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I have been using Arch for a couple of years now and would recommend trying it if you have a bit of experience maintaining a Linux system. Take a look at the web page - http://www.archlinux.org/ . Uses the pacman management system, reasonably easy to use ascii-graphical (ncurses) installer, actively maintained, free. Its nice features are i686/x86_64 optimization and rolling release.

... or if you don't want to go all the way to building your whole system from scratch (which is educational initially, but takes a lot of time and effort to keep up to date afterward), you can use a distro like Arch Linux which generally has the latest version of everything, but still has the convenience of package management with pre-built binary packages, etc.

it doesn't compile to .DEBs but ArchLinux does work like you describe, with the source build system making a binary package of the application, which you can install afterwards just as with distro-provided ones, so mixing both source and binary packages is completely seamless. It's not 100% like FreeBSD, however, since it also has a "rolling-release" system like Gentoo so you can't stay with a given version of the system, not easily at least, but most people that have tried both say that Arch is by far the closest to FreeBSD in the Linux world.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way read it 3 or 4 times before my first install. more about the details than the philosophy like debians but thats more important to me until I see something that disagrees with my beliefs.

Access 4.0 never existed. It went straight from 2.0 to 7. I'm not an Access user however, but regardless of this if you're even right about this it's the only example you've provided of a 'toy language' that breaks 'every two to three years', and it's debatable.

VB 3.x was released in 1993, 6.x in 1998, and VB.Net is barely in it's infancy. This is not 'every two to three years'. It's pretty much double that. Also, VB is not a toy language to those of us who make our living using it.

I found trivial differences between 97 VBA and XP VBA but YMMV.

OLE 2.0 was released in 1993. I'll repeat that one: 1993. Please note that nobody can just sit on something for 14 years. Are you seriously suggesting that Microsoft should have retained all backwards compatibility for that long? Sometimes things have to break to move forward. Take every kernel upgrade to Linux that breaks one thing or another in a distribution. Shit happens, but you fix it. I don't know about you, but that's my job.

Have you got any others? Those examples wouldn't cut the mustard even if you looked at them generously.

http://www.archlinux.org/

I like Slackware and Arch, I used to use Slack for everything, now I use Slackware for servers, and Arch for workstations, that combination suits me down to the ground, they're two top distros.

Arch has a lot of software ready to roll, a quick 'pacman -S <package>' away, and plenty more in the (quite active) Arch User-community Repository, and if you fancy rolling your own packages of anything, compiling and producing a package with abs (the Arch Build System) is easy enough too.

I like Slackware and Arch, I used to use Slack for everything, now I use Slackware for servers, and Arch for workstations, that combination suits me down to the ground, they're two top distros.

Arch has a lot of software ready to roll, a quick 'pacman -S <package>' away, and plenty more in the (quite active) Arch User-community Repository, and if you fancy rolling your own packages of anything, compiling and producing a package with abs (the Arch Build System) is easy enough too.

Arch linux is beginning to use Mkinitcpio. It is for the most part easy to install and use.

Seems most new arrivals to Arch Linux forums are folks from Gentoo and from Slackware. Many new to Arch site the forums themselves as yet another refreshing change. I personally enjoy the balance of overall friendliness but occasional justifiable-policing of the too-absurd or off-topic.

/plug

To me the quality of the community, especially as shown by a distro's Wiki/Forum/IRC Channel is a big determinant in the desirability of the distro. I've been using ArchLinux for years, and one of it's strongest suits is its knowledgeable and within reason, patient and helpful community (along with great package management). If a quick search of the forums and wiki fail to answer your questions, someone on the IRC channel probably can; sometimes I leave the channel up in the background just to learn tricks from the more knowledgeable people hanging around. Keeping an eye on a good distro community can teach you all sorts of useful things. Also, never rule out a simple google search, if you are having a problem, there is a good chance someone else has had it too, so learn from their experience.

I use archlinux (no, not ark linux), which implies udev, and thunar. My own usb pen works good, and this weekend a friend came to visit, with a usb harddrive in two partitions. Both partitions showed up in thunar about a second after i pressed the on-button, and the FAT worked flawlessly (the NTFS less so, of course. I didn't mount it, but it showed up).

