Arch Linux: Myth and Reality (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Arch Linux: Myth and Reality (2015)

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50 pointstype036 comments

I find this post sort of like "I want Arch to turn into Ubuntu".

Arch is easier to use than Gentoo, LFS or Rawhide Fedora.

The Arch Wiki is pretty useful even for non-Arch users. Try to install Linux on some new or exotic hardware, Arch is very likely to be first at search results.

And it is elite, since it is more likely to be used by linux or OS developers (some way as fedora etc)..

Anyway, I think better way to learn Unix is FreeBSD (better documentation). And my main system is Ubuntu :-)

> The Arch wiki is pretty useful even for non-Arch users. Try to install Linux on some new or exotic hardware, Arch is very likely to be first on search result.

Yup, especially on new laptops. When I first got my XPS 13 the arch wiki had a bunch of useful information on what I needed to do to get the hardware to work correctly before the next Fedora release supported it. Built a patched kernel package and off to the races I went.

I just gave up today trying to install arch on my new-ish '13 laptop because of a UEFI debacle. The instructions were not clear about how to install the bootloader and UEFI partition.

At one point it says make a fat32 partition, but after that it never says what to do with it, or where to mount it. The instructions don't go in series, each section is its own novel, with branches at each level.

earlier, it says "pick one of these 3 UEFI bootloaders" but never follows up with how to make each one work.

I'm in no way whatsoever afraid of the command line (I run ubuntu every day ), but man I wish it had a graphical or at least curses-based installer. linux mint installs in under 3 minutes, including UEFI and full-disk encryption.

I definitely agree the articles related to bootloaders can be very hard to read

If you want to use GRUB and UEFI, my recommendation is follow the headings up until the end of Installation

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#UEFI_systems

Then you just need to generate the config

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#Generate_the_main_...

The partition you're referring to is explained here

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/EFI_System_Partition

Indeed, I installed arch for first time in a Raspberry and the wiki was the perfect guide for setting everything up and installing just the packages I needed, no more. A much more lightweight and neat option than the typical Raspbian distro.

Used by developers? Last time I checked they didn't even ship debuginfo packages in their repos (makepkg can handle it, but you'll have to do everything yourself; someone will need to step up and volunteer until this can happen distro-wide I'd wager)...

Yes, I think the author misses the point, which is that Arch is a mentality not a distro. I built my system from scratch and configured it that way, without any scripts to guide my install or anything else, and now I know Linux and its ecosystem better than ever. The only "Arch" things about my Arch anymore are Pacman and a handful of other tiny things which make life on the bleeding edge more convenient. The idea is to stay as close to upstream as possible while being nearly pure GNU/Linux without the duct tape and bailing wire which holds most distros together shoddily. About every day I'm glad I went this way and I thank myself for doing it every time an otherwise aggrivating experience becomes pleasant by virtue of ironically not using the 'convenience' methods usually provided by inflexible GUIs and scripts which attempt to predict every possible configuration. It's hard to develop for the world when you live in Beverly Hills, I think. I wouldn't call it a community either, so much as a hackerspace.

If you want to build your system from scratch, there is LFS.

Every time I try to justify arch as my daily driver I fail to explain it other than that arch stood the test of time. All other distros got me installing something else, arch sits at the sweet spot between unmanaged and managed.

Thanks again to the creators and maintainers. Much meant.

Yup. Over the years, compared to other distos, "it just works" for me as well. Even thought I spend maybe 10 mins a week doing updates, I always feel like that it was time well spent.

Google Cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A1Qpn8W...

As an Arch user, I agree with some of his points regarding the community. In particular, the attitude of some Arch users annoys me as they think all other distributions are inferior.

Arch is great. It's a local minima. It's the closest thing to LFS with binaries done right. I think minimal binaries are a key thing of Arch. They get rid of a lot of complexity. By avoiding heavy patched packages, I've found Arch much easier to debug and maintain.

But IMHO NixOS/GuixSD are the future as they tackle a big set of issues most distros ignore. Namely making sysadmin transactional and reproducible. Perhaps they're not ready for prime time yet, though.

