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Arch Linux – Do it yourself

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Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#11

Post by baldfat »

digi_owl wrote: post #4

Would not Linux From Scratch get even closer to "do it yourself"? http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Linux from Scratch = Orange

Arch Linux = Apple

Arch "Learn more about Linux" is a indirect effect of running Arch and well LFS whole purpose.

Arch = Great Linux Distro (My second favorite to my distro home OpenSUSE)

LFS = Learning tool that is not necessarily for production machines.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#14

Post by stefantalpalaru »

spystath wrote: post #9
digi_owl wrote: post #4

Would not Linux From Scratch get even closer to "do it yourself"? http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

LFS is probably as close to DIY as possible, however it still requires you to compile everything. I suppose Arch is DIY while still providing binary packages (faster installation) and a more or less standard linux installation while still allowing you to customise it to you heart's content. Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how th…

> Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured (see custom init, custom udev etc).

Gentoo offers even more freedom of customization than Arch. Choose your init system, your udev variant, your main Python version, set around 100 build time options for ffmpeg and so on.

LFS is great for learning and looking under the hood, but for a system that you actually use daily, Gentoo has no rival.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#15

Post by Arguggi »

TuxLyn wrote: post #6

I've blogged about Arch Linux back in 2014. If anyone interested; http://www.distrogeeks.com/arch-linux-2014-install/

TFA and your blog post both mention SLiM as a login manager, according to the Arch wiki[0]:

"The SliM project has been abandoned (the project homepage is down, leaving a github mirror), and is not fully compatible to systemd, including logind sessions. Consider using a different Display manager or Xinitrc."

Lightdm [1] seems to be a better alternative.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightDM

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#16

Post by joshuapants »

spystath wrote: post #9
digi_owl wrote: post #4

Would not Linux From Scratch get even closer to "do it yourself"? http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

LFS is probably as close to DIY as possible, however it still requires you to compile everything. I suppose Arch is DIY while still providing binary packages (faster installation) and a more or less standard linux installation while still allowing you to customise it to you heart's content. Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how th…

A good Arch alternative is Void Linux. It's almost like if BSD and Linux had a child. I've moved away from the "assembly-required" distros, but I had a lot of good fun playing with them and did learn a lot.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#18

Post by ekimekim »

Only tangentially related, but I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions.

What is the point of separating / from /home? I know the /boot thing is due to max size stuff on certain modes of boot, but shouldn't be required for UEFI?

And I really don't understand why you'd want to run swap. On a modern machine with huge amounts of RAM, if a process is using enough RAM that you need to start swapping it to disk, I'd rather just invoke the OOM killer and kill the badly behaved process, instead of slowing my system to a crawl while it tries to access memory at disk speeds.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#19

Post by tomswartz07 »

For myself, I appreciate the fact that almost all of the Arch packages are 'un-fooled-around-with'.

Very often, I've run into issues with Ubuntu packages solely because they have their own strange versioning, and roll certain patches into weird versions.

I think it boils down to the management philosophy: Ubuntu tries to make it 'as easy as possible', whereas Arch says, 'if you have a bug or problem, take it up with that program's developer'.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#20

Post by digi_owl »

spystath wrote: post #9
digi_owl wrote: post #4

Would not Linux From Scratch get even closer to "do it yourself"? http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

LFS is probably as close to DIY as possible, however it still requires you to compile everything. I suppose Arch is DIY while still providing binary packages (faster installation) and a more or less standard linux installation while still allowing you to customise it to you heart's content. Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how th…

The reason Gentoo forked udev is that they have a commitment to user choice. That is, you as the user gets to decide everything. If you want to use udev, fine, if you want something else, also fine.

So they created eudev because it was becoming more and more of a hassle to dig udev out of systemd for use with non-systemd installs.

And i think LFS has also adopted eudev for their "traditional" book now, because they ran into the same issue.

Something like this should really give pause for thought in the "init" debates, as it is a stark reminder that systemd has gone far beyond being just about init. And thus all those videos demoing systemd vs "random init of the day" boot times end up being a distraction rather than enlightening.

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