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Arch In Depth

Posted by Zonk on from the walking-underneath dept.

The LinuxTimes Editor wrote in to alert us to a LinuxTimes article entitled Arch In-Depth, discussing the Arch Distribution. From the article: "First of all, let me go ahead and say I'm not approaching Arch with a completely clean slate. I've heard things about Arch Linux before. I've heard that it resembles Slackware in the way it was lean and meant for "advanced users". I've heard about its package manager called Pacman which is supposed to be all the rage. I've heard it's optimized for i686 by default which can arguably improve performance. I've heard it's Gentoo without "all that compiling". So when Arch 0.7 got out a few days ago I simply had to try it out."

2 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. Not "Gentoo without all that compiling" by Dammital · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The reviewer twice referred to Arch as "Gentoo without all that compiling", suggesting that Arch's performance (with its precompiled 686 binaries) would appeal to Gentoo users.

    I doubt that those precompiled 686 binaries would appeal much to Gentoo users with AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha and MIPS systems.

    And as for "all that compiling", Gentoo allows you to install from binary packages if you must. But I compile away some of the bloat via USE flags; you can't do that with Arch binaries.

  2. Re:Reviewing the review by MobyDisk · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Actually, I like that. One of my complains about Linux distros is that they install too much crud. The last Mandrake I saw in the stores had a super duper hyper-fighting edition which boasted 7 CDs and a bonus DVD. Do people have a fetish for installing stuff?

    Whenever I install some generic media package from the install CD, I get 5 image viewers and 3 mp3 players and 6 text editors. And of course, 1 image viewer scales up cleanly, 1 scales down cleanly, 2 have a slide show, and 1 plays movies.

    Compare that to Windows XP, which comes with one image editor (paint, yes, it sux.) one image viewer (Windows Picture and Fax viewer, which is excellent) one media player (Windows Media Player, which is okay).

    They don't have to be the best most whizbang - just give me one. Better yet, give me none and let me select one. But don't give me 5!