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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)

#31

Post by int_19h »

mariusmg wrote: post #3

So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? There's no "sellingpoint" in the article except this "dig" at the other distros : "apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk breaking everything)"

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 find Pacman to be noticeably faster than all other binary package managers. I just did a full package upgrade on a laptop that hasn't been upgraded since the beginning of this year, and yet it was able to compute a (fairly lengthy) list of packages to upgrade faster than I could blink.

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

#32

Post by int_19h »

fest wrote: post #11
mariusmg wrote: post #3

So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? There's no "sellingpoint" in the article except this "dig" at the other distros : "apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk breaking everything)"

From my personal experience: upstream packages get updated a lot more frequently, even faster than in debian-testing repo.

Arch should probably be compared to Debian unstable, not testing. Testing can be pretty slow, especially close to the next stable release - and that's by design.

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

#33

Post by Latty »

rantanplan wrote: post #10

I briefly considered Arch, a few years back that I was having a relationship crisis with my Fedora. Unfortunately it was a no-go for me for the following reasons, but the situation may have been improved since then: 1) Back then it was only recently that they had instituted package signing and verification for their official packages. Ouch! That was something that most distros had for years back then. So security was…

I think all of the 'other package managers' are just wrappers around pacman to give more functionality. I haven't seen any competing completely different package managers.

Packaging, yeah, some stuff is only AUR, but that's generally a better starting point than "well here is the source". In general, 99% of what I use is available in proper packages. Obviously that'll depend on what you use.

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

#34

Post by jcelerier »

mariusmg wrote: post #3

So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? There's no "sellingpoint" in the article except this "dig" at the other distros : "apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk breaking everything)"

> So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ?

I've used a bunch of distros over the years, starting at Red Hat Linux 5.2 when I was a kid, Mandrake linux 7,8, Ubuntu from 8.04 to 12.04, Debian stable, testing, unstable, sid, and finally Arch.

Arch has been, by far, the most hassle-free when I see some software on the web and want to use it on my machine. Also the only one where I wasn't able to botch the system as to make it either unable to install any package or unbootable, while it happened quite often with Debian and Ubuntu.

AUR is fantastic, both as an user and a software author: it means that I just have to make a small script to make my software available easily to other arch users, vs the ungodly process to get a package into Debian and Ubuntu ; also I can be fairly confident that my users will always have a somewhat up-to-date version of my software.

Pacman installs stuff much faster than apt or yum in my experience; updates seem almost instantaneous. The best is that as a software developer you always get the most recent version of libraries and compilers: gcc 7.2, qt 5.9, etc. Likewise for desktop environments: KDE updates come very quickly.

Some packages also have "git" versions available on the AUR; for instance the creative coding toolkit openframeworks is available in the AUR both as the latest stable version, 0.9.8, released a year and so ago, and the latest nightly git version which has a lot of improvements. It's very useful if you report a bug in some software and the author fixes it in git master : means that you can often just do `yaourt -S software-i-use-git` and have it be recompiled automatically with the fix, vs trying to follow the build procedure yourself.

If you have a recent computer, older kernels and mesa sometimes don't cut it while in arch you get the latest stable kernel very shortly after its release.

It uses systemd meaning that the general system config is very simple.

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

#35

Post by Majestic121 »

Latty wrote: post #27
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.

The biggest "just works" thing for me with Arch is that, because you configure everything yourself and set it up, you know what is in your system and how it's slotted together. Less magic, when something goes wrong, you have an idea where to look. It's obviously not going to be true for some, but for power users, it's surprisingly great. I've been on Arch for many years myself with the same story.

If you have to configure and set up everything yourself, it can not really be called 'just works'.

I'm definitely a fan of setting things up and diving into config myself, but let's be honest : Arch is not a 'Just works' distribution. Ubuntu could be considered one, maybe elementary as well

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

#36

Post by jcelerier »

mac01021 wrote: post #8

>I’ve configured the compiler once to work in an optimized way for my specific CPU, then compiled all the LXDE packages from ABS and installed them. I noticed they were running a little bit faster after that. I would love to hear about what configuring the compiler to work in an optimized way for your specific CPU entails.

