Submitted by “I’ve been a Linux diehard since my early days with Debian 1.3. I visited various RPM distributions, including Red Hat, Mandrake, and SUSE, flirted with Gentoo, and jumped on the Ubuntu bandwagon, but I could never find a single place to settle – until I tried Arch Linux.”
Arch is very impressive, and has become my favourite distro as well.
I wonder why it hasn’t become more popular yet.
It’s not by FAR as complicated as gentoo, or whatever hardcore distro.
Arch is also the snappiest distro i’ve ever tried.
I guess people really NEED a gui to install linux (which i’m not against…)
I would however like to see a meta-package with some common administrative GUI tools, that would fit arch well enough. If they exist (and if they do the job well), why not…
As a everyday Arch user, I like any public exposure like this. And as a regular visitor of one Arch linux Chinese forum (www.linuxsir.org), I do notice a increasing volumn of people are trying Arch recently, whose people I don’t think they are”competent Linux users” since they asked many “beginner’s funny” questions.
So go people go, let’s do our best
to Wiki:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page
to Installer:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=527&highlight=installer
Arch eagerly need better Documents and Translations.
Edited 2006-05-17 02:44
I am a happy Arch Linux user, but doesnt it get a little more coverage on OSNews than average? There have been several other distro’s reviewed on newsforge’s series in the recent past.
That didn’t actually say anything about the product… Certainly didn’t say anything that isn’t present in other distros (pacman = apt-get = yum) and certainly doesn’t say anything to engender it as a desktop OS compared to others…
Someone bothered to link this why?
If you want more words, then there’s another review written for OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9540
It was written last year, and there are many great enhancements not covered (because they weren’t there at the time), but perhaps it’ll give some extra depth.
Don’t forget, the NewsForge articles have a word limit, which is why they’re quite short.
I would have enjoyed writing quite a bit about Arch, as there are *many* aspects that I really enjoy, but really arooaroo hit it on the head: the limit is about 1000 words… and I really had to pear down what I had to say about that because of it.
While it’s great that pacman is compared to the likes of apt-get/yum, it is really until you try it that you realize how well written the package manager is.. so much that I still am suprised by it daily.
The point of the article isn’t to describe in detail the distro, but to arouse interest to try. For many people that swing between distros, I’m positive most will find Arch a fit to their needs.
“I find the democratic aspect of the system refreshing in a sometimes overly political Linux landscape.”
He was saying his feeling. Do you wanna hear all about tech buzz words instead of whisper of heart? To me I like to know what people really care about, even if I didn’t realize the “democratic” part of Arch community, maybe this is something specially attractive.
Arch was my primary distribution till the hard disk of my Thinkpad Crashed and I had to replace it. As replacing took soem time and I wanted a working system in no time, so I went for Ubuntu. Though Arch is still on my Desktop, but I use Thinkpad most of time. I thought that I’ll use Ubuntu till I get the time to install Arch. But using Ubuntu is so fun and so easy, that I became lazy. Now I am at ease with Ubuntu and was postponing getting back to Arch.
Reaging this article again started the urge to get back to the familiar comfort of Arch.
The best thing with Arch is the simplicity and the speed. OO2 just flies with Arch. Also making new packages is very simple, just edit the PKGBUILD and create new packages.
The more I remember Arch, the more is the urge to use it.
Not sure if I’ll have Arch back on my Thinkpad by end of day, but sure all my nerves are aching to use pacman. Will have to wait till I reach home and use the dektop.
If you have the Ubuntu Live-CD, it comes with gparted. You can use it to resize the Ubuntu partition and make some room for Arch.
Using two distros side by side on the same computer is a good way to decide which one suits your needs better. Of course, you may find out that you’ll want to keep them both. 😀
Today everybody talks about Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the same as SuSe, Redhat, .. but seems to have been done a little bit more clever.
Still it is a clumsy distro targeted as “I don’t even change my brown wallpaper” users. Almost every user of Ubuntu I’ve seen so far … didn’t even change his wallpaper.
