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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)

#261

Post by rekado »

nwah1 wrote: post #121
nextos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually describe Arch as the simplest possible binary distribution. It's just a thin layer (pacman mostly) on top of vanilla packages. This reduces complexity a lot. I understand most of what is going on in my install because I explicitly configured everything, and packages don't contain weird patches. While I love Arch's ethos, I think the next step in distributions is to embrace declarative configuration, non-des…

Arch and Debian are both working on reproducible packages, but Debian is much further along in that process. Arch build scripts are great, insofar as the entire packaging steps are open source and standardized, which in theory should make reproducibility easier. I agree that Nix and Guix are superior in concept, but they don't seem production-ready.

> Nix and Guix are superior in concept, but they don't seem production-ready.

FWIW I have been using Guix and GuixSD in production since 2014. I use Guix with a cluster of several hundred nodes and on countless workstations.

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

#262

Post by Scottn1 »

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 am very similar. Love to thinker sometimes so early this year downloading and installing many of the top and some obscure distro's. Just sort of felt like going doing an a No-Windows 30 days.

Antergos (arch made easy) was one of the distro's I tried last and it stayed on my Asus netbook the longest. I was fairy impressed with Antergos as it installed nice and felt pretty quick. But then things got too manual for my tastes. I just wanted to install Brave Browser. The tgz package didn't run and I couldn't obviously use the deb or rpm version. It wasn't in the default software add/remove when I searched. So I was thrown to using the command line (yaourt) and researching it's commands to get the repository correct, download and install a browser I simply wanted to try that would be a download from website and install on Windows as well as the more popular linux distro's.

That was one. Then a week later a update knocked out my wifi. I had to again mess around with some command line fix that worked. The real kicker was when I had not touched the netbook in about a month and when I finally did, I did the routine Pacman -Syu. This I found out the hard way was supposed to not go more than a week or so of not doing. This wrecked the distro so bad I couldn't even get the GUI. That was enough tinkering for me with Arch. I don't have time to research that as I didn't care anymore. Formatted.

I was most impressed with PClinuxOS. I just worked and had pretty recent packages on a rolling release. Never had any breakage and it also held hand enough I never touched the command line (even to install Brave). OpenSUSE, Korora and KDE Neon all were also decent and feel I could have used them long term if forced to.

In the end of about two months, I just wanted to crawl back into my comfy Windows 7 world and get some work done again. Be able to use literally any software I want and not be confined to lesser quality alternatives. Not have updates kill my install. Etc. I seriously applaud all the coders and individuals dedicating their free time to open source and thank them for that, but I guess I am fine with proprietary closed source that I've grown up on since 1984.

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

#263

Post by erikbye »

Foxboron wrote: post #195
erikbye wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch Anywhere. https://arch-anywhere.org/

Please don't recommend Arch Anywhere. It uses an unsigned package repo as part of their install.

Only if you enable it; if it's the third party, Arch-Anywhere-specific stuff you're thinking of.

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

#264

Post by thomastjeffery »

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…

Try NixOS.

The Wiki/Manual isn't quite there yet, but it's so manageable that that isn't important right away.

> having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences.

Just imagine: Your OS broke after installing an update. You reboot, and pick the second to last GRUB/syslinux entry, and literally boot into the system you had before.

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

#265

Post by thomastjeffery »

fmap wrote: post #118
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.

Let me stress the "install once, and never again" part - this is why I'm using arch. It's the first (binary) distribution I tried that eight years down the line still works as well as the day I first installed it.

Have you ever tried NixOS?

Nix takes the clean install to an elegant extreme. You can totally break your install, and then boot the exact system you had before just by picking the GRUB entry. It's amazing.

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

#266

Post by thomastjeffery »

Arch was my favorite distro for a long time. The Arch and Gentoo wikis are still my go-to for linux-related information.

Arch was my favorite distro right up until I installed NixOS. NixOS is the first distro that has truly innovated since Debian.

While I could maintain an Archlinux install for several years without much effort, I am guaranteed to be able to maintain my NixOS install longer than I could possibly want to. I am guaranteed a clean, working system. If something breaks, I need only reboot, and pick the last derivation in GRUB.

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

#267

Post by ernst_klim »

zamber wrote: post #245
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've updated both my desktop and my laptop from 18 to 18.1 to 18.2 with absolutely no issues at all. Or are you talking about major versions?

Yep, though I've been upgrading that system since Mint 14 (with Cinnamon). Compared to Arch the maintenance cost is orders of magnitude lower. Compared to Ubuntu (2y, at work, upgraded from 16.04 LTS -> 16.10) it feels higher mainly because stuff is less tested and can also break with regular updates (unless they fixed their workflow to remedy that). - For mortal-level usage -> Ubuntu - For mortal-level usage when yo…

>For mortal-level usage

I had to choose distro for my gf, so I'd looked for some newbie friendly. I'd installed ubuntu 16.04 in qemu and I found that gnome-software does not work properly: there are a few packages available to install from gui (no scribus, no emacs, no kicad etc). Literally a year passed since lt came out and it has such unacceptable issue for a newbie-friendly distro. Hopefully fedora just works.

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

#268

Post by ernst_klim »

Koshkin wrote: post #128
nextos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually describe Arch as the simplest possible binary distribution. It's just a thin layer (pacman mostly) on top of vanilla packages. This reduces complexity a lot. I understand most of what is going on in my install because I explicitly configured everything, and packages don't contain weird patches. While I love Arch's ethos, I think the next step in distributions is to embrace declarative configuration, non-des…

> the simplest possible I find Slackware easier to install. (IMHO, it's the sanest distribution of all. I have used many of them but kept coming back to Slackware.)

>Koshkin

>Slackware is the sanest distribution of all

Are you a russian physicist?

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

#269

Post by pwdisswordfish »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #95
sevensor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can affirm that. I don't understand how Arch gets this reputation for breaking during an upgrade. In the four years I've been using Arch on a variety of systems, I've never had anything break in a way that didn't have a trivial, obvious fix, and most of the time pacman points out potential problems during the upgrade. Arch has allowed me to spend way less time on system administration than I used to before I switch…

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…

> it almost immediately hits the Pacman repos.

I tried Arch and it's not the case, my examples:

PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/release-9-6-2.htm... 9.6.2 released 2017-02-09, in Arch repos - https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/log/trunk?h=... - almost a MONTH later. 9.6 released 2016-09-29, in Arch repos - 2016-10-29 (version 9.6.1, they skipped 9.6) - again, a MONTH later.

Had issues with outdated Node.js and some other package I can't recall.

To be honest, up to date packages for me were only available with brew in macOS.

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

#270

Post by KozmoNau7 »

bbv-if wrote: post #216
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will second this, I faced these exact same issues, for the same reasons. If you don't subscribe to the Arch news feed, you're taking a chance on every upgrade, that your system will not boot correctly.

For me, a simple alert "Hey, this update can break things, do you know what you're doing?" in case of a risky update would be enough.

Which is what Mint does by default. It shows the update, but doesn't select it automatically.
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