“Arch Linux, or Arch for short, is one of the uprising new distributions. Well, at least compared to old folks like Debian or Slackware it’s still fresh and shining. Arch is gaining new users and good reviews every day. Let’s find out why this is happening.” More here.
Arch Linux: Smooth and Cuddly
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Used Arch more than 1 years. I was using Slackware before, starting from 1996 (Koules, anyone?). It is really an awesome distro, but it suffers from Linux’s stability problems. Other than that, Arch Linux is the way to go, if you’re going to use Linux.
I can’t say I have stability problems unless I misconfigure something. Could you enlighten us with some more details?
As for the author’s issues with the kernel and initrd system, I agree that it’s still a bit immature and problematic. However, I think the consistency in device naming and well limited module loading that it allows fits in perfectly with the Arch simplicity. On the other hand, the complexity of the automation… I can’t disagree with him there. It’s a bit of a paradox.
Stability is definitely an issue on Arch. It’s a known one, and viewed as a tradeoff by most for having a rolling release system with more or less “bleeding edge” packages. I don’t mean that you get a lot of bad packages in arch, I mean that things break, out of the blue, after upgrades. Fairly often, too. Many times, these are upstream bugs, or bugs that crop up because there is only a very small pool of testers for arch. But there is breakage – absolutely. Now, most of the time when you hear about breakage, it’s something caused by the user refusing to read the front page or even the output of pacman. Genereally, there will be a known migration from one system to another, and people just don’t bother to educate themselves before upgrading and end up with br0ken installs. 75% of the time (yes, I pulled that figure out of my ass), if something breaks, it’s for these reasons. The remaining percentage of the time, though, it’s because something genuinely *did* go wrong somewhere.
That being said, I love the distro. I’m posting from my arch box right now, actually. This is my main box, and I’ve had this install going for over 2 years at this point. In that time, I’ve migrated from one mobo to another (single to dual core and AMD to intel), and moved / from a raid array to a single disk with the raid array only housing my /home dirs. Not a single hiccup. “Flexible” would be an understatement. ARCH FTW!
Yes, I agree completely, but Excessive referred to Linux instability in general compared to BSD. I’m not sure if (s)he was talking about the kernel specifically, or actually the GNU userspace.
Excessive just migrated from linux to BSD – there’s a thread about this migration on the Arch BBS (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=32249). The general sentiment of the thread is that linux in general is too unstable, and that the BSDs offer more stability and a better user experience. It’s a pretty good discussion, though, apart from a small amount of linux vs. bsd fanboism.
> that linux in general is too unstable
Hear hear, I’m in this thread too and I couldn’t get this “feeling”. There are some qualities in Linux world and some really bad drawbacks, but vice versa there is lot of quality in *BSD world, but some lack of drivers etc. Maybe you should speak again about it in maybe about two years … you cannot get real experience with in OS in some weeks. The latter is the real problem with Linux, people don’t help any distro while playing the distro-DJ. You do need this so-called “fanboism” to some extent, without it it’s almost impossible to develop a free operating system of high quality. If you don’t like something in a distro, help them to advance in quality. Bouncing from one distro to another isn’t helpful at all.
Excessive just migrated from linux to BSD – there’s a thread about this migration on the Arch BBS (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=32249).
How did you know that?
Either you are one of the most impressive psychics, or you are one of these muppets who have more than one account on here.
Um, they use the same username on the Arch forums – I even linked to the thread in question. It’s pretty easy to follow that thread of events.
Thanks for accusing me of being a muppet, though.
Excessive just migrated from linux to BSD – there’s a thread about this migration on the Arch BBS (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=32249). The general sentiment of the thread is that linux in general is too unstable…
Sorry, but that is just absolute tosh, and that thread does not help. An awful lot of people who proudly proclaim that they’re off to BSD generally come up with the unstable word when having a go at Linux – and they never, ever say what those stability issues are. Let’s take a few comments and reasons for the ‘BSD move’ from that thread:
Ports are awesome, and it also says whether the package has known security issues or not.
And other package management systems can’t?
Kernel is better structured, so compiling my own kernel is really easy.
How?
X configuration is really hard at first. I managed to set it up in 2 days.
Wow, good for you. X is a userspace piece of software, and is the same everywhere.
Most of my network problems (Slow DNS resolution etc) has gone with BSD. It is really fast.
Rubbish. I’d take a look at how you were configuring it to start off with. Anyone worth their salt knows that comment is just daft because DNS is absolutely ubiquitous on a wide variety of Linux systems.
