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Arch Linux – Do it yourself

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Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#81

Post by clearing »

SSLy wrote: post #51
damcedami wrote: post #46

Most 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

https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui Though, I can't vouch for quality of this, I don't use it

I used aui for my recent arch install, and it's helpful for things you might forget (like installing wpa_supplicant, wouldn't have bought an ethernet cable for my very first install...).

I'd recommend figuring out the steps in the FIFO section yourself, as it is largely dependent on how you partition your system, and one would benefit from learning about things like mkinitcpio.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#82

Post by bcook »

collyw wrote: post #26

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

I REALLY wanted to like Manjaro, but it was too buggy. When it was running, it was a smoother, more functional GUI than my barebones Openbox window-manager, which was great.

But... During the past 5+ years, I rarely ever had a problem with Arch Linux that is not 100% my fault. Manjaro... it had some problem every few days; updates DB would become corrupt, random freezes, login GUI would stop functioning...

I suppose my main complaint was that Manjaro could be great it it simply eased the installation and setup of Arch Linux. I do not understand why they use a completely separate repository. Hopefully they continue to improve!

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#83

Post by dougmany »

pimeys wrote: post #44
coldpie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is good to hear. I used Arch and loved it until that upgrade thing you mentioned a few years ago. It basically made a machine I had unusable so I stopped using Arch altogether. Maybe it is time to go back.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#84

Post by jvreeland »

vitoreiji wrote: post #74
mhax wrote: post #48

Arch 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.

Yes, the systemd introduction was a special time in Arch land. A lot of systems got broken in those days. The only comparable time I can recall right now is when they dropped GRUB Legacy. People who upgraded carelessly were unable to boot. These are the two single big events in 8 years or so I've been using Arch.

The filesystem package changes have caused no end of issues to people who did't read the news and just Syu'd :)

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#85

Post by collyw »

bcook wrote: post #82
collyw wrote: post #26

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

I REALLY wanted to like Manjaro, but it was too buggy. When it was running, it was a smoother, more functional GUI than my barebones Openbox window-manager, which was great. But... During the past 5+ years, I rarely ever had a problem with Arch Linux that is not 100% my fault. Manjaro... it had some problem every few days; updates DB would become corrupt, random freezes, login GUI would stop functioning... I suppose…

I have Ubuntu on one machine, Mint on my work desktop and Manjaro on another.

Manjaro is by far the most stable and problem free. It required a bit of tweaking to set up, and there have been a couple of times when I needed to run a command to reset the package manager to a usable state though.

(To be fair I push the Mint box hardest in terms of installing stuff and tweaking things. Its only been good since I went to XFCE as Cinnamon tended to hog the CPU randomly).

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#86

Post by adwf »

charliefg wrote: post #75
richmt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using arch for quite a while, and I was wondering if you could explain why gentoo would be more rewarding for someone like me.

Tick 3 for Gentoo: [] Do you enjoy building everything to the minutest specification, regardless of bins being available? [] Do you like the idea of building/rebuilding the entire system into your hardware instead of performing a quick fresh installation? [] Let's say you've been lazy with updates -- would you mind emerge ragging the CPU for 15+ hours? (Disclosure: I love Arch but (believe it or not) I've been die-ha…

It was no.3 that eventually killed Gentoo for me. Took a three week holiday and it must've been a busy release period or something, because when I came back I had an unholy hell of packages needing updating.

The worst part was there were multiple dependencies that just wouldn't compile. I fixed the first couple, but when you have a 3hr+ OpenOffice compile fail on you inexplicably... I just want my computer to work without worrying about all that! It used to be that people would say "Then why are you using Linux? go back to Win/Mac", but nowadays a perfectly stable, maintainable and fast Linux is easily achievable. I think this is the major reason behind Gentoo's declining popularity recently.

Having said that, I learnt a huge amount about Linux just by unbreaking all the bizarre things that risky Gentoo emerges did to my system :)

Ultimately, it all comes down to how I'd rather spend my time. Hours and hours every month running a big emerge on Gentoo, or a few seconds in pacman on Arch? I have work to do on my computer and eventually the process of just running the Gentoo updates was occupying too much time that I could be spending on actual work.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#87

Post by doktrin »

burntsushi wrote: post #3

There'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…

This deserves to be a visible comment. The arch documentation is pretty phenomenal, and may be some of the best distro-specific documentation I've ever come across.

That said, I've just moved back to mint after about a year with arch. At the end of the day, arch required a little too much of my time and attention. Still a great distro, though.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#88

Post by kasabali »

antocv wrote: post #72
dman wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Dependencies. Conflicts with. Unavailable dependencies from mirrors. Girlfriends OpenSUSE for example ran fine for a few months and now its stuck in an infinite update/upgrade loop or whatever it is trying to do - I really dont have the time to look into it. But the problem is, zypper cant update but really wants to update. Most likely it is conflicts between different repositories, or unavailable shit from some repo…

> Ive seen the same on most .deb based distros Ive tried - failure to update/upgrade a package or collection of packages - breaks the entire system.

Which means you didn't try Debian stable. deb based or not doesn't matter, all that matters is distribution policies on packaging, migrations and releases.

Re: Arch Linux – Do it yourself

#89

Post by hsitz »

Gracana wrote: post #73
aaron-lebo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

> Such an approach is usually looked down upon in the Arch community. That's really too bad, because I think a method for sharing curated sets would be great. Maybe the problem isn't so much that sets would be bad, but that it might cause people's expectations of arch to change. Like, if you do everything yourself and it breaks, it's your fault, but if the system does it for you and it breaks, now it's arch's/the mai…

I think Manjaro is actually the most popular distro based on Arch. Has versions with XFCE or KDE pre-installed, and has packages for many others (Cinnamon, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, Gnome, LXDE, LXQT, MATE, etc). Main difference from Arch is that it maintains its own repositories and adds Arch updates only after they're deemed reliable. (Although if you'd prefer to use Arch repositories I think you can install Manjaro and convert it into plain Arch system.)

A couple others that I believe use Arch repos and rolling-release updates directly: ArchBang (Open Box wm): http://www.wiki.archbang.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Bridge Linux (Gnome, KDE, XFCE) http://sourceforge.net/projects/bridgelinux/

There's list of all the Arch-based distros here: http://distrowatch.com/search.php?basedon=Arch

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