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Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

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Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#121

Post by subsection1h »

dartharva wrote: post #100

Arch is awesome and was the distro that finally got me to stop sticking to Windows. Every other distro I tried had some flaw that kept on making its experience subpar, and I have tried a lot of distros - Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, and a few more. I was staying away from Arch for its reportedly complex installation. But this month I decided to take the bullet and, to my surprise, got a fast and flawless sy…

> the AUR is awesome and has everything you'll ever need

But what if I need packages created and maintained by vetted, qualified devs rather than the unvetted randos that upload PGBUILDs to the AUR? Many of the AUR contributors I've looked into have no publicly-accessible real names, no personal websites, no LinkedIn accounts, and their GitHub accounts are only a couple years old with Japanese cartoon characters as their account photos.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#123

Post by ddevault »

archi42 wrote: post #17
ddevault wrote: post #6

Small? No. Simple? No. Great documentation? Yes.

Care to elaborate in a sentence or two? I mean, I have a decent idea who you are, so I think you have some authority on things Linux - but I'm curious regarding your reasoning :) I think especially the metrics for "simple" are very use(r) dependent. Simple for you or me means something entirely different than e.g. my Grandma (who has no computer). Personally I run four Linux machines, so they're customized anyway and…

The simplest system uses the fewest moving parts to accomplish the goal. Some of Arch's ideas, like PKGBUILDs, are pretty simple. But ultimately Arch is just another typical mainstream Linux distribution with glibc, GNU coreutils, systemd, PAM, etc. These tools are all severely bloated and over-complex, and many simpler alternatives exist which solve the same problems with much less.

As for "small", well, it varies, but Arch systems tend to bloat more with time as the system does not provide much for auditing and cleaning up your system, so the older an arch install gets, the more garbage it accumulates. Arch also tends to turn on as many options as possible for each of the things it packages, so many packages have a lot of optional dependencies made mandatory. This is not a unique problem to Arch; only Gentoo (and maybe Nix and friends) solve this one, and they have many other problems to contend with.

All of this is not to say that Arch is necessarily a poor choice. It's just not simple, nor small.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#124

Post by realgeniushere »

bradrn wrote: post #19

> The installation process, and the documentation behind it, lead to the third virtue: a complete installation tends to be very small and simple, because you only install the bits you need. If you don't know what bits you need, the documentation will help you to work it out, and the result is something that is both fairly minimal and that, with luck, you understand. You know what's in there because you installed it.…

This is a false sense of understanding that many Linux users develop. You basically built a puzzle by putting together the pieces that fit together. And you have the illusion that you learned something about the picture drawn on the pieces.

You don’t really understand anything more except how to configure a system with a poorly designed configuration system. Installing a difficult-to-use Linux distribution teaches you nothing about operating systems, compilers, linkers & loaders, shared libraries, or anything else about the foundations of modern computing.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#125

Post by dartharva »

subsection1h wrote: post #121
dartharva wrote: post #100

Arch is awesome and was the distro that finally got me to stop sticking to Windows. Every other distro I tried had some flaw that kept on making its experience subpar, and I have tried a lot of distros - Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, and a few more. I was staying away from Arch for its reportedly complex installation. But this month I decided to take the bullet and, to my surprise, got a fast and flawless sy…

> the AUR is awesome and has everything you'll ever need But what if I need packages created and maintained by vetted, qualified devs rather than the unvetted randos that upload PGBUILDs to the AUR? Many of the AUR contributors I've looked into have no publicly-accessible real names, no personal websites, no LinkedIn accounts, and their GitHub accounts are only a couple years old with Japanese cartoon characters as t…

How exactly does any other distro solve that? Please don't tell me you genuinely find PPAs to be a better alternative...

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#126

Post by E39M5S62 »

seized wrote: post #113
E39M5S62 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4inrut/manjaros_ssl_... The link for the post is dead, but they've let their SSL cert expire multiple times. While it happened a few years ago, I find that a hard thing to come back from.

I think the most recent incident was a few months ago...

Good lord.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#127

Post by belval »

subsection1h wrote: post #121
dartharva wrote: post #100

Arch is awesome and was the distro that finally got me to stop sticking to Windows. Every other distro I tried had some flaw that kept on making its experience subpar, and I have tried a lot of distros - Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, and a few more. I was staying away from Arch for its reportedly complex installation. But this month I decided to take the bullet and, to my surprise, got a fast and flawless sy…

> the AUR is awesome and has everything you'll ever need But what if I need packages created and maintained by vetted, qualified devs rather than the unvetted randos that upload PGBUILDs to the AUR? Many of the AUR contributors I've looked into have no publicly-accessible real names, no personal websites, no LinkedIn accounts, and their GitHub accounts are only a couple years old with Japanese cartoon characters as t…

> But what if I need packages created and maintained by vetted, qualified devs rather than the unvetted randos that upload PGBUILDs to the AUR?

Pay for them or package them yourself. The nerve of being angry at people giving you their work for free and having the *audacity* of thinking you should have access to their real name, personal websites, LinkedIn and GitHub account.

The level of entitlement dripping from your comment is disgusting.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#128

Post by hutzlibu »

stryan wrote: post #108
hutzlibu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not aware of critical issues, but there was indeed a time of confusion, when the dev leadership changed. So sources please for current flaws?

This Github repo has the most common issues I've heard of: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno . Big ones are: shadiness with funding, letting their SSL certs expire 4 times, and the fact that their idea of stable isn't additional testing, but just letting the packages sit for a week. There was also a recent kerfluffle not covered there where they shipped a broken kernel to Apple Sillicon users without contacting the…

Well, the funding issue I find to be quite trivial and of no big concern to me, but the repo issues are indeed something that has bothered me at times, where I ended up modifying repos to get the most up to date ones.

The recommendation from the repo, EndeavourOS sounds interesting, though.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#129

Post by ttarr »

silisili wrote: post #99
dartharva wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not anymore. Archinstall, an easy-to-use installation script, now comes included in the ISO and so now anyone can install it and get a full-fledged OOTB distro ready within minutes.

Does archinstall let you luks encrypt without LVM? I've never understood why every distro feels these two are dependent on each other.

I use luks with btrfs, setup using archinstall, works as expected, I hope this helps.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#130

Post by hutzlibu »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #64
bradrn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard of Manjaro, but on the occasions when I’ve brought it up in conversation, people have almost unanimously warned me off from it in fairly strong terms… not entirely sure why, but that alone makes me reluctant to use it.

Manjaro is like Arch but not exactly like Arch. If you have a problem with Manjaro and then go to the (stellar) Arch documentation to try to figure out why it doesn't work in a case like this, that documentation won't help you.

Well, this I cannot confirm. I regular go to the normal Arch docs for help and usually find it suitable. So it is not fundamentally different, but yes, it uses different repos and some things indeed work differently.
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