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

Re:Not "Gentoo without all that compiling"

[Anonymous Coward]

"But I compile away some of the bloat via USE flags; you can't do that with Arch binaries."

But one of the points of Arch is making *very* easy to compile your own packages (thus, the "gentoo without gentoo" thingie). As I already told, it will be a *very* great hit if Arch manages to seemlessly integrate binaries from the public repos with packages locally compiled. The rationale of this is that usually from the whole bunch of packages you usually have installed (in the numbers of hundreds, even thousands) it only makes real sense to recompile a short number of them (because you want them with special flags, you need them patched or whatever) so you could have most of the benefit from Gentoo (having locally compiled well integrated packages when needed) without all the hassle about compiling the other 95% of the packages you really doesn't care about.

As a side benefit, that approach would make easier for some company to give proper "out of the box" support which Gentoo will never get since by Gentoo's own "mission statement" you can't have two identical boxes. This only point (and not having security patches) precludes Gentoo from the professional environments and makes it "only" a hobbyist distribution.