I didn’t have any hardware issues since I started working on it.
Wow. Exactly what are those hardware issues, because they aren’t specified?
In every “I’m moving to BSD” comment I’ve ever seen a lot of extremely flimsy reasons such as these are pulled out of thin air. Saying that Linux is unstable and that BSD is faster doesn’t make it so, nor does it mean anything to anyone.
Completely agreed, but that’s not to say BSD doesn’t have it’s benefits. I see the same problems with people’s arguments when they’re switching from Windows to Linux or OS X. I think a lot of it can be attributed to people having a bit of intuition, and not really understanding why they’re being drawn the way they are. And I think we can probably agree that Windows to Linux is a worthwhile transition.
Personally, I’m tempted to give BSD a try because Linux is losing it’s underground status very quickly now, and every day we’re losing the quiet, intelligent communities. Of course, I’m not sure any community can be quiet and intelligent if it involves Theo de Raadt…
Seriously, though, I’m very interested to see what happens with Dragonfly BSD as it matures, and Haiku at the other end of the spectrum.
I was just sharing my overall experience on that thread. Please look at my first post, which includes thanks to developers and community of Arch Linux. Everything I wrote there and here, are just personal opinions.
>> And other package management systems can’t?
Of course they can, but this was not available under Arch, so that’s why I wanted to indicate it.
>> Kernel is better structured, so compiling my own kernel is really easy.
>> How?
Editing a highly commented text file is better than having a menu for kernel configuration. If you follow the guidelines, everything is crystal clear.
Please have a look at:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/kernelcon…
>> Most of my network problems (Slow DNS resolution etc) has gone with BSD. It is really fast.
>> Rubbish. I’d take a look at how you were configuring it to start off with. Anyone worth their salt knows that comment is just daft because DNS is absolutely ubiquitous on a wide variety of Linux systems.
Just look at LQ (LinuxQuestions.org) for Slow DNS, you’ll see what I mean. You’ll see lots of recommendations regarding turning off ipv6, modifying modprobe.conf for undocumented switches etc, most of these simply don’t work. Under FreeBSD, these problems simply don’t exist.
>> I didn’t have any hardware issues since I started working on it.
>>Wow. Exactly what are those hardware issues, because they aren’t specified?
– My system locks up for no apparent reason.
– ALSA drops lots of sound frames for no apparent reason under Gnome / KDE (even I don’t like it). Searching for information for 2 weeks didn’t return any solutions.
– Network (especially DNS lookup) is extremely slow in general. And I’m searching to find a real solution for nearly 3 years. If the cause is slowness of my DNS servers, why BSD works but Linux does not?
Overall, that post at Arch Linux bbs was “So far so good” post. I’m not saying FreeBSD is better than Linux, nor the reverse. But Linux DOES have stability problems at core (both in Kernel and userspace), and I don’t have much time to search & solve them anymore.
>> In every “I’m moving to BSD” comment I’ve ever seen a lot of extremely flimsy reasons such as these are pulled out of thin air. Saying that Linux is unstable and that BSD is faster doesn’t make it so, nor does it mean anything to anyone.
That thread is not a flaming thread. Nobody is suing anyone there, and there is not a flame war. I still love Linux, but I don’t have time solve things under it anymore.
“Unstable” in terms of ABI. A “mess” in terms of the base, see LSB. A better structured kernel, just have a look at it, how to configure it, compare it – it’s open-source.
>And other package management systems can’t?
Yes of course Debian. Period. There is no other distro in Linux world even comparable to them. Hype isn’t really a match for real quality software engineering. Of course Linux isn’t bad at all, they do have just very different goals. *BSD is determined to superior quality and therefore lacks some of the nice features – Linux is determined to keep pace with this moving target called high-tech.
http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0704.3/1063.html
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39267255,00.htm
http://www.linuxworld.com/community/?q=node/539
But of course they keep trying :o)
http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=53317
So you have to choose between lot of quality and somewhat quality but lot of features
Since when is stability a problem?
With my Gentoo installs ‘breaking’ all too often, it is great to find a distro that combines the ‘rolling’ philosophy with an unpretentious & supportive community around it.
Congratulations to the Arch team.
What is ‘breaking all too often’ in gentoo? I’m using it since few years and I if anyone or anything broke it it was me.
I can’t find a distro that is so easy to maintain and tweak, of course after You learn all tools and the proper way of maintaining it (but that is true for all distros).
Well good thing that I have been using it since 2002 and still do on a number of servers.
