101–110 of 127 posts
Is arch relatively approachable for a linux noob who has logged a bit of time on Redhat and Ubuntu?
If you're going to try it on hardware, Intel graphics and networking will probably work best.
Also, the arch wiki is a great resource, in general: https://wiki.archlinux.org/
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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 :)
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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 wi…
Forget to update for a while? Good luck getting your system into a sane state ever again. Better yet, if you go a while without updating, you'll wind up with package conflicts in your dependency graph (the worst is the dreaded "package X and package Y both insist on different versions of the same dependency"), and it'll take you forever to manually untangle them.
I've been using Gentoo as my main since 2004 or 2005, though I had some Arch experience from my work desktop at my last job (I installed Arch on it because I wanted something Gentoo-like but wasn't about to risk Compile Hell when I had deadlines to pay attention to). The decision to switch wasn't an easy one, but it's been very rewarding. I'm still of the opinion that portage is the best package management system I've used (it's not just for compiling stuff from source: there's no reason someone can't build a binary distro using portage), but pacman is a pretty damn close second, and I'll take pacman's lack of flexibility over Compile Hell any day.
I still have conflicting thoughts about systemd. I actually ripped it out on my old work computer and replaced it with OpenRC (to fulfil my goal of "something Gentoo-like but without all the compiling"), but on this machine I decided I'd keep systemd around for at least a few weeks because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and learn something new. Now, I'm not sure what to do. I've discovered there's a bunch of stuff to really like about systemd (in particular, "systemctl status" is amazing), but on the other hand, I really miss OpenRC, and I happen to prefer its idioms over systemd's (I'm sorry, but you will never convince me that INI-style syntax isn't the ugliest thing ever).
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The filesystem package changes have caused no end of issues to people who did't read the news and just Syu'd :)
Exactly. You're not supposed to pacman -Syu without looking. Part of your duty when you choose to install Arch is to take a few minutes every week to keep on top of what's new. Call it basic hygiene.
Note, I use pacmatic, which pulls the news feeds, but it took me getting bitten a few times before I learned to do this.
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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…
Further, it might seem arcane to have to type "apt-get install -f" to install dependencies for an autonomous .deb package, but I'm not sure how different that is from having to learn, for example, the myriad switches for pacman.
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'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.ar…
I guess I'll give LightDM a look, just in case. Thanks for the heads up!
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Could you explain what causes Ubuntu package manager to fall over?
Honestly, I don't know. I'm not really familiar with non-Arch distros, and I only install a different distro maybe once a year, so I've never dug into the problem. The first thing I do when I install a non-rolling-release distro (usually one of Ubuntu, Mint, or Fedora) is update the software using the package manager. The upgrade process almost always fails in some way and leaves me with a broken system. On the odd i…
First Installing Arch Linux is pretty difficult task when you atempt to do it for your first time if you are not familiar with command line and basics of linux. But I would suggest you to install Arch Linux as you will gain a very good insight on how linux works. then If you got no idea what dd is, arch ain't for you friend! ... do not follow