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Arch Linux turns 10

archlinux.org

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Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#31

Post by Deinumite »

bitwize wrote: post #16

Arch rules. It is literally just what I wanted from a Linux distro: the dead simplicity and austere Unix-ness of Slackware combined with the up-to-the-minute-ness and easy source package integration of Gentoo. A true gem and reminder of what Linux is and can be, when Ubuntu makes it seem like we've lost our way...

Ubuntu is the best distro around... for what it's purpose is.

Ubuntu isn't around to cater to power users, the whole idea behind it is shipping a distro thats so easy your grandma can install and use it.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#32

Post by yabai »

Arch is what I have been running (since around 2006). I love the simplicity. When things do break, there is an amazing community waiting to provide support. The Arch community rules! I think Arch is quickly becoming what Gentoo was...(hopefully I dont start a war!).

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#33

Post by PsyGeek »

Like others, I also love Arch and have been using it since 2007. Although I started with Slackware, I find myself using Arch as my primary Linux distribution these days because I feel it is the best of Slackware, Crux, FreeBSD and maybe Gentoo to an extent. As power users, I'm sure we can all appreciate Arch for what it has become. I look forward to using Arch in the coming years.

Happy Birthday Arch Linux!!

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#34

Post by chimeracoder »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #22
phzbOx wrote: post #18

Earlier 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 has nothing to do with a GUI vs. command-line interface. You're confusing the decision of what information to present with how to present it.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#35

Post by yabai »

Vergle wrote: post #3

Happy 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?

If I never broke anything...I would not know much about Linux! I think part of maintaining a distro like Arch is dealing with things breaking. The good news is that you learn about how something works and usually can figure out a solution. The Arch community is awesome and is very responsive when things don't work.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#36

Post by yabai »

phzbOx wrote: post #4

I love Arch. Best distribution by far in my opinion. Sadly, I had huge problems one week ago when I did a full system upgrade (took me 2 days to fix everything that was corrupted and lost lots of money because of it) but then it was my fault. (Never use --force with a system upgrade!) To be fair, there should be a warning when you try to execute the command as it's probably not what a user would want to do.

The more I use Arch, the more I do things on the command line. That means a lot less software to maintain. I think if you run tons of different software, you are asking for things to break.

I happily run dwm, and a handful of CLI tools. This minimalistic setup is enough for me - and seems to cut down on things breaking.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#37

Post by jack12 »

I'm not sure exactly when I moved over to Arch from Crux, I'm sure the distribution was at least a few months old by then, but it's been a great distribution as long as I've known it.

It does suffer the occasional dip into making things more complicated than they need to be, some element of the distribution straying towards the "SysV" darkside and away from the "BSD" ideal, or an upstream's configuration system just getting too insane to work around any longer, but everything always works back to some sense of balance after a few years. And it does feel like upstreams come around to the Arch way of thinking more often that the other way around.

I do wish it was a bit easier to automatically build or just download pre-made packages with some of the more popular compile flag variants, ports- or portage-style, but not so much that it casts a shadow on all the other benefits of Arch.

Still, it would be nice to be able to install a console vim with python and ruby interpreter support without having to install gnome too, or being able to install java on a headless server without having to stick half of X11 on there, or not having to install Apache because you want to change nginx's modules. It's always possible to change the PKGBUILD and recompile, but it seems like just changing one enable/disable switch to ./configure should be easier than it often is (vim is especially a pain to keep a custom PKGBUILD of, the ABS PKGBUILD seems to undergo massive revisions every few months).

But really the distribution is just great, the best out there. It lets you use pure Linux and avoid all the hoop jumping other distributions make you do in order to keep their package managers happy, while still giving you all the benefits you want from a distribution like automatic pre-compiled upgrades. And that's enough to make it the best balance of a distribution out there for me.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#38

Post by drostie »

It's a couple days too late to wish Arch happy birthday, but if you're very quick, you can still wish Albert Einstein happy birthday. He'd be 133 today. Unfortunately there's no real location of his corpse that you can visit as he was cremated, but last I heard, his eyes are kept in a safe deposit box somewhere in New York, there's a couple slides of his brain at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and the majority of his brain is somewhere in Princeton.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#39

Post by rufugee »

jack12 wrote: post #37

I'm not sure exactly when I moved over to Arch from Crux, I'm sure the distribution was at least a few months old by then, but it's been a great distribution as long as I've known it. It does suffer the occasional dip into making things more complicated than they need to be, some element of the distribution straying towards the "SysV" darkside and away from the "BSD" ideal, or an upstream's configuration system just…

I've been using debian based systems (including ubuntu) for over a decade now, and I can't think of more than a handful of times time I've had to jump through hoops to keep apt and dpkg happy. You may not always have the latest version of the software, but the productivity compared to compile.everything or rpm-based systems is significant. Almost everytime I need a piece of software, it's one command away.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#40

Post by kamechan »

Vergle wrote: post #3

Happy 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?

In my own experience with Arch, things offered through AUR (while convenient) seem to cause more problems than that which is in core, extra, community, multilib, etc... In other words, things which pacman handles.

So using AUR introduces a bit of maintenance overhead in the sense that I spend more time reading the comments, checking the number of votes for an item, researching the dependencies that arise, etc. But I'm also happy AUR is there to supplement what is in the supported repos. That said, I've definitely had some MAJOR problems that I've had to work through using AUR packages.

I would say that your statement about putting in the time up front to learn how the system works in order to do relatively less system administration in the long run applies more to Gentoo than to Arch. I was a Gentoo user for several years before switching to Arch, and once you get all your configuration files set up on Gentoo, the system is rock solid. The only drawback is that you're compiling nearly everything from source based on your specific system configuration through make.conf and such, updates can take a while. However, the internal consistency and dependency resolution of emerge seems far, far better than pacman in my experience.

To me at this point Arch is as stable as OSX, and possibly even more so. I go weeks without reboots and my computer never slows down. I do updates almost every day, and most of the time have no problems. And I really appreciate the rolling-release paradigm. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that possibly sometime in the future, OSX could potentially go that route as well. It already seems like they're headed there in some ways.

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