This is fine, but it is still that Ubuntu doesn’t make it very easy to it’s users to modify their system, set up some basic services or build own packages.
It’s just that even debian makes all these tasks complicated. Not complicated in obscurity (as would go for SuSe) but in just complicated.
Arch provides both comfort and customizability. Sure, you have to know many things the typical Not-wallpaper-setter would never know to get it up and running. But Arch makes every task you have to do as simple (not easy) as possible for you. The BSD init is not only fast, it’s also damn easy to get a module loaded or a service started. You want to have a job done every day? just place a symlink / wrapper script to /etc/cron.d/daily/… Arch also uses udev magic to any extend; when talking about modules to be loaded, I talk about thinks like fuse (for sshfs)…
So ok, you have to set up your own Xorg config. But you don’t have to check what network card you have, or sound card. You can plugin a usb camera and only have to add your user to the “camera” group to get access to it…
This is what I am missing in other distros. I’m not a zealot who wants to compile every package himself, because just it’s for doing myself. But I also want to have my own X setup with dualhead, I need services like apache, tomcat, I want to use sshfs. So every piece of extra stuff I want to do, I can do. But every piece of ridiculous stuff to be done I don’t have to care about
No one’s pretending that it’s a newbie distro (although I’m not saying it’s complex either). It makes it simple to be a power user, although, admittedly, I’m a fairly lazy user and don’t always take advantage of that fact.
Instead, I just use it as a stable platform for doing other stuff, like the pacman GUI frontend, Jacman! (http://www.andy-roberts.net/software/jacman/) [/plug]
“Still it is a clumsy distro targeted as “I don’t even change my brown wallpaper” users. Almost every user of Ubuntu I’ve seen so far … didn’t even change his wallpaper.”
What a gross stereotype
“This is fine, but it is still that Ubuntu doesn’t make it very easy to it’s users to modify their system, set up some basic services or build own packages.”
How do you come to this conclusion? Ubuntu doesn’t keep you from doing anything anymore than any other distro; it just turns out that Ubuntu does it _for you_ most of the time.
“It’s just that even debian makes all these tasks complicated. Not complicated in obscurity (as would go for SuSe) but in just complicated.”
Yes, Debian isn’t easy to use, you have to do everything by hand (that’s why I switched to Ubuntu), but that doesn’t mean that it’s any more complicated than say… slackware. (or Arch for that matter)
It turns out that Linux is Linux, if you can do it on one distro, you can do it on the other.
Hi,
you obviously just lack of the Arch like experience. Arch isn’t just Slackware which you referenced to.
Please don’t get me wrong: I never stated (and it would never be my intend to) it would be impossible to do this or that with Ubuntu/Debian. Sure it is possible to do anything with it which is possible with any other distro! I’m with you regarding this.
What I said is that it is _complicated_. I don’t know how complicated it is to modify slackware. I sure know how complicated it is with Debian or Ubuntu as I used these systems, too. Many tasks are just much, much simpler in Arch (best example is modifying or creating packages). You just have to try this out yourself to get an idea about how complicated Debian is. I had to have this experience myself
Regards,
Ford Prefect
Edited 2006-05-17 20:04
While Arch may provide comfort and customizability, I don’t think that modifying your Debian system is “complicated”.
I think udev is pretty standard on most (all?) linux distro’s nowadays. Also the scripts in /etc/cron.d/daily is standard. Things like plugging in an usb stick also just works, or an usb external harddisk for example. Adding services to a runlevel, is also fairly standard on Debian, just adding a link in for example /etc/rc2.d/ to the required service in /etc/rcS.d.
Modifying packages in Debian and then building your own, is also very simple, you can for example for existing packages use “apt-get source”, then do your modifications, then use “dpkg-buildpackage” to build the modified version and finally use “dpkg -i” to install the new package.
