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Arch Linux – Do it yourself

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Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#61

Post by nextos »

olalonde wrote: post #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…

I don't think Linus opinion is necessarily against Arch. I am using Arch precisely because I don't want to fight my OS!

I also found Gentoo, let alone Linux from Scratch, very complicated and time consuming. The nice thing about Arch is that it hits the sweet spot between simplicity, technicality and easiness. In my opinion having vanilla binary up-to-date packages is the way to go.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#62

Post by bstamour »

crypt1d wrote: post #54
bstamour wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Idk, 6gb seems excessive. I'd prefer a small footprint system (eg, my centos VM images take 1GB after installation), and to do the tweaking during installation.

I thought so too, but then I reminded myself that my laptop has a 256 gb solid state drive. 6 gb for a fully loaded system is pretty small in comparison.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#63

Post by thrownaway122 »

FreeFull wrote: post #28
spaar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the advantage of seperating / and /home is that it makes a re-install more painless. You can keep your personal data and config without copying it to another drive and just reformat / alone. And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning the article has.

I have managed to switch from a different distro to Arch without losing my /home by deleting everything other than /home. I imagine it would be tougher if the distro I switched to wasn't Arch.

Some time ago I messed around and somehow managed to break my Ubuntu system so that it wouldn't boot. Instead of bothering to work out how to fix it I just re-installed (with a different version number) and kept my old /home partition. It all worked out of the box.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#64

Post by thrownaway122 »

FreeFull wrote: post #28
spaar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the advantage of seperating / and /home is that it makes a re-install more painless. You can keep your personal data and config without copying it to another drive and just reformat / alone. And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning the article has.

I have managed to switch from a different distro to Arch without losing my /home by deleting everything other than /home. I imagine it would be tougher if the distro I switched to wasn't Arch.

Some time ago I messed around and somehow managed to break my Ubuntu system so that it wouldn't boot. Instead of bothering to work out how to fix it I just re-installed (with a different version number) and kept my old /home partition. It all worked out of the box.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#65

Post by dman »

coldpie wrote: post #36
nextos wrote: post #35

I 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'…

Could you explain what causes Ubuntu package manager to fall over?

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#66

Post by Gracana »

nextos wrote: post #35

I 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…

Arch has been pretty reliable and straightforward for me, but I wish it had a set of packages you could install to get a full-featured desktop. A curated set that included a DE and fonts and programs, or something. I like arch's install process for weird systems where configuring disks and networking would be difficult in most other distros, but once that's done I want to move back to easy street. I don't want to have to customize everything.

Maybe something like that already exists? I can't be the only person who has this "wants custom X but generic Y" problem.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#67

Post by collyw »

ryenus wrote: post #59
collyw wrote: post #26

I will recommend Manjaro for anyone that wants arch without the install hassles. https://manjaro.github.io/

Thanks for sharing this! An installer for Arch Linux is something I've been wondering for quite a while and didn't know it already exists :-)

If I had the time, I would like to try a real install, as I am sure I would learn a fair bit, but sadly I don't (or I have higher priorities).

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#68

Post by tormeh »

wtf_is_up wrote: post #47
zx2c4 wrote: post #27

Gentoo 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.

When it comes to things you don't care about, those are usually inversely proportional qualities.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#69

Post by aaron-lebo »

Gracana wrote: post #66
nextos wrote: post #35

I 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…

Arch has been pretty reliable and straightforward for me, but I wish it had a set of packages you could install to get a full-featured desktop. A curated set that included a DE and fonts and programs, or something. I like arch's install process for weird systems where configuring disks and networking would be difficult in most other distros, but once that's done I want to move back to easy street. I don't want to hav…

I think Antergos is a bit like what you are asking for.

Such an approach is usually looked down upon in the Arch community. I hate that it is. I love Arch. I love the package system, I love the wiki, I love everything about it. What I don't love is redoing everything each time I have a fresh install. Yeah, it probably takes 10 minutes to get a working system up and a day to get everything as I want it, but I hate just knowing I have to do it all again.

I really want a distro based on Arch which gets over those fears. Again, Antergos probably fits and papyros.io looks really interesting, too.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#70

Post by amyjess »

zx2c4 wrote: post #27

Gentoo is a much more rewarding and educational experience: https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/ https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page

I've used both, and I recently switched from Gentoo to Arch when I built my new desktop last month.

While I prefer the way Gentoo does certain things (slotting is wonderful, eselect is the best alternatives system I've seen, eselect news beats checking Arch's website for breakage warnings, and Portage overlays beat the pants off of Arch's pacman repos vs. AUR dichotomy), I'm sick to death of compiling everything. I actually got my Arch system up and running in a single night. Gentoo would've taken the whole weekend.

Also, if you forget to update for a while, it's much easier to drag an Arch system into the present day than it is to do the same with a Gentoo system.

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