> In particular, the attitude of some Arch users annoys me as they think all other distributions are inferior.

Well, they are... if you want rolling releases that are very up-to-date.

(That not to say there aren't valid reasons not to want a RR distro.)

> But IMHO NixOS/GuixSD are the future as they tackle a big set of issues most distros ignore. Namely making sysadmin transactional and reproducible. Perhaps they're not ready for prime time yet, though.

Agreed, but it really depends on whether NixOS/GuixSD can get enough packagers (people) to get close enough to Arch Linux in terms of "recentness"... so that people would actually start to adopt these distros.

Ideally, I'd want one of this type of distro, but in practice Arch Linux is just ridiculously more current for everything I care about. (I know that I should probably volunteer as a packager, but I just don't have the time or motiviation to do the "make-work" that most of packager life is.)

Debian Sid is very up to date and rolling.

Last I time I tried it... not really. Their KDE packaging was about .2 versions behind mainstream[1]. Admittedly this was about 2-3(?) years ago.

It was a terrible experience.

[1] IIRC, for various technical reasons due to having to maintain upgradability between stable versions of Debian. If you don't totally embrace RR as a distro, you are consigned to these bizarre situations where you try to be RR, but can't really because you have a secondary distro which requires release-to-release "upgradability".

Last time I checked Nix & Guix repos were really up to date.

It's also much easier to package stuff than in Arch. So easy a user that is savvy enough to use either distribution can commit missing packages with minimal work. But they have plenty of stuff.

Admittedly, a problem they have is that it's hard for them to package things with minimal dependencies, something Arch is particularly good at, but this is being worked out with multiple package outputs.

> It's also much easier to package stuff than in Arch. So easy a user that is savvy enough to use either distribution can commit missing packages with minimal work. But they have plenty of stuff.

It's not that they don't have plenty of stuff -- it's that when I last tried they didn't have the stuff that I want.

(Incidentally, I think the Nix approach kind of retards adoption of "new things" because it lets old stuff "just keep working" despite old dependencies. I'm sure what the security implications are, but I think they might be quite severe. However, this is just an aside.)

Frankly as i grow older i am getting more and more tired of the magpie-like chase of new and shiny in tech. I want my stuff to work tomorrow like it did today, thank you very much.

Frankly if bridges were built like software/firmware is built, they would be blown up and rebuilt every 6 months. Good luck getting that past the planning department, much less the public.

That is basically why people do not update, because they worry that their workflow will be more disrupted by a changes to the tech they use daily than some potential security breach.

> Well, they are... if you want rolling releases that are very up-to-date.

Exherbo has this in spades, but with additional configurability and multiarch support.

Well, damn, I hadn't checked in a year or two (or three), but last time I checked Exherbo was actively user-unfriendly... so I didn't bother checking again. I'm not being hyperbolic here, btw, it explicitly had a statement to the effect of: "If you're not a developer, don't even try to install Exherbo".[1]

I am a developer, but why would I want to support such a negative position?

[1] The general messaging seems to have improved. Still source-based, which I now don't tend to like. I want to save some electricity for the benefit of the world.

Things have matured significantly. No, you're not being hyperbolic -- I've been one of the developers since 2009 and we were actively hostile to users who we thought would cause more trouble than worth the effort.

Now it is at the point where things usually work well and major breakage is exceptionally rare (if ever, now). It's used in production environments, too.

#exherbo on freenode is pretty friendly and active.

Re arch community, It really depends on which platform you communicate on. Those on the Arch IRC channels are massively elitist, but I've found that to be equally true for most other distros as well. The arch message board can be extremely terse at times, but that's intentional to improve the signal to noise ratio, much like how SlackOverflow operates. However if you chat to arch users on other forums like here, people are massively more friendly.

My point being you get good and bad sub-communities within any distro / OS.

Not sure where i first encountered it, but ever since the idea of Arch as a "humblebrag" distro has stuck with me.

