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Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

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Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#151

Post by lomnakkus »

adrusi wrote: post #131
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Arch was easy, and then I tried an actual mature well thought out desktop distro ;-)

I tried Debian about a year ago hoping to share your insight, but I discovered that if I wanted to understand how to configure some piece of software, I had to look at both the Debian documentation and the upstream documentation for it, and I found that creating custom packages was harder, or at least harder to learn (when I made my first arch package, it took me less than an hour to figure out how ABS works, and pac…

That's one of the big selling points of Arch Linux for me, personally: They try their very best to avoid various custom patches, etc. This is probably also a big reason that the Arch Wiki is one of the greatest sources of information on configuring anything... for any distribution that doesn't fiddle too much with the upstream packages.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#152

Post by 0xfeba »

teekert wrote: post #96

I also love Arch, the only thing off putting is how hard it its to realize full disc encryption. I used Arch Anywhere but it works only with when choosing bios emulation and full disc encryption didn't work, Antergos makes too many choices for me, the base Arch image is to much work to install (where I have Solus or Ubuntu running in 20 min). I did like it better when they still had their own minimal installer. I don…

I run luks with dmcrypt on my home server and laptop, with zero issues. Was pretty easy to setup? Home server was a little more intensive as it has dmraid under dmcrypt.

Then again I did 'manual' installs without the GUI I hear they have now.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#153

Post by Thaxll »

erikbye wrote: post #26

I've been a Linux user since early Slackware. Arch is the only distro I will recommend, and, contrary to its image as a tinkerer's distro, it's the only Linux install I've had that "just works" and works. Install once, and never again. Minimal, stable. Packages are updated promptly, and I never had a problem using user repo packages.

You're recommending a rolling distro? I remember some people at work using Arch they did it for couple of month and then switch back to Ubuntu because random things would break afters updates, dhcp, printing, X server ect ...

Arch is great for home / hack stuff, for work you want something stable.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#154

Post by AsyncAwait »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #139
AsyncAwait wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure, what I meant by 'get it' is not how long have you been using the system, (I still don't get Windows), but whether you connected with the way the developers meant it to be used, i.e. if it became second nature. I am just sharing an experience that I had it similar, but not anymore, I definitely don't find it requiring sysadmin amount of work to maintain, my daily routine is: read archlinux.org, pacman -Syu…

Don't get me wrong, I definitely get the Arch way of doing things, if that's what you like and how you want your system to work . My daily routine was exactly the same as yours, except I experienced several boot-breaking errors over the years, where I had to spend hours getting my system running again. I consider that a waste of time. In contrast, Mint takes care of itself, which leaves me to get on with my life in p…

Sure, maybe I've just been lucky to not experience such bugs, but for me the benefit of rolling + latest packages is worth it.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#155

Post by nogbit »

lunchables wrote: post #140
sevensor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe this all marks me as fallen from the ranks of the Linux cognoscenti, but I don't care. I just want to get on with my life. In the same way that I see a lot of people gush about Mac OS, Mint simply gets out of my way and lets me get on with stuff I actually want/need to do. Interesting -- this is what I would say about Arch. I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big oppo…

I agree, except for the installation. Manjaro I think would be a great compromise.

The community editions are great as well, Manjaro with i3 is fantastic. If you like vim you will love a tilling window manager.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#157

Post by AsyncAwait »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #146
AsyncAwait wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months It does indeed 'just work', it only doesn't if you fail to understand what rolling release means. There is usually a painless way to upgrade even after a long time, you just have to use pacdiff and read archlinux.org a bit more carefully than if you update daily/weekly. Also, how d…

"Oh it just works, as long as you read the documentation before every update and follow the update news feed, which usually has a bunch of information on packages your either don't use or don't care about. And you may have to fix shit manually. So yeah, it Just Works." With Mint (or Mac OS or Windows or Ubuntu), it updates automatically. Or if it doesn't, it flashes an icon, I click the icon, it updates for me. That'…

a. There's no need to 'read the documentation' before every update a quick glance at the news feed will do.

b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system.

c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad.

d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#158

Post by OtterCoder »

lunchables wrote: post #140
sevensor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe this all marks me as fallen from the ranks of the Linux cognoscenti, but I don't care. I just want to get on with my life. In the same way that I see a lot of people gush about Mac OS, Mint simply gets out of my way and lets me get on with stuff I actually want/need to do. Interesting -- this is what I would say about Arch. I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big oppo…

I agree, except for the installation. Manjaro I think would be a great compromise.

Argh. I spent most of yesterday trying to set up a dual boot with Manjaro and nearly bricked my machine. It is really dependant on hardware I think.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#159

Post by keenerd »

striking wrote: post #145
thesmallestcat wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you understand the difference between Arch and distros like Debian? When GNOME ships a new version, it almost immediately hits the Pacman repos. Do that for every package and you're going to have integration issues. Your users also get to be the guinea pigs for new releases. Ship buggy packages and sooner or later your users' systems will install a critical package with bugs. This is why Arch gets "this reputation…

There's a difference between running on the [testing] repos, which do what you say, and the regular default repos, which wait for packages to graduate from [testing] before rolling them out.

Only a small percentage of packages go through [testing]. Typically only when problems are expected. [community] and [extra] require no testing, just that the packager says "good enough for me." [core] is held to higher standards.

Re: Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)

#160

Post by bartkmq »

jwilk wrote: post #115
int_19h wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the biggest point in favor of Arch is that it is a binary distro that seems to be closest to "vanilla" - meaning that packages are generally built directly from upstream, without heavy distro-specific patchsets applied by maintainers. There's still plenty of patches, mind you, but they're usually there to ensure that it builds and installs correctly in Arch environment, not to change functionality. I also fin…

Making /usr/bin/python point to Python 3 doesn't sound very vanilla to me.

He defines 'vanilla' to mean 'build from upstream with little distro-specific changes'. So what does this have to do with making Python 3 the default python interpreter? I bet this symlink is not even part of the python source code; it's always a choice made by the distro maintainers.

Arch is known to be always cutting edge even if this sometimes means breaking stuff so this decision is not exactly surprising.

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