In arch the compile flags are set in /etc/makepkg.conf.

Got my system compiled with

    CFLAGS="-march=native -O3 -flto -pipe -fstack-protector-strong --param=ssp-buffer-size=4"

    CXXFLAGS="-march=native -O3 -flto -pipe -fstack-protector-strong --param=ssp-buffer-size=4"

    LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O3,--sort-common,--as-needed,-z,relro,-flto"

    MAKEFLAGS="-j16"

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

#37

Post by mac01021 »

whoopdedo wrote: post #25
mac01021 wrote: post #8

>I’ve configured the compiler once to work in an optimized way for my specific CPU, then compiled all the LXDE packages from ABS and installed them. I noticed they were running a little bit faster after that. I would love to hear about what configuring the compiler to work in an optimized way for your specific CPU entails.

export CC=gcc -march=native

Can you explain?

Doesn't "-march=native" just set the target CPU architecture to be that of the host you're running on? Isn't that the default behaviour anyway?

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

#38

Post by bbv-if »

number6 wrote: post #19
bbv-if wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he didn't mention that in Arch a routine upgrade can break everything which rather doesn't happen in the release-based distros. It has happened to me more that once over the last 8 years. I still use it nevertheless, but it's definitely not for everyone.

This Never happened to me in 5 years of arch. I always considered this a hoax. How did Arch break?

To name a few: when systemd was introduced; when there were changes made to the file structure (moving everything to /usr); when kde4 was replaced with kde5. And there were more issues, I just don't remember all of them. Reading the news before the update could have helped sometimes but I don't do that every time I execute `pacman -Syu` for various reasons; and sometimes problems are unexpected or just bugs fixed on the next update.

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

#39

Post by CannisterFlux »

mariusmg wrote: post #3

So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? There's no "sellingpoint" in the article except this "dig" at the other distros : "apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk breaking everything)"

The rolling release model - you always have the latest stuff. Latest git, firefox, pidgin, all the latest released version of dev libraries and tools. The AUR is handy for installing proprietary stuff like google-chrome, hipchat, no-machine, or packaging up things you install outside Arch but need e.g. old free software that isn't in Arch.

Generally Arch doesn't patch upstream software unless it is absolutely necessary and they are keen to drop patches when an issue is fixed, so if you read on a project's website that the config file is in /etc/whatever.conf then it will be. In other distros they move stuff around in a more capricious way.

The dist-upgrade thing is also kinda true. It's not that it breaks everything - I use Ubuntu too, and I don't think I've ever had an upgrade break on me in 10+ years - but you need to set aside a few hours to upgrade the world each time. With a rolling release you can spread those few hours out over the 6 months. Just a few minutes a day or per week. Also, because you go from one release to the next, as the upstream developer envisioned, the compatibility of programs between versions tends to work out OK. Whereas in a longer-term release there can be big version jumps that the upstream dev did not really anticipate, causing things to break. For example, maybe some feature gets deprecated and there are some months were releases show a warning "hey, this feature is going away, do this other thing instead". You can sort it out early in Arch. But in another distro, you go from the release with a feature to a release without it, and no smooth transition between versions. And all at once, so "everything" breaks/changes that same day.

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

#40

Post by mac01021 »

jcelerier wrote: post #36
mac01021 wrote: post #8

>I’ve configured the compiler once to work in an optimized way for my specific CPU, then compiled all the LXDE packages from ABS and installed them. I noticed they were running a little bit faster after that. I would love to hear about what configuring the compiler to work in an optimized way for your specific CPU entails.

In arch the compile flags are set in /etc/makepkg.conf. Got my system compiled with CFLAGS="-march=native -O3 -flto -pipe -fstack-protector-strong --param=ssp-buffer-size=4" CXXFLAGS="-march=native -O3 -flto -pipe -fstack-protector-strong --param=ssp-buffer-size=4" LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O3,--sort-common,--as-needed,-z,relro,-flto" MAKEFLAGS="-j16"

Interesting.

So how does this set of options tend to differ from those used by the guys who build the normal binary packages?

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