steven36 Posted November 2, 2016 Share Posted November 2, 2016 Last refuge for purists Dig through the annals of Linux journalism and you'll find a surprising amount of coverage of some pretty obscure distros. Flashy new distros like Elementary OS and Solus garner attention for their slick interfaces, and anything shipping with a MATE desktop gets coverage by simple virtue of using MATE. Thanks to television shows like Mr Robot, I fully expect coverage of even Kali Linux to be on the uptick soon. In all that coverage, though, there's one very widely used distro that's almost totally ignored: Arch Linux. Arch gets very little coverage for a several reasons, not the least of which is that it's somewhat difficult to install and requires you feel comfortable with the command line to get it working. Worse, from the point of view of anyone trying to appeal to mainstream users, that difficulty is by design - nothing keeps the noobs out like a daunting install process. It's a shame, though, because once the installation is complete, Arch is actually - in my experience - far easier to use than any other Linux distro I've tried. But yes, installation is a pain. Hand-partitioning, hand-mounting and generating your own fstab files takes more time and effort than clicking "install" and merrily heading off to do something else. But the process of installing Arch teaches you a lot. It pulls back the curtain so you can see what's behind it. In fact it makes the curtain disappear entirely. In Arch, you are the person behind the curtain. In addition to its reputation for being difficult to install, Arch is justly revered for its customizability, though this is somewhat misunderstood. There is no "default" desktop in Arch. What you want installed on top of the base set of Arch packages is entirely up to you. While you can see this as infinite customizability, you can also see it as totally lacking in customization. For example, unlike - say - Ubuntu there is almost no patching or customization happening in Arch. Arch developers simply pass on what upstream developers have released, end of story. For some this good; you can run "pure" GNOME, for instance. But in other cases, some custom patching can take care of bugs that upstream devs might not prioritize. The lack of a default set of applications and desktop system also does not make for tidy reviews - or reviews at all really, since what I install will no doubt be different to what you choose. I happened to select a very minimal setup of bare Openbox, tint2 and dmenu. You might prefer the latest release of GNOME. We'd both be running Arch, but our experiences of it would be totally different. This is of course true of any distro, but most others have a default desktop at least. Still there are common elements that together can make the basis of an Arch review. There is, for example, the primary reason I switched - Arch is a rolling release distro. This means two things. First, the latest kernels are delivered as soon as they're available and reasonably stable. This means I can test things that are difficult to test with other distros. The other big win for a rolling distro is that all updates are delivered when they're ready. Not only does this mean newer software sooner, it means there's no massive system updates that might break things. Many people feel that Arch is less stable because it's rolling, but in my experience over the last nine months I would argue the opposite. I have yet to break anything with an update. I did once have to rollback because my /boot partition wasn't mounted when I updated and changes weren't written, but that was pure user error. Bugs that do surface (like some regressions related to the trackpad on a Dell XPS laptop I was testing) are fixed and updates are available much faster than they would be with a non-rolling distro. In short, I've found Arch's rolling release updates to be far more stable than anything else I've been using along side it. The only caveat I have to add to that is read the wiki and pay close attention to what you're updating. This brings us to the main reason I suspect that Arch's appeal is limited - you have to pay attention to what you're doing. Blindly updating Arch is risky - but it's risky with any distro; you've just been conditioned to think it's not because you have no choice. All of which leads me to the other major reason I embraced Arch - the Arch Philosophy. The part in particular that I find appealing is this bit: "[Arch] is targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation, and solve their own problems." As Linux moves further into the mainstream developers seem to feel a greater need to smooth over all the rough areas - as if mirroring the opaque user experience of proprietary software were somehow the apex of functionality. Strange though it sounds in this day and age, there are many of us who actually prefer to configure things ourselves. In this sense Arch may well be the last refuge of the DIY Linux user. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/02/arch_linux_taster/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jverga Posted November 2, 2016 Share Posted November 2, 2016 Tried Arch...too much work to keep running. Wiped and installed Ubuntu 16.04.1 from Mini-ISO. Did basic XFCE install without desktop, just Feh for wallpaper. No Ubuntu branding. Configured network manually...no network manager. Got Samba running....got Synaptic cause my eyes are too bad to use text mode package managers. Install Liquorix kernal. All this on my Asus Chromebox HTPC Music server. The Chromebox has a 5 second boot time, uses 159 megs of ram. Only 1015 packages installed. PPAs beat Yaourt any day. Ubuntu has less breakage for me than Arch and setting the Chromebox with Ubuntu and tuning and tweaking it to perfection took just 8 hours (as opposed to 24 plus hours for the Arch install and setup) Prolly just me me but the Ubuntu community is lots more laid back thanh Arch people, too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steven36 Posted November 2, 2016 Author Share Posted November 2, 2016 4 minutes ago, jverga said: Tried Arch...too much work to keep running. Wiped and installed Ubuntu 16.04.1 from Mini-ISO. Did basic XFCE install without desktop, just Feh for wallpaper. No Ubuntu branding. Configured network manually...no network manager. Got Samba running....got Synaptic cause my eyes are too bad to use text mode package managers. Install Liquorix kernal. The only ARCH based distro I use so far is manjaro linux , There's some things I like about Linux Mint better than manjaro linux but for testing new programs and kernels you cant beat a distro that lets you install from Arch . That's why i have both lol . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brain_death Posted November 3, 2016 Share Posted November 3, 2016 Arch Linux is so far ahead of other distros that it literally hurts. Currently, I wouldn't run it on a web server, but on a desktop if you know what you are doing, the only real competitor is Gentoo, which will also heat your home in terms of compile-time. The total flexibility of adding everything you want, instead of disabling whatever you don't need, is a major advantage for those coming from a Windows background. Love it or loathe it, this is the way of the future. Windows 10 - wtf is that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steven36 Posted November 4, 2016 Author Share Posted November 4, 2016 Sometine's unstable works better than stable a good example of that was Ubuntu 16.10 it was what people wish Ubuntu 16.04 LTS would run like .. Ubuntu is so restricted with drivers and stuff it wont run on all computers anymore since Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf were you can still use ARCH on just about any computer .. Ubuntu reminds me of windows 10 because they are trying become a phone platform they need to focus more on being a desktop platform no ones going ever buy phones with Ubuntu just like they will never buy them with windows 10 . Both companies are wasting our time with that crap Ubuntu needs too get away from Wayland . I'm testing unstable updates witch is very close to using ARCH and it runs better than stable Manjaro updates were for me this last update whipped everything in shape . Linux Kernel 4.9 RC3 . http://news.softpedia.com/news/linus-torvalds-announces-linux-kernel-4-9-rc3-things-are-getting-bigger-509791.shtml and Mesa 13.0 https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2016-November/133978.html It's running great on Manjaro Linux better on a computer that want run Ubuntu 16.04 or higher at all because of AMD display drivers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steven36 Posted November 4, 2016 Author Share Posted November 4, 2016 Proof Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or newer is not worth a hill of beans on this computer Distros based on Arch runs fine on it ,Like i said i still Linux Mint better for some things so i have 17.3 on another partition also i have windows 10 on another drive on this computer Gateway AMD that came with Windows 8. .My Dell Mini I have Linux Mint 18 and Windows 10 on I'm a computer geek . lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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