Creating packages which have not been “debianized” is not that hard either. You could for example use “checkinstall” to easily create a debian package.
I believe it is not that hard to create a “real” debian package either. I’ve looked at how it’s done, but never did it myself.
I don’t really see why Debian would be complicated for a user who does want to modify/tune his system. However, I do think that the information to do this kind of things is not always easily accessable. For example Gentoo has excellent documentation on their website and excellent forums. I once looked at Arch and I remember their forums looked very good too, I don’t know about the documentation though.
You’re right, most struggle I had with Debian was to find out what to do or how something was organized.
This is not such a big problem on Arch at first because it is much simpler. It has far less packages, no installer who asks a lot of questions and does magic, a very clean etc/ directory, a single file with all basic config in it. It has a comprehensive documentation about the package management which also covers building own packages so it’s not hard to find this out, you’re even pointed at it without asking for.
There is great support esp. at Freenode IRC, whereas in debian channels “newbie” questions mostly are ignored or even flamed at. In #archlinux, even the silliest questions like “how to search for a package” are answered ;-).
There is also a psychological thing, it’s just if you have debconf with thousands of packages on your system, you tend to “better not touch”. On the other side, if your system is as basic as it can be, you have to edit only 4 files to get X running, you better get the feeling of being in control and that it’s worth to investigate.
Still it’s simpler to add a script’s name to an array in a config file and have a @ before it to make it start in background, a ! to disable it, than to create a symlink for which you have to think of the right number at the beginning of the name and so on ;-). Sure creating a symlink is a very basic operation but perhaps you see a difference
. And better not think about defoma … I will never _really_ understand how to install fonts in debian 😉
Edited 2006-05-18 00:05
Still it’s simpler to add a script’s name to an array in a config file and have a @ before it to make it start in background, a ! to disable it, than to create a symlink for which you have to think of the right number at the beginning of the name and so on ;-). Sure creating a symlink is a very basic operation but perhaps you see a difference
.
In Debian you can use Boot-Up Manager for this. It couldn’t be simpler. http://www.marzocca.net/linux/bum.html
And better not think about defoma … I will never _really_ understand how to install fonts in debian 😉
???
In Debian you can install fonts via apt-get and defoma makes them automatically available for all applications. If you have some fonts of your own, you just drop them to ~/.fonts/. What on earth can be difficult in that?
is slow on my system.
My desktop pc an old Amd Duron 1000Mhz, 256MB with ati radeon 9550.
I have strange delay when switching between desktops. For example on desk 1 there is kosole, kate and amarok running in background, on desk 2 there is firefox with 2 -3 tabs. When switch from 1 to 2( and reverse 2 to 1) there is delay 2-3sec. to refresh firefox’s interface and around a second refreshing konsole’s and kate’s interfaces. I tryed archck and beyond kernels, with ati properitary drivers, with x drivers, with firefox download from mozilla the “speed” was the same.
When I installed it and use it for some time i thought that I found the distro for me,but speed is very important. At first I thought that my pc got too old and I have to upgrade it.But …
Some days ago I installed suse 10.1 and with all its running processes there is no delay the same apps running when switching between desktops.
I realy like arch but dalays are very annoying
This sounds like you just run out of memory so swap is used and has to be read back on the desktop switch as applications are woken up again.
I don’t know how SuSe gets around this. But on the other hand, I had an old celeron 433 machine with 256 MB and running Arch on it, too. I didn’t run a bloated desktop environment, but a lightweight window manager and some rather lightweight apps, too. For example I would never have used konsole, kate and amarok but aterm, scite and xmms. But if SuSe gives you the experience you expect without switching apps / behaviour, stick with it. Perhaps have a look at memory usage under arch if you want to do some research.
cu
Ford Prefect
Congratulations, I only have a Duron 1.1G+128M sdram, with kt133a(on-board audio)+g400, Arch has been the fastest distro in my experience. There could be something wrong with your configuration, however I can’t tell. I am using GNOME.