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Arch Linux turns 10

archlinux.org

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Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#41

Post by chimeracoder »

Deinumite wrote: post #31
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.

Honestly, I'm not sure Ubuntu even excels at that anymore.

When I switched my parents over to Linux, I installed Mint, not Ubuntu. This was well before the Unity debacle, but even besides that, I'm glad I did. Mint looked familiar to them (coming from Windows), and while it may be heavily bloated from a software perspective (the stuff that makes Arch users cringe, since they ship everything by default to maximize configuration-free compatibility), it feels very lightweight from a user perspective - like what Windows might be like if they stripped out all of the stuff that people really don't care about.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#42

Post by dsrguru »

lloeki wrote: post #28
hollerith wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike Debian, Arch Linux has what they call a "rolling release schedule," which means that the only choices you have are (1) refrain from using Pacman at all to update your software, which of course leaves security vulnerabilities unpatched and (2) opening yourself up to major changes to major subsystems, like Gnome, any time you use pacman to update your system. In contrast, on Debian, major changes to e.g. Gnome a…

> And I got the impression that updates of Arch broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did. Maybe it looks more 'frequent' but when it does so it's in a much, much more limited scope each time. It's more like small, discrete steps vs a whole batch at once. > you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch L…

I've been using Arch for about five years, and I can tell you that things break more frequently than with any other distro I've used for a suffiently long amount of time. Things break more frequently when you're tinkering with things, but sometimes even on routine updates. If you want something more stable, use Debian Testing or Slackware. That being said, Arch is great. Try it!

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#43

Post by old-gregg »

chimeracoder wrote: post #41
Deinumite wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly, I'm not sure Ubuntu even excels at that anymore. When I switched my parents over to Linux, I installed Mint, not Ubuntu. This was well before the Unity debacle, but even besides that, I'm glad I did. Mint looked familiar to them (coming from Windows), and while it may be heavily bloated from a software perspective (the stuff that makes Arch users cringe, since they ship everything by default to maximize con…

No need to bash Ubuntu just because it lost the coolness/freshness factor. It's still a great distribution, and the only one I know which serves excellent font rendering out of the box.

I love Arch as much as the next guy, but their default font experience is awful. The biggest headache of using it was constantly fighting/maintaining patched cairo/freetype from AUR (because they'd occasionally conflict with a newer version of some other package). And on top of that you'd have a ton of other packages with baked-in broken fonts like Firefox, xulrunner and Open Office.

When it comes to fonts and text rendering, all users firmly belong into two groups: the 1st group would post a screenshot of their screen where the 'd' and 'p' are rendered with double line thickness at the tip of their curves, and then claim "my fonts are fine". The 2nd group would consider that unusable.

What Ubuntu excelled at (and still does) is to bring Linux to the 2nd group of people, which is a lot larger than the 1st one. All Canonical's questionable achievements like Unity, upstart and Bazaar have been easily eclipsed by them noticing and taking care of the elephant in the room: readability of text on user's screen. They fixed it by patching freetype, providing sensible defaults for fontconfig and by developing an excellent set of default fonts.

Sorry for the long rant, this is Arch birthday after all. Arch rocks! Long live Arch! :)

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#45

Post by hollerith »

rufugee wrote: post #39
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.

It is hard to see what your comment has to do with Arch Linux since it is neither a compile.everything nor an rpm-based system.

But yeah, for users willing to adapt themselves to a system, as opposed to adapting the system to their desires, the debian-based distros are probably the best Linux distros.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#46

Post by leif »

keenerd wrote: post #23
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 ;)

You should be using Pacmatic. The --force thing was a news feed item, and Pacmatic would have shown you the official news before you could have done damage.

I didn't know about this (on and off, but current and likely more consistent in the future arch user). From me, and anyone in my position, thank you.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#47

Post by leif »

old-gregg wrote: post #43
chimeracoder wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm not sure Ubuntu even excels at that anymore. When I switched my parents over to Linux, I installed Mint, not Ubuntu. This was well before the Unity debacle, but even besides that, I'm glad I did. Mint looked familiar to them (coming from Windows), and while it may be heavily bloated from a software perspective (the stuff that makes Arch users cringe, since they ship everything by default to maximize con…

No need to bash Ubuntu just because it lost the coolness/freshness factor. It's still a great distribution, and the only one I know which serves excellent font rendering out of the box. I love Arch as much as the next guy, but their default font experience is awful. The biggest headache of using it was constantly fighting/maintaining patched cairo/freetype from AUR (because they'd occasionally conflict with a newer v…

I have had the best font experience on arch, out of gentoo, debian, Ubuntu, fedora, centos, and FreeBSD. It wasn't straight out of the box, but it was easier to make happen than on any of the others.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#48

Post by leif »

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?

I have seen arch break pretty spectacularly, but only on systems where i did some, to put it delicately, unadvisable things (put /tmp, /var/tmp on tmpfs, put /usr on unionfs over squashfs, etc). Where I have avoided breaking standard practice, I have never had a single problem. I also see it to arch's credit that I was able to do such horrific things to it with such ease (and fairly good documentation).

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#49

Post by w1ntermute »

After experimenting with countless distros over the years, Arch is by far my favorite. It combines the customizability of Gentoo with the simplicity of Slackware. Long live Arch!

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#50

Post by leif »

yabai wrote: post #32

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!).

What do you think gentoo was? When I used it (2005-7ish), I think it was a toy for brat haxxors. At the time, I was a brat haxxor, so it worked well.
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