Thunar automagically mounted for me when I clicked on the device icon. When I was done, i left-clicked and selected "unmount". The only non-intuitive thing I can think of here, is the fact that the word "unmount" was used. perhaps "disconnect" or something would be better. and don't say "safely remove hardware". When I hear that, i alwasy think of electrictricity and grounding :)

The only "dirty work" i've done to enable this, is to add my user to the "storage" group, and a "simple-to-use" distro could just use a different udev rule to avoid that requirement.

There are always little annoyances, though. With Ubuntu, in order to get multimedia fully working with all the 32-bit codecs one might need for audio and video, you either have to sift through thousands of packages in synaptic, or run a third-party, unsupported script that could be easily tampered with. On gentoo, masking and unmasking is dangerous and generally does more harm than good. On FreeBSD, what's there is there. There's no need for stable, testing, unstable, and nuclear-waste branches, as everything that is in ports is stable. The ports framework hasn't changed in the years i've been using it. The system is easily modifiable after some general use (ie, you can force it to work when it decides not to - which is extremely rare).

The most comparable system i've seen - that is, the system that accomplishes the third party software installation goal with the least ammount of over-engineering - is pacman. Similar in that the build scripts are no-brainers, the package installer is elegant from the command line, and it just works. Portage, in comparison, is like an ape that's all feet and no legs.

No single upgrade will force it to "make the world". A single update will update a single package. A universal update (emerge -u world) will.

Try arch linux. It takes the gentoo/freebsd approach without compiling.

Thats why I like Arch Linux. You start with essentially nothing, and are in complete control of everything as you build up to what you want.

Arch linux is gaining popularity with users sick of recompiling every day (like i was getting with gentoo, even after i got my opteron i started to get more involved with the outside world and having a hell of a lot more fun than typing "emerge -u world" ever provided me with). I'd recommend it, it's a very nice distro. It is starting to get some growing pains, though.

My problem with distros like debian (ubuntu included) is that they don't *Feel* elegant to me. Gentoo felt elegant, but required too much time to maintain. Arch Linux feels elegant to me, but at the same time is binary-based, so upkeep is orders of magnitude less time intensive than Gentoo.

I'm quite found of Code:Blocks , except for a somewhat weak debugger frontend. Its actually written using wxWidgets, so it works just fine under Windows (wx binds to win32 api) AND Linux (wx binds to gtk2). I was actually just building myself a package for ArchLinux earlier today, as a quick warning the guy that packages up the releases runs Windows, so you have to fix the dos style line endings in the build scripts before building it, but it works just fine.

I also had the problems of "loosing" POP messages when they are downloaded on different machines in my home network and of not having the sent items in a central location. I don't want to "leave them on the server" because my ISP will soon tell me my box is full and start bouncing inbound mail.

My solution was to set up fetchmail to download mail from the ISP-Pop server and deliver to procmail which delivers to an imap maildir in my home directory. Cron is set to check every 10 minutes for new messages. My imap server is courier-imap . The imap server reads whatever procmail dumps into the maildir. The configuration was a snap because I just took the default configurations(the box is inside my firewall and is not externally exposed - configuration may be more complex if you have to lock down the box for external access). Outbound I still send smtp directly from the mail client to the isp, but I have thunderbird configured to put a copy in the "sent" folder on the imap server.

I've had this configuration working a few weeks and so far it seems to work well. Now I can see my messages no matter which machine I happen to be on. Thunderbird seems to be easiest client to make this work with. I've had problems getting both Outlook/Outlook Express to put then sent items on the server, but have had not problems with Thunderbird. here is the link that I used to help me with the setup (It's for Arch Linux, I use CentOS, but the configs are the same). Just remember to turn of the email notifications in your crontab or it will spam you inbox.

We're sorry but the combination of your operating system and Firefox 1.5 is not currently supported.