Every distro has its problems, so don’t take it so personally YOU.
If it breaks for you so often, why do you use it still ?
If you use it since ancient times, what are the problems that keep you from keeping them non-broken ?
My ~amd64 Gentoo has been in a state that I’d call “broken” once in the last 1.5 years. Are your “breaking” events more or less frequent ? What do you mean by “all too often” ?
My favourite is still Debian, yet Gentoo has not produced such a breaking that I’d stop liking or using it (although I had my ups and downs too
would sound nicer if you wouldn’t have begun with
.
From what I’ve seen of the Gentoo community, too many go nuts adding a tonne of insane optimisations which quite frankly yield little in the way of real world performance gains.
For me, I just stick to good old -Os , its not exactly sexy, but it compiles, provides a balance between optimisation and hard disk space.
From what I’ve seen of the Gentoo community, too many go nuts adding a tonne of insane optimisations which quite frankly yield little in the way of real world performance gains.
A lot of people add in every flag under the sun in their make.conf, but most just stick to what the Gentoo manual recommends.
For me, I just stick to good old -Os , its not exactly sexy, but it compiles, provides a balance between optimisation and hard disk space.
Not just hard disk space, but also disk I/O bandwidth during application startup and memory footprint while loaded. Like the OP, I’ve been using Gentoo since the good old days, but over time my reasons for using it diverged from the kids and their exotic compiler and linker flags. -Os is always a good choice, and usually the best choice on laptops.
They’ll come around, just like I did. However, my days on Gentoo may be numbered. As the stack matures, I’m drawn to the theory that mindshare begets progress and quality. Actually, Arch was instrumental in me coming to this conclusion. I think that Arch benefits greatly from lessons learned from Gentoo, and I was an early contributor to what became the ftp installer, but its community is just too small for me.
Arch is great, and it’s definitely the most FreeBSD-like of all of the Linux distributions. But I’m ready to quit being different and find a Debian distribution that suits me. To each his own.
What is ‘breaking all too often’ in gentoo? I’m using it since few years and I if anyone or anything broke it it was me.
Gentoo installations are almost always down to idiots arbitrarily installing a tonne of stuff in unstable and using masked ebuilds and whining when they don’t work. Apart from the very, very occasional ebuild problem, when using stable I have never had any problems. I do occasionally install one or two things from unstable, but that’s just when I want a particular bit of software there and then.
Every *BSD user who is in need of a Linux distro to cope with should get this precious one.
While Arch is the best linux binary rolling system, Rolling Systems are not for my age any more!
Edited 2007-05-05 11:25
While Arch is the best linux binary rolling system, Rolling Systems are not for my age any more!
To be honest, I’m fed up with binary systems that require their own repositories for their own specific versions. If in Gentoo, or another such system like Arch, you want to upgrade to a particular piece of software, then you simply wait for the package to appear in stable and you install it. Of course you’re responsible for making sure nothing bad happens with any conf files etc. If you were installing a binary package then you’d first need to find one, or find a repository of software built for your particular version of your distribution. It’s a perennial problem in the Linux software installation world.
If you want to keep a server up forever without reinstalling, and want to periodically upgrade to new and different versions of software (you’re ultimately responsible for planning and how the upgrade goes though), then a rolling distribution like Gentoo or Arch is about the only way of doing it.
I’m the other way around. I’m not really fed up with rolling systems, I’m just not convinced that they can ever be as hassle-free or high-quality as a periodic upgrade system. I see your point about only updating what you need, but that makes the binary compatibility issues far worse, effectively creating infinite potential targets to consider.
The only people who really want rolling systems are enthusiasts and maverick sysadmins. Everybody else wants a system that’s been tested as a cohesive product, with frequent releases and fixes in the service stream. I think you’re somehow confusing the rolling/periodic debate with the larger issue of binary compatibility. Both of these packaging models have issues with binary compatibility, but they are worse for rolling systems. Many of these issues go away with source-based systems, but they introduce their own shortcomings.
Binary compatibility is a problem. Rolling distributions are not the answer, but to be fair, neither are periodic update distributions. It’s a fundamental limitation of our free software development model. Admitting we have a problem, and classifying it the right way, is the first step toward proposing solutions.
Arch is nice.
Good for learning Linux too before I delve into LFS.One nagging problem is when you update the kernel the system breaks.
Otherwise, Arch simply rocks.
The system only “breaks” with a kernel update, if the kernel developers change something essential. And if you study the changelog of the kernel, nothing spectacular will happen while updating.
I was too vague , my apologies.
