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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)

#201

Post by JdeBP »

levesque wrote: post #169
catpolice wrote: post #164

I used to love Arch wholeheartedly. The systemd transition left a bad taste in my mouth, and I haven't felt like I've had full control of my system since then, but I periodically try other Linux distributions but I always end up coming back to Arch. My experience with other distributions always goes something like this: Oh this is nice and easy Hm, there isn't a package for this thing I love. I guess I'll build it my…

So what is the issue with systemd? Any strictly better alternative out there?

There are alternatives.

* https://framagit.org/taca/archnosh

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

#202

Post by keenerd »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #138
Hello71 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds suspiciously to me like "I rewrote my program in new language and it was 20% faster and 200% easier!" in that yes, your new experience may be better, but that's not necessarily attributable to the new language/operating system, but instead that you just got rid of all the old cruft. It's entirely possible (and sounds to me likely, based on your story) that you could have just reinstalled Arch with the sam…

Sure, I could have reinstalled Arch, but 1) that sort of breaks the whole "install once, update forever" ideal many Arch proponents trot out, and 2) that would still require me to install everything manually, set up the base system manually, fiddle around with config files and so on. In comparison, to install Mint, I popped in the USB stick, ran the installer and that was it. The most complicated thing was the partit…

Funny you should mention Mint. For many years they have required that you do a re-install instead of a dist-upgrade. Even just this past year, that was the officially recommended course of action for going from Mint 17 to Mint 18.

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

#203

Post by zdkl »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #148
zdkl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No judgement, I've been in the same place. What you describe sounds like the consequence of installing a lot of packages. Arch "prefers" when you strip it down to what you need , if only because that way you don't need to worry about too many version mismatches.

So if you actually try to use the system for more than a handful of things, it tends to break? That's not very reassuring.

You put it well in another thread with "it absolutely isn't [...] a good distro for people who just want to get on with life."

If you're looking for your computer to Just Work(tm) look elsewhere. However I stand by my comment about it being an outstanding learning tool for the curious & future sysadmins.

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

#204

Post by Ig0rK »

bartkmq wrote: post #129

I'm a big fan of the Arch User Repository (AUR). But Arch itself takes too long to configure and breaks from time to time so I switched to Manjaro which is based on Arch but has its own repos with more config files already prepared for you. Also it's not rolling release but updates once a week which allows the maintainers to check for errors before they reach the users. Because of the AUR I actually think Manjaro can…

Same thing with the rolling release breaking the system happens frequently with manjaro. The latest update broke my system for example. If you google "manjaro update system broken" you will see that this happens at least once a year which is not fun.

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

#205

Post by tanderson92 »

sevensor wrote: post #112
discreditable wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big opportunity for breakage. I've had a server running for several years on Arch. The systemd transition wasn't bad. I didn't have any custom init scripts to migrate, so it was mostly update & reboot. Arch is a great install once and update forever system. I even migrated my install in-place from x86 to amd64 after upgrading the CPU. The…

> I even migrated my install in-place from x86 to amd64 after upgrading the CPU My hat is off to you -- I would have guessed that wasn't possible!

On a multiarch distro, like Exherbo or Debian, you can switch architectures by cross compiling for the target arch.

On Exherbo, after cross compiling, one only needs to change the /usr/host symlink and reboot.

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

#206

Post by traverseda »

saimiam wrote: post #189
AsyncAwait wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big opportunity for breakage. I experienced that transition and while you had to read the wiki somewhat carefully, I remember being a bit 'disappointed' afterwards as to how smooth/uneventful it was, it sounded way more scary than it actually was.

Well, just yesterday, I had to go back a release from Ubuntu 17.04 to 16.04 because of some oscure DNS related systemd-resolved bug which I spent all day trying to fix. Mind you, this bug has been under active discussion for a while now. Since my 16.04 server is just a day old now, I'm thinking I'll bite the bullet and switch to a troublefree distro recommended in this thread. (Not a Linux cognoscenti.)

Huh, I had to do the same thing yesterday. Interesting coincidence.

Did you add DNSSEC=no to /etc/systemd/resolved.conf? That fixed the problem I had yesterday, which is probably a different problem.

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

#208

Post by phren0logy »

kristerv wrote: post #119

For beginners https://antergos.com/ is a clean version of Arch just with a simple installer. So you get all the benefits of Arch with no bloat (like Manjaro) and don't have to learn installing the OS manually.

I use, and have been very happy with, antergos. From install to a pleasantly configured GUI is very simple, and from there it's basically just another Arch machine with nice defaults.

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

#209

Post by striking »

catpolice wrote: post #164

I used to love Arch wholeheartedly. The systemd transition left a bad taste in my mouth, and I haven't felt like I've had full control of my system since then, but I periodically try other Linux distributions but I always end up coming back to Arch. My experience with other distributions always goes something like this: Oh this is nice and easy Hm, there isn't a package for this thing I love. I guess I'll build it my…

You can still use OpenRC. No support, but it might work.

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

#210

Post by alyandon »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #59

I fell in love with Arch, after having used Gentoo for years, and Debian before that. The straightforwardness appealed to me, it's a binary distribution with a rolling release cycle and no custom-finagled packages. But after a while, I got tired of manually configuring everything , doing all kinds of weird house-keeping and having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested co…

I had a very similar experience running Arch on a desktop. After borking my system twice in a six month period during updates (which was admittedly my fault for not following pre-upgrade instructions to the letter) I decided that I'll stick to distros that take care of those details for me.
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