I have _never_ had any problem with a x86 (not ~x86, the unstable tree) ebuild. That, of course, does not prove that no problem ever existed. Don't use Gentoo anymore, though. Switched to Arch. (Almost) same flexibility, less compiling.

which is based on slackware.
Not really...check this http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchLinux out.

Quote from Arch's wiki:

Arch Linux is descended from Crux.

su; pacman --sync --refresh; pacman --sync --sysupgrade

Oh, so what you don't like is the way OO.o looks on Linux? That's not a desktop problem, or a Linux problem - that's an OpenOffice problem. It's a legitimate complaint, and I completely agree with you - but your unhappiness is the result of how OO.o uses system fonts, not the result of poor-looking fonts on Linux. OO.o apparently needs to be tweaked to look nice on linux for a variety of reasons, none of which seem logical to me but I'm not an OO.o developer.

Linux fonts look fine. OO.o doesn't by default use those perfectly suitable fonts. It can be made to look fine: this page seems to have some useful information, and even though one of the suggestions does talk about editing your xorg.conf (may be distro-specific instructions) it shouldn't take any four hours to do it. I'm sure that a less cursory Googling would turn up even better results, like this one. I know, I know - you shouldn't have to Google to solve basic problems like this. You're right. Email the OO.o devs and let them know. It's still not a Linux problem, it's an OO.o problem.

I have never argued that OO.o looks as good on Linux as it does on Windows. That wasn't what your original comment implied, though - it implied that the default fonts in Linux were ugly, required lots of configuration to make the desktop usable, and that the OO.o problems were a symptom of that. THAT implication is incorrect. Since you no longer appear to be maintaining that position, though, we can consider this conversation to be complete.

I'm currently becoming quite partial to Arch, a binary distro that offers excellent customizability and speed in a much friendlier package. Like Gentoo, it is mostly non-automatic as far as hardware setup is concerned, and so is recommended for experienced users. The major weakness right now is a lack of diversity in packages, but most of the cool, fairly mainstream stuff you'll want to be using is included, and packages are of high quality. It's worth a look.

I'm the maintainer for the Arch Linux AUR package for this. You can find the relevent things over here: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gimpshop/gimpsho p

http://archlinux.org/pacman/

FreeBSD makes a decent desktop, about as fast as most major linux distros, but without a lot of the linux-specific niceties like HAL and DBUS. Check out arch linux, as well, it's got all cutting edge desktop stuff, but with a very simple, unbloated base install that you build on with binary packages. Pacman (it's packaging systems) is one of the most bare-bones, but easy-to-use package managers i've laid hands on. It's got what *i* expect to be there, without any extra cruft. But yeah, those would be my two choices for a desktop *nix system, FreeBSD or Arch. Both slim, no-nonsense systems.

Have you ever tried http://www.archlinux.org/? It's got an excellent package manager called pacman.

Arch Linux is a breath of fresh air.

Arch Linux is a breath of fresh air.

Yes, I'm sure I've seen ArchLinux's logo somewhere else before...

Actually, Arch Linux has a very simple init system, as shown here: http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/guide/install/arc h-install-guide.html#bootrc. It's just like Gentoo, for that matter. I understand what you're saying about Slackware, though. All the inits for a runlevel are in a single file (from what I remember). However, I prefer the Arch/Gentoo approach since you can start and stop services using the same scripts as those used during the init process.

Check out Arch Linux. It's a bit young, but up-to-date, fast, elegant and great package management.

Sorry http://archlinux.org/ - Ctrl + C acted up.

I use Arch Linux and one of the trusted user repos has the full efl family, built one week ago. Well, almost complete...it's missing evidence and a couple of other thingies...to get the whole group enable rensels repo and:

pacman -S efl

Check out Arch Linux, a distro targeted to 'competent users' that has a wonderful package manager. Dependencies are built into packages. Optional dependencies are usually not listed, and even if they are, you can use the Arch Build System to make your own package from the Arch stock PKGBUILD.

I installed the openoffice package and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't run until I realized I hadn't installed the i18n-en files.

Human performance, by nature is not perfect, the task of cleaning up notation created with midi can be very daunting indeed.

