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

Reviewing the review

[IO ERROR]

From the article:

To apply the changes, I just rebooted and now the network worked!

OK, so much for this reviewer.

Oh well, at least Arch has it in pacman. I was just about to open up Gnome Terminal and get pacman to install netstatus but I look through all the menus and a terminal application! Wow...no distribution I've ever tried didn't have a terminal application.

OK, so much for Arch. (Turns out you have to pacman gnome-extra to get everything.)

Turns out that Arch is extremely minimalist; you get only what you asked for and sometimes less than you asked for. This is probably good for, say, embedded systems, but for most of us with our 100GB+, 200GB+, drives, there's not a whole lot of point to leaving things out. Though there are people who will be quite happy with this.

I'm not one of them.

As I have mentioned before, Arch feels a bit like a modern version of Slackware. I wouldn't be surprised if a few Slack users jumped ship to Arch.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if every Slackware user dropped Slack and went to Arch. It sounds like a much better Slackware than Slackware. But, again, this approach is not for me. Ironically, my favorite distributions are Gentoo and Fedora (in that order). Yes, I'm weird.