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.

Re:Reviewing the review

[MobyDisk]

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!

Re:Minimalism? Great!

[Dh2000]

Since Archlinux doesn't work on the humble p-133 (i686 only, remember?) this point is moot.

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.