Arch Linux turns 10
archlinux.org
Arch Linux turns 10
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#2Congratulations to all those past and present involved with Arch. Over the past few years Arch has become my favourite personal distro due to how much control it gives me over my system without being _too_ complicated.
Here is to another amazing 10 years for Arch as well as everyone working on other Linux distros. You are all pretty damn amazing in my opinion. Thank you for all you do and please don't stop =D
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#3Happy birthday! And...
A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#4I love Arch. Best distribution by far in my opinion. Sadly, I had huge problems one week ago when I did a full system upgrade (took me 2 days to fix everything that was corrupted and lost lots of money because of it) but then it was my fault. (Never use --force with a system upgrade!) To be fair, there should be a warning when you try to execute the command as it's probably not what a user would want to do.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#5Happy birthday! And... A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?
Now that I have arch working for my needs, I spend hardly any time maintaining it.
The only issues come up when some sort of breaking change is released, and in that case there is always an article right on the arch homepage for steps to migrate to the new package.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#6Happy birthday! And... A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?
I've been using Arch to 'get shit done' for about two years now. Apart from the occasional package upgrade to update everything to its latest versions, you don't have to do anything you don't want to.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#7Happy birthday! And... A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?
Now that I have arch working for my needs, I spend hardly any time maintaining it. The only issues come up when some sort of breaking change is released, and in that case there is always an article right on the arch homepage for steps to migrate to the new package.
and I suppose if your needs are limited cause you only need common services (emacs, firefox, tmux) those incidents will be pretty unusual?
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#8Happy birthday! And... A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?
I had the same concerns, but after a solid year on Arch only, I can say that things rarely break and if they do I learn something in the process.
Yes, sometimes, like every few months or so, there is some maintenance to do, but only after manually initiating system updates. Never once have I come across a maintenance issue that didn't have a quick solution already discussed on the Arch forums or wiki.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#9Happy birthday! And... A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?
Unlike Debian, Arch Linux has what they call a "rolling release schedule," which means that the only choices you have are (1) refrain from using Pacman at all to update your software, which of course leaves security vulnerabilities unpatched and (2) opening yourself up to major changes to major subsystems, like Gnome, any time you use pacman to update your system.
In contrast, on Debian, major changes to e.g. Gnome are mostly limited to when a new version of Debian comes out, and you get a lot of leeway as to when to upgrade to the new version, and in particular, sometimes you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.
And I got the impression that updates of Arch Linux broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.
Still it is a very compelling distribution because of its "elegance".
I probably spend just as much time maintaining my OS X box as I did maintaining my Arch Linux box: e.g., when I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard and from Snow Leopard to Lion, I had to install a bunch of stuff (a dict client, Gnu coreutils, Carbon Emacs, even wget IIRC) to get a comfortable environment, and the installation took a lot more time than it would have on a Linux distro. E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only on key press or mouse button click.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#10I love Arch. Best distribution by far in my opinion. Sadly, I had huge problems one week ago when I did a full system upgrade (took me 2 days to fix everything that was corrupted and lost lots of money because of it) but then it was my fault. (Never use --force with a system upgrade!) To be fair, there should be a warning when you try to execute the command as it's probably not what a user would want to do.
I think having to use an option like '--force' is considered warning enough. Which is, I think, perfectly reasonable. Of course, I don't know your exact scenario, but that's how things seem to work.