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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)

#221

Post by harrygeez »

A lot of pros and cons thrown around here and there, with each of them having their merits. I like Arch because it lets me piece up the OS that I want to use.

Of course, it has its limits and it probably isn't 100% to your liking, but it's pretty much there, and the best thing is since I tweaked everything myself, I know what's wrong when things go wrong.

Like most people, I had my fair share of bad surprises after updates, but these errors don't go unnoticed and so far I am able to solve them all following the solutions posted in the forums, it's not that hard. Pacman also cache your old packages so downgrading is also relatively painless.

I recommend Arch to anyone who wants to get to know better how their computer works. Some of its shortcoming are annoying, yes, but not a dealbreaker IMO.

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

#222

Post by hedning »

DiThi wrote: post #110
Already__Taken wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix and Guix node packages are 8.2 and 8.1 respectively. Nix can't seem to find a couchdb package and guix is 1.6.1 Arch package have node 8.5.0 and couch is 2.1.0 When I read blogs about new software and I can't just packagemanager install/update it on I don't really see any more value than living on windows installing exe's from websites. Every distro I've used except arch has a real case of documentation not livin…

Nix has node 8.4 in its unstable channel, and it seems very easy to change[0]. I don't know about couch but it has 2.0 and the change to 2.1 shouldn't be big. [0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/c699694cbf4400480fe4...

Yes, with nixos it's easy and _safe_ to install packages from unstable while running a stable system as default (installing stuff never breaks your system).

There's also a fairly new feature called overlays which are used to fully track upstream releases (there's overlays available for rust and Firfox Nightly for instance).

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

#223

Post by fasquoika »

j7ake wrote: post #134
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…

Reinstalling arch Linux means that you have to reconfigure everything. Arch does not work right out of the box.

You could always install Antergos. It's basically just Arch + sane defaults

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

#224

Post by nilsocket »

keenerd wrote: post #156

Volunteer from Arch Linux here. I ask this whenever a big thread comes up: are there any packages in the AUR that you'd really like to see be made into an official package?

Firefox-nightly

vs-code

latte-dock(unknown for some people, but it's famous among KDE users)

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

#225

Post by kochthesecond »

keenerd wrote: post #156

Volunteer from Arch Linux here. I ask this whenever a big thread comes up: are there any packages in the AUR that you'd really like to see be made into an official package?

Thank you for your work.

I'd really like to see the web server caddy included in official packages.

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

#226

Post by Shikadi »

mezuzza wrote: post #211
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've used Arch since at least 2011 and I know exactly what you're talking about. When I first started using it, it had the stupid blue install script (pacstrap was it?). Around that time, I had to reinstall arch ~4 times for some reason or another. It was not a great experience. It made me learn a lot of Linux stuff just to keep it up and hitting `pacman -Syyu` was always a scary thing to do. You could never hit yes…

I started using Arch sometime before you did, and had the exact same experience - Something happened between 2012 and 2014 that made Arch the most stable Linux distro I've ever used. Arguably more stable than Windows 10, depending on your opinions of Microsoft's execution of forced updates.

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

#227

Post by darkengine »

keenerd wrote: post #156

Volunteer from Arch Linux here. I ask this whenever a big thread comes up: are there any packages in the AUR that you'd really like to see be made into an official package?

rcm, the dotfile manager! I use it get fresh systems going. FreeBSD and OpenBSD have a pkg/port, but neither Debian nor Arch currently have an official package.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rcm/

Should also mention Blink, the softphone. Looks and works better than Linphone (in the offical repos) in my experience.

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

#228

Post by barsonme »

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…

> 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 consequences

Weird! I ran dev versions of everything, updated once every couple days, and can only remember one time that I had to fix a catastrophic bug.

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

#229

Post by favadi »

auxym wrote: post #176
pizza234 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you refer to apt-hell exactly? I've been using Ubuntu for years, and I can't remember any problem with the package manager. The apt-related annoyance is that some PPAs don't carry updated packages (for all the recent Ubuntu versions), but has nothing to do with apt itself. Maybe you refer to distro upgrades? To be fair I have little experience with those, as I never upgrade, only perform fresh installs.

I was not able to update anything anymore due to some complex dependency problem that could not be resolved and seemed to be circular. This happened twice with Ubuntu and another debian-based distro. Granted, I admit I mess around a bit with debian sources. I sometimes pin things, and often times pull packages from sid or unoffficial repos to get fresher versions. With arch though, packages are always fresh, and the…

> Granted, I admit I mess around a bit with debian sources. I sometimes pin things, and often times pull packages from sid or unoffficial repos to get fresher versions.

Found your problem.

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

#230

Post by deepanchor »

auxym wrote: post #78
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…

The main reason I stay away from anything debian based these days is apt. I've been stuck in apt-hell a few too many times. Antergos (arch-based) seems to be treating me well.

Yup, another Antergos fan here. I started with vanilla arch, but like others, got tired of things constantly breaking and my system becoming unpredictable and possibly unstable after every update. I got tired of doing everything manually and wasting time making config files for the simplest of things.

I tried looking into other distros (mint, fedora, ubuntu) but always found myself missing the awesome power of the Aur. So Antergos is the perfect compromise. It's easy to install (no manual configuration required) and gives me access to the Aur.

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