How would you compare Arch to Mint? Which one would you recommend for people wanting to get deeper into Linux?
Arch Linux turns 10
21–30 of 87 posts
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, well the thing is I never had to use it before. But a package required it, so with a quick google-fu it said to include --force. What wasn't clear is that you had to do a --force for only that package.. while I simply added it to my already crafted command. (I.e. ctrl-p --force ). Let's say I've learned that one the hard way ;)
This is why I'll never jump on the "GUIs are for stupid people" bandwagon.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, well the thing is I never had to use it before. But a package required it, so with a quick google-fu it said to include --force. What wasn't clear is that you had to do a --force for only that package.. while I simply added it to my already crafted command. (I.e. ctrl-p --force ). Let's say I've learned that one the hard way ;)
You should be using Pacmatic. The --force thing was a news feed item, and Pacmatic would have shown you the official news before you could have done damage.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#24Happy 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 find that almost every time something breaks it's really because I haven't been careful enough. What you need to do is watch out for any messages during updating (especially during kernel updates) and make sure to just use sudo carefully etc.
I also want to add that while people always seem to talk about Arch breaking, it has hardly broken more for me that Windows of Ubuntu have in the same period of time. The advantage is that when Arch breaks, you fix it because you just tend to really learn how your system works when you use Arch, while in Windows and Ubuntu, I'd just reinstall usually.
I use Arch as my only OS, for day-to-day use, and it's perfectly stable when I'm not actively experimenting etc.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#25The following is a slightly edited comment I posted a while back on reddit in response to someone questioning the amount of demand that Arch places on its users. The context is slightly lost, but I think it remains relevant:
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I speak only from experience when I say that after around 15 years of using Linux distros other than Arch up until about 6 months ago (Slackware, then Redhat, then Ubuntu, then Debian, then Fedora), I've been surprised at the immediate decrease in work on my part to configure and get and keep a working system on Arch vs. the supposedly less technically intensive and demanding distributions.
However, you bring up a point I hadn't considered and that is the amount of time I spend in documentation-land, in this case, the Arch wiki. Now, the Arch wiki is just about the most god damned beautiful documentation efforts in all of Linux, so I always consider it a boon and joy to be looking through. But, on the other hand, when I was using Ubuntu, for instance, I had to deal with their forums. I was probably searching around their forums for answers about as much as I am reading through the Arch wiki. But the Ubuntu forums are huge and they are a complete mess and headache. It's decentralized and self-contradictory. Half of the brain power spent in most distribution forums is doing triage on the quality of the information you are reading (is it good? bad? best practice? hackish? etc.) Debian's and Fedora's forums are less problematic, but they suffer from having an information scarcity, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Ubuntu's, which suffers from a superabundance to the point of noise.
Arch's wiki hits the sweet spot with me because it's maintained, re-read heavily, fairly distribution agnostic (I spent a decent amount of time on Arch's wiki before even switching to using Arch itself), and very thorough. Importantly, I learn a hell of a lot while reading it. I get just as much knowledge out of it as I put in time. I can't say that that was the case for the forums and documentation of other distributions. And, of course, if you use linux as anything more than a word processor and web browsing appliance, you are going to spend time in documentation. The less time the better, it needn't be said, but I'd rather it be with Arch's wiki (or vanilla man pages) than most anything else.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#26How would you compare Arch to Mint? Which one would you recommend for people wanting to get deeper into Linux?
Arch will give you a deeper view than Mint, including having to make choices for yourself, about every component you wish to use.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#27How would you compare Arch to Mint? Which one would you recommend for people wanting to get deeper into Linux?
I think they are in quite the opposite ends of Linux desktop distro spectrum. Mint attempts to provide nice out-of-the-box experience and Arch is "tweak everything". Mint being based (more or less directly) on Debian includes far more distro-specific patches than Arch which has fairly vanilla packages (afaik).
As for my recommendation, imho you should learn the system you are going to use. If you want to learn Debian, use Debian (or Mint, or some other close Debian derivate). If you want to learn Arch, then use Arch. Every major distro can be poked and prodded, tweaked to no end, and you can look what happens under the hood.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#28Happy 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 a…
> And I got the impression that updates of Arch broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.
Maybe it looks more 'frequent' but when it does so it's in a much, much more limited scope each time. It's more like small, discrete steps vs a whole batch at once.
> 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.
That's because Arch subscribes to the opinion that upstream knows best, and puts emphasis on as much vanilla as possible (which contributes to its overall simplicity, leanness and elegance). Hence security update means version bump from upstream. Contrast with Debian which actively back ports security patches to the pinned version in each release.
> 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.
Ironically (although I did not notice that particular behavior myself) this would restore the pre-Lion behavior.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, well the thing is I never had to use it before. But a package required it, so with a quick google-fu it said to include --force. What wasn't clear is that you had to do a --force for only that package.. while I simply added it to my already crafted command. (I.e. ctrl-p --force ). Let's say I've learned that one the hard way ;)
This is why I'll never jump on the "GUIs are for stupid people" bandwagon.
This issue is completely orthogonal to whether or not a GUI was in use. The text UI could just have easily asked for confirmation, and a graphical UI could easily allow the user to shoot themselves in the foot.
Re: Arch Linux turns 10
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, well the thing is I never had to use it before. But a package required it, so with a quick google-fu it said to include --force. What wasn't clear is that you had to do a --force for only that package.. while I simply added it to my already crafted command. (I.e. ctrl-p --force ). Let's say I've learned that one the hard way ;)
This is why I'll never jump on the "GUIs are for stupid people" bandwagon.
Even though I agree with your statement, do you truly believe that if a GUI had presented the options Yes/No/Cancel/Force or whatever, that less people would have suffered from issues like this? I probably would have used that --force flag on a non production system and a GUI would even make that decision more easy for me...