Arch In Depth

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."

Comments

Not "Gentoo without all that compiling"

[Dammital]

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.