Arch Linux turns 10 • Hacker News Board

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#81

Post by tammer » Thu, Mar 15, 2012, 12:29 PM UTC

jon6 wrote: post #63

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.

I have a bunch of painful stories about using Arch but the best one happened most recently. I had some outdated package that I wanted to update so I asked in the #arch irc room how to just update that one package. I was told upgrading a single package is generally a bad idea and its better to just update the entire system. I have had a server running Gentoo for ~5 years and I frequently upgrade single packages at a t…

Definitely a valid opinion, but the way I see it when you use Arch you inherently don the hat of one of those 'bleeding edge distro people,' and it's up to you to keep everything working. It's simply the price I pay to have the most up-to-date software and some of the best performance I've ever seen.

More hegemonic distro's like Debian trade some of that speed and freshness for a more hands-off experience. Nothing wrong with either!

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#82

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 15, 2012, 12:52 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#83

Post by kiloaper » Thu, Mar 15, 2012, 1:01 PM UTC

It's the community that really makes Arch a great distro in my opinion. Because of them we have an excellent well-moderated forum with technically competent and helpful members, an outstanding wiki and a huge amount of software available in the AUR.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#84

Post by jeez » Thu, Mar 15, 2012, 1:08 PM UTC

wow, 10 years. I've been using it for a couple of years now.

But I do occasionally find it hard/difficult (from a mental POV), and I fall back on Fedora. I'll be a true *nix guy when I can stop doing that. :)

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#85

Post by leif » Thu, Mar 15, 2012, 1:41 PM UTC

old-gregg wrote: post #61

leif wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could not be more wrong. I have probably worked more for my fonts than for anything else about my system, on any linux distro I've tried (on OSX, the rendering's fine but the actual font choices kind of blow...there I have other problems that consume much more of my time than the fonts). On arch, I install the infinality patched freetype stuff from the AUR, set some preferences in .Xresources, install the fonts I…

> I install the infinality patched freetype stuff from the AUR I proved my point right there. That's what I've been doing too and maintaining AUR-sourced patched core packages like that has been problematic: every once in a while you'll get a part of Gnome or something else demanding a higher version of freetype (which your patched version doesn't provide) and it either halts your update or forces you to get plain va…

> Also I feel that this discussion is somewhat misplaced.

Yeah, probably. :)

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#86

Post by known » Thu, Mar 15, 2012, 1:51 PM UTC

Arch has the best documentation.

Re: Arch Linux turns 10

#87

Post by hollerith » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 11:42 AM UTC

leif wrote: post #48

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).

>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).

This is the key differentiator between Arch and other distros (particularly, Debian): Arch wins when the user wants to modify the system in ways not intended by the maintainers of the distro. In contrast, Debian wins against Arch when the user never does anything that the maintainers of the distro did not anticipate that users would do. (Debian wins here because changes have gone through vastly more real-world testing and bug-fixing before hitting Debian stable than they have gone through before hitting the machine of the Arch user. Note that there is no stable version of Arch Linux.)