly worked' from install, although it didn't really. I've ended up doing make/make install a few times for packages I needed configured like I wanted them. I might go back to Slackware when I get around to it, not really a big fan of Ubuntu at this point for what I do (programming).
Re: On switching to Arch Linux
#94The community has become quite aggressive and elitist lately, they now remind me of the days of gentoo.
That's a shame, back when I installed it years ago (05ish I think) the community was one of my favorite things about the distro.
Yeah I remember it back in the beginnings, it was quite friendly. Now I see people get yelled at in #archlinux for having an opinion on x vs y which is opposite of what the majority of #archlinuxers think. The forums are like "not my problem fix it noob, here is half a wiki page"
Re: On switching to Arch Linux
#95I wanted to try Arch to see what the fuss was about after I got badly burned by the Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade. I'm not a Linux newbie by any stretch and I managed to get it set up in a virtual machine, but when it came time to install the community package installer, I just couldn't do it. I was no doubt doing something stupid. But after fiddling with it for half an hour, I sat back and said to myself, "If I can't even install the installer, what is maintenance going to be like for anything remotely complicated?"
And that's when I realized that while it's fun to tweak and fiddle, I have real work to do and doing things like fighting with a package manager and installing drivers is not very high on my to-do list. I ended up rolling back to 11.04, which I'll probably stick with for some time.
Re: On switching to Arch Linux
#96I've been using Arch for about three years now and can't imagine using another distro. The install phase is a pain if you want to get a full-blown plug-and-play ready-to-go desktop experience that rivals Ubuntu, OS X, or Windows. It's actually really easy if you just want a bare-bones system that boots into a shell and doesn't install any packages other than what it needs to do just that. Switch to Arch if you're a m…
Then why Arch and not Slackware?
Re: On switching to Arch Linux
#97I've been using Arch for about three years now and can't imagine using another distro. The install phase is a pain if you want to get a full-blown plug-and-play ready-to-go desktop experience that rivals Ubuntu, OS X, or Windows. It's actually really easy if you just want a bare-bones system that boots into a shell and doesn't install any packages other than what it needs to do just that. Switch to Arch if you're a m…
Then why Arch and not Slackware?
1) PKGBUILDs are dead simple to write
2) AUR (see #1)
Re: On switching to Arch Linux
#98First of all, nothing works out of the box. You will have to manually set up the driver for your video card, support for your sound card (which can be a little difficult if you use USB headphones), wifi support, Xorg, your desktop environment and/or window manager of choice, etc. Literally everything mentioned here worked out of the box for me when I installed Arch (except for USB headphones, which I do not own).
Author here. I think we're talking about two different things. By "nothing works out of the box" I mean that you need to set it up yourself. For example, the Beginner's Guide leads you through setup of your video driver [1], ALSA [2], Xorg [3], and wifi [4]. These are all things that require manual work. Maybe there's a more appropriate term for this than "doesn't work out of the box" (?) but it's the first term that…
I think the comment meant that, apart from installing the package, everything else worked fine.
I would probably say something like, "isn't available after initial install" and that "you need to install all the packages you want to use".
It is one of the Arch philosophies that you don't need any packages on your system that you don't want to use.
Re: On switching to Arch Linux
#99Oh wow so this is like 2002 gentoo then?
I feel like the OP misconstrued things like "doesn't work out of the box". What he meant was, "I needed to install the package to get my video driver and sound driver working".
Generally Arch doesn't install something until you ask it to.
Re: On switching to Arch Linux
#100"First of all, nothing works out of the box. You will have to manually set up the driver for your video card, ...Xorg, " I stopped there http://xkcd.com/963/
Technically true, but misleading. I've installed Arch on four machines of various hardware, and this is actually the easiest part of the installation process. You have to select a driver from a comprehensive list of which drivers work for which cards, and you don't have to make any (non-trivial) changes to xorg.conf, unless you want to set up multiple monitors. (And even then, I was able to avoid that for a long time…
I have an Arch laptop that I frequently use with a second monitor, and I've never had to tweak my xorg.conf. The now-ubiquitous XRandR extension for X largely obviates the need for xorg.conf completely. These days, it tends to "just work".