Comparison of Arch Linux & Slackware

PostThis writes "The so-called 'lean and mean' distros in the Linux land, Arch Linux and Slackware are being compared in this article. Their installation, configuration, usage, package management, stability, speed, support and future vision are among the qualities discussed."

Comments

Re:How insightful is this comparison?

[BrokenHalo]

In answer to your header "How insightful is this comparison?", I would simply say "Not very".

(Quick disclaimer here: I've been a fan of Slackware since it was SLS...)

One point that I happen to agree with is that Pat uses some strange packaging quirks. A case in point is that he prefers Gnome built with "-prefix=/usr" while KDE goes in /opt. I'm sure he has legitimate reasons for doing so, but unless he elucidates them it just seems odd.

However, the advocacy of swaret in TFA is irrelevant and somewhat silly in this context. Swaret is a 3rd-party package which has worked well (up to a point) for a number of people, but which has also something of a reputation for leaving systems unbootable.

In actuality, the dependency issue is fairly much irrelevant in [probably the majority of] Slackware setups, since a large proportion of apps are hand-built from source, which necessarily implies that dependencies are resolved to start with.

Re:How insightful is this comparison?

[stromthurman]

I concur with your remarks. In particular the discussion of swaret. The author is discussing distros here, they should be weighed on their own, out of the box, merits. I personally have pretty mixed feelings on swaret (worked fine for me when upgrading from a cd, bombed on me when upgrading over a net connection), but including a discussion on it in a comparison of distros is a bit misleading. Especially without a discussion of some of swaret's problems. I don't know how many other people have experienced it, but when I tried to upgrade slack to current over a net connection, it bombed on me, when I did it via cd, it worked fine. Giving readers the impression that "slackware + swaret = strong package management," is probably very bad advice. Compare the distros based on their out-of-the-box merits, not by what you can do when third party apps are added.

And to support your final claim, most of the apps I install, after initial slackware setup, are done via ./configure; make; make install, and it might have helped those who know little or nothing about slackware if they were told that this becomes a common procedure, even with .tgz packages.