I have a client who uses Lilypond for music notation, and he tried capturing into rosegarden, then cleaning it up, but since he was used to playing pianos without pedals, he tends to bleed notes over, so it was unfeasable.

Speaking of Lilypond, help is needed compiling it for Arch Linux. You know. FYI.

Oh fer heck's sake... that's just too geeky... And I'd gotten to grips with ./configure, make and make install, but that's several steps too far... so to install Freya, I've got to fix the dependencies??? why haven't those fixes been passed up to those projects already??? sitting on the details in an out of the way forum is not helping matters.

Damn multi-CD distros not using the fact we're *gasp* usually connected to the Internet and can download what we want.

I'm not sure whether that's a comment made in comparison to other distros, but, just in case, here is...

A brief broadband linux tutorial:

Debian

Ubuntu

Arch

Gentoo

The end.

I have know idea what distro the Libs are apt to use.

Arch is also very nice -- it's complied for i686 and has great package management, so you get speed and flexibility without having to wait for things to compile. The main disadvatage over Debian (or Gentoo) is that the number of packages is relatively small.

I think Portage is pretty cool. It's the only distro that I've use that could install mplayer correctly the first time ( emerge mplayer).

pacman -S mplayer

*shrug, grin*

(come on, how could anyone resist a distro with a package manager called "pacman"? :-)

Arch Linux is a disto with a very good package management system. Kind of like the Gentoo portage, but binary based instead of source based.

Arch Linux. It's an i686, 2.6 kernel, devfs, KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6 using binary distro (similar to Debian except even more lightweight and up-to-date).

I use it all the time. My primary machine is still Debian but all my other machines and servers are running Arch. It requires a bit more setup work than Debian.

I like it because it is extremely lightweight but has an excellent packaging system (pacman). The packaging system (and all those packages) are pretty much the only reason I've stuck with Debian all these years and Arch is the first to come along that comes close (Gentoo is OK, but compiling is a waste of time). Although it doesn't have anywhere near the number of packages as Debian, I can see it growing rapidly.

An example of the sane thinking behind Arch: There is no "/usr/doc" directory. I always use manpages or go online to find documentation. I've never understood why so many distros include all that documentation. I mean you rarely use it (mostly just for setup), why make it take up disk space? Everything is online nowadays and manpages are easy/handy.

Also, the install is fairly raw (which is a good thing). It just works and is simple. They need to fix some stuff with regards to swapfile setup (like if you don't want a swap partition) but otherwise it is fairly easy. You almost don't even need the installer (just the boot CD). Too many distros go off with their crazy complex and broken installers that end up leaving you frustrated (*cough* Debian *cough*).

"GNU Arch [gnu.org]. It's not a distribution. It's a version control system like CVS or subversion."

NO. It IS a distribution. I tried out their 0.6 release and I was impressed. Arch Linux isn't for newbies (you need to manually edit config files), but is the fastest distro I've tried yet and has a really nice package manager called pacman.

Take a look here: http://archlinux.org/

Anyways, dreading a gentoo rebuild I started looking for other 686 optimized distos, and gave Arch Linux a try. So far I love it. Pacman is a great package manager. If your suffering from gentoo compile burnout, give it a shot.

I ran gentoo for a while (and still am on one machine), and while the amount of customization that is possible is wonderful, I just don't have the time to be constantly compiling things to keep my system up-to-date.

I've recently installed ArchLinux and I think it provides the best of both worlds. It is a primarily binary based distro, but makes it very easy to build those packages from source, if you need to tweak something.

The package builder is very straightforward. I've only been using Arch a few days and have already built a number of custom packages.

In my testing I've found that any i686 compiled distro is 99% as fast as anything you custom compile in Gentoo. The biggest difference in performance that I've seen is really only the difference between "arch=i686" and "arch=i386". And even then it isn't a whole lot. Most optimization crap that Gentooers like to shout about is just chasing rainbows.

Although the major distros don't tend to do i686 for some reason, there are many minor ones that do. Arch Linux is one of my current favorites.

Could it be this?

Reiserfsprogs warning

My system wasnt affected, but downgraded anyway.