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Arch Linux: the Distro of the Year?
Provataki writes "OSNews posted an enthusiastic review of Arch Linux, a distro that is fast gaining popularity lately. The article compares Arch to the existing big-name Linux distros and takes a shot on describing where Arch offers a better solution. It also lists some of Arch's own problems and suggests solutions."
Arch is not perfect and no matter what Archers might advocate to you in the forums or IRC, Arch is not for newbies
:-/
This would have been interesting news for geeks six, seven years ago. At that time I was writing my PPP scripts and XF86config etc. from scratch. I have come to value my time more, and let the established distro developers do the 'dirty' work.
For doing that successfully I buy their product once in a while, and enjoy the great configuration management tools available now.
As far a package managers are concerned: the only time I ever messed up one was when I did an 'rpm -e rpm'
Stachel
People like distros that do stuff automatically for you. For example, I plug in an iPod or usb flash drive and an icon instantly appears on the desktop. No need to mess with the fstab, it just works automatically. Those features are in the popular distros and are very beneficial to people who just want their shit to work.
And you mentioned slackware because you like it. I could have easily posted why not use gentoo because compiling all your own software might get that 0.5% performance increase so everyone should do it. Who cares?
There are so many linux distros out there that people should never act as if one is always and will always be better. There are distros for the bored people out there (gentoo) that people can spend hours tweaking. Then there are distros that people can throw on in 20 minutes and get a complete system up and running. People should play around with several distros and choose the one that suits their needs best.
I'm a Debian developer, and I'll agree that it's not simple in all the ways it could be, but I don't get this:
"apt-get & dpkg and all these related tools are not as brain-dead simple to use as pacman is"
How is "apt-get install whatever" any more difficult than "pacman -S firefox"?
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
If it's too hard to use, then the solution is not to invent a whole new format, but to write tools to make it easy. Automating dependency management and package installation is hard. Writing a new user interface is easy.
Personally, I would like to see Debian packaging and packages become the base for all "mainstream" (i.e. binary distributed) linux distros. Obviously, distros like gentoo are something of a special case, but distros like Xandros, Ubuntu, and Mepis have demonstrated that it is a good base upon which to build a robust distro, and compared to different RPM-based distros, Debian based distros are amazingly interoperable. Why reinvent the wheel?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Actually, Arch Linux has a very simple init system, as shown here: http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/guide/install/arc h-install-guide.html#bootrc. It's just like Gentoo, for that matter. I understand what you're saying about Slackware, though. All the inits for a runlevel are in a single file (from what I remember). However, I prefer the Arch/Gentoo approach since you can start and stop services using the same scripts as those used during the init process.