I almost did this but ended up installing Gentoo! I've loved it, its a great way to learn your way around Linux and learn new skills!
Arch Linux – Do it yourself
41–50 of 127 posts
Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself
#42> The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it! -Linus Torvalds
Surprisingly, Linus is actually quite critical of the more technical Linux distributions. Here's another quote from him:
> And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I'm a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don't want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be "overly technical" - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc.
> Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I've never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu.
https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/linus-t...
Not that I think it takes anything away from Arch, but I thought it was an interesting piece of trivia.
Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself
#43Surprised to see a tutorial on Arch linux on front page.
As a sys admin, I appreciate the effort to tune everything to your needs, and Arch has its place there for sure. As a user, I just want things to work. So I usually stay away from tweak-everything-you-can distros. So now on one hand you have the distros that do pretty much everything for you (ubuntu style), and on the other you have to do the tweaking for yourself(arch, gentoo, slackware, etc). I, for one, would prefer some middle ground - eg, a system being able to predict the most optimal setup for my box, but also allow me to tweak it should I prefer something different. RHEL/CentOS seems to be slowly getting this, and I enjoy its tools quite a lot (tuned daemon for kernel params optimization, kickstart for package customizations, etc.)
Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself
#44I really like Arch, because contrary to the popular belief it is the most hassle-free distro I've encountered. As vanilla and up-to-date as possible, but with the right amount of automation (binary pkgs and great simple utilities) baked in. That said, some distros like nix and guix are addressing a much needed problem now---how to be able to get reproducible builds. Sadly, they haven't learnt many lessons Arch taught…
> I really like Arch, because contrary to the popular belief it is the most hassle free distro I've encountered. I completely agree. I tried switching to Linux a few times in high school (early-mid '00s), and always had false starts with Fedora or Ubuntu. Usually the package manager would break and everything would fall to pieces. I ended up installing Arch as a Subversion server for some personal projects, and that'…
I've been using Arch on my workstation and on my laptop for several years already. I can sign all the points you gave in here and I really appreciate how easy it is to setup and use the distribution.
Although many years ago I had problems when updating, in the recent years everything just works and I don't need to worry about upgrading the whole distro every 6 months.
Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself
#45There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial, but the canonical install instructions for Arch are instructive and detailed: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide Also, if you want to use Arch in a dependable way, subscribing to arch-announce is important[1]. It's a low traffic mailing list that notifies you of any manual steps you may need to take during a package upgrade. (I've been using Arch…
>There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial That's often true, but I was disappointed that this was little more than a rephrased version of what's on the Arch Wiki. I love the Arch documentation on the Wiki. It's perfect for me– laid out well, easy to follow, arranged in a logical wiki order, and stuffed with insanely useful tips. The pages on stuff like tmux are fantastic.
Most of the time the information is already in the wiki. And it's nice how the installation guide covers every corner case. I smoothly migrated my laptop from a simple installation to luks+lvm, just by following the guide. You can actually read TFM because it's already there. It's also kinda funny how many google searches that relate with configuration issues on linux link back to the arch wiki. Definitely documentation is one of the stronger parts of arch.
Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself
#46Most interesting thing I want to see was bash script (or other way) to automate install and configure the post-installed system, like this gist https://gist.github.com/julionc/4162347
Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself
#47Gentoo is a much more rewarding and educational experience: https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/ https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page
I wouldn't describe my time using Gentoo as rewarding.
I guess you're right about it being educational, though.
Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself
#48Arch is awesome and I've used it at home and work for years, but the rolling release cycle means that you must keep on top of upgrades.
I was once a little too slack (no pun intended) and had several hundred packages that needed upgrading and there was simply no easy way of making it work. It was around the time of the systemd introduction, so that may have been a significant complicating factor.
Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself
#49Surprised to see a tutorial on Arch linux on front page. As a sys admin, I appreciate the effort to tune everything to your needs, and Arch has its place there for sure. As a user, I just want things to work. So I usually stay away from tweak-everything-you-can distros. So now on one hand you have the distros that do pretty much everything for you (ubuntu style), and on the other you have to do the tweaking for yours…
What you described is basically slackware. If you install the whole image (roughly 6 gb) you get a working desktop machine that's easy to keep up to date (just run slackpkg update once in a while). Yet when it comes to tweaking, it's easy, because everything is a shell script or text file, no binary blobs of weird file formats. It actually reminds me a lot of FreeBSD.
Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself
#50Surprised to see a tutorial on Arch linux on front page. As a sys admin, I appreciate the effort to tune everything to your needs, and Arch has its place there for sure. As a user, I just want things to work. So I usually stay away from tweak-everything-you-can distros. So now on one hand you have the distros that do pretty much everything for you (ubuntu style), and on the other you have to do the tweaking for yours…
I use arch for few years already and I've found out that actually one does not need to make any tweaks - in 99% of cases, just install the package you want and it just works. The only thing I've replaced is font rendering pipeline -- I use the outstandingly beautiful bohoomil's repository[0].
And that's it, everything else is right there.
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality#Custom_repos...