The system just didn’t break into a kernel panic, but the reference to the bootloader , my case LILO , was moved.
The system keeps rebooting all the time.There is a fix in the forums though about chrooting into the system and running LILO again.
I’m using Arch on my laptop since two years and I think it’s really great. I tryed ubuntu and gentoo last summer and I’m always returning to Arch.
I would say “Arch is the best for me“. This is great about linux: you can be sure that one distro will fill your own needs. Arch does for mine.
Stability is a problem in Linux, especially if you have too much free time. That’s why people so much love Arch, Gentoo and similar
Don’t mistake “stability” with changing kernel interfaces etc. The latter is a problem of the Linux kernel, there aren’t real stability issues in terms of kernel panics. If so it’s most of the time a hardware failure or a crappy bios.
Distros like Gentoo and Arch do not have stability problems per se, they just make it easier to modify your system and make it easier to do stupid things if you don’t know any better. The only times I have really gotten into trouble with Gentoo is when I used unstable or something completely out of the tree and even then I was always able to bring the system back without having to reload my operating system. My new laptop has absolutely no stability issues running 64-bit Hardened Gentoo.
Now back to the subject. I’ve never used Arch for any extended period of time but I do remember a lot of Gentoo users leaving for Arch when it first came out and most of them seemed pretty happy although some did end up coming back to Gentoo. I guess binaries are only important for some people.
ArchLinux looks fantastic from what I’ve read (here and at their wiki).
I’d love to try it out if only… I wasn’t already running FBSD and CentOS everywhere, and trying to find time to play around with NetBSD.
The market is officially saturated with some very excellent FOSS OS choices.
[really this is not a gripe about ArchLinux or anything else; if/when I’m ready to try another Linux distro it’ll be Arch.]
I switched to Archer from Gentoo some time ago and haven’t looked back since (well, not much anyway ;-)). I really love it.
(replying to doesn’t work for me O_o)
I think that Arch benefits greatly from lessons learned from Gentoo, and I was an early contributor to what became the ftp installer, but its community is just too small for me.
I wonder, butters, what do you need a bigger community for? (that’s an honest question)
(are you talking about archbootstrap, which alas didn’t get the proper attention, or perhaps an actual ftp installer implementation?)
comparing Arch to BSD is a little bit of misunderstanding.
Arch is bleeding edge linux distro. This means that things may break. It also means that a lot of stuff that does not work on BSD (or some other linux distros) may work on Arch.
It also means that Arch may appeal to the specific kind of users: ones who like tweak, modify, experiment. I don’t believe that Arch maintainers ever thought that distro will get as much of popularity. Popularity comes at a cost: there is more and more users with less skills who complain about “complexicity”.
I hope that Arch will not change though. It is nice to have variety of distros.
I prefer Arch over Ubuntu because later seems to me quite dull and in spite of all the reecent hoopla not as much automated/able to seemlesly recognize/configure the hardware.
I do have FreeBSD and OpenBSD configured as servers because of stability and the quality of PF. But on my laptop I have Arch that is fast fun and bleeding edge (with all the consequences thereof)
Simple, fast, clear, and great community.
Running as main desktop for a few months now, and loving it.
Arch does not install nothing that you dont want, even the most basic progs depend on your choice.
Keep up the good work!
To be honest, I don’t think that Arch is less stable than Ubuntu. It’s definitely less stable than SuSE. But it all comes down to the user. A new linux user might freak out when X11 fails to run because of some configuration or update error. I’ve seen this happen before. A friend once asked me to install linux on his laptop. I recommended OpenSuSE but he said he wanted Ubuntu because he looked up linux on google and he found Ubuntu. Later, a Ubuntu update broke his X server and so he formatted his hard drive without asking for help or trying to fix the problem. Ironically, Ubuntu issued an update that same day to fix the xserver problem.
A moderatly knowledgeable user might freak out over bigger issues like hardware problems or hal/dbus problems. He/she will ask for help and will only format the hard disk when help doesn’t fix the problem.
While a experienced user will be more patient when he/she encounters problems and might not freak over a kernel panic. A experienced user will just pop in a live cd, chroot into his system and fix the problem.
The conclusion is that stability is relative. It does take time for people to learn stuff, but eventually everybody learns a lot. The choice of distribution only affects how fast you learn how to fix these problems. If you use a super stable SuSE, chances are it will take you years to learn how to fix serious problems, while if you use arch or gentoo, it will take you much less. Again, in the end, everybody learns.
Edited 2007-05-07 00:41