As a Slackware user, and also having used LFS for a while, I thought that it was Slackware that was closest to LFS, without all the trouble of having to build the base system by hand. Once installed, the system could be extended, if needed, by using software packages from different sources, just like LFS. I did try Arch a while ago and found that Slackware was easier to install than Arch. Here's an analogy: being more of a kit, Arch is an AR-15 of Linux, whereas Slackware is an AK-47: it just works (it never failed me, anyway).

I never get the reason why that gets downvoted. It's just the metaphore?!

i know i don't understand the specific differences between those guns to understand it.

(i didn't downvote because of i that. I just found it to be a poor one)

I admit that the analogy I have used may not suit everyone's taste, and I apologize, but, as always, reality trumps imagination: turns out, there exists a version of UNIX for Z80 called UZI: http://www.dougbraun.com/uzi.html.

OT: AK is more reliable than AR may not be true:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX73uXs3xGU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAneTFiz5WU

I still feel straight jacketed in Nix, the entry point is just a bit too high when you spent your life playing in super mutable land. Nix-likes are the haskell of distro, one needs to learn the basic principles to be able to do anything outside `nix-env -i php`.

Don't see any issue with generally mentioning Arch together with Mint or Fedora or Debian or CentOS. Heck, they're all in the DistroWatch's TOP10, and they are all very alike (sure, some pieces are quite different - but, I'd say, the big image isn't much). Unless the choice is specifically locked down to "Mint or Fedora", of course.

But if every $distro user author meets, tends to inappropriately put "I use $distro[1]" in Linux-related conversation, then there's something not right not exactly with the $distro but with the company the author's in. Don't want to offend anyone, but that's feels a lot like neophyte-like behavior, when everything's so new and shiny, and every difference is overwhelming.

[1] Arch's by no means unique or outstanding here.

Around 2000, I used to distro hop every 6 months. Around 2005 I found Arch, and it stopped my distro hopping to this day. It was a painful road however. Lots of hours put in figuring out how everything (and I mean everything) works. In the end, it's the most stable OS I use, even though it's rolling release. Right now I have 5 machines running it. It basically forces competency, and I'm totally responsible for everything. Obviously this does not appeal to most people. I feel that Arch is purely a power user distro.

I have arch on two machines and I must say that I kind of regret it at this point. Every update it's a coin toss whether there'll be a regression in some package and pacman seems very limited as a package manager. It basically gives up on conflicts -- there is no sophisticated automated conflict resolution like in aptitude and no way to powerful way to do pinning like with apt_preferences.

Weirdly I've found the opposite to be true when comparing Debian's command line package tools with pacman. I've found pacman to be much more powerful and cleaner to use. Granted some stuff is a little more hands on rather than things silently working in the background. But pacman's query tools are light years ahead of apt and that really makes the difference when needing to do complicated updates like the stuff you mentioned.

Agreed about regression though, that's one of the issues of running a bleeding edge distro though, which most Debian-based distros are not. The general advice is to check ArchLinux's news page before running system updates. Personally I rarely bother as I have a ZFS root so I just create rollback points - a little like Windows Restore, but at the filesystem level so super quick.

Interesting. I liked Arch at home, but I could never really use it. I would end up going back to Windows for gaming.

Anyways, three-and-half years ago at work I got the chance to install Arch. Three years later, the only issue I ever had with wildly doing 'pacman -Syu' was GRUB, which got screwed at some point. I got scared back then, but I had the Live USB dongle to the rescue and I could access Arch own wiki with my phone. Anyways, I could quickly solve the problem.

Six months ago I did the install from scratch, and this time I have yet to face any issues with package installation/upgrade/dependency resolution. Even AUR packages sometimes if they fail you just have to make small adjustments to the PKGBUILD file and be done with it.

It’d be nice to know what kind of packages you’ve been having issues with: at work I deal mostly with Ruby, Erlang, and database engines. As for other packages, Synaptics input and... probably that’s what. Also, whatever dependencies Awesome WM and fish shell require.

I did a few Arch installs two years ago to try it out. I loved the experience, it really did teach me tons and gave me a beautifully minimalistic system with me in control - and yet I ended up going back to Ubuntu. I found that I valued the community too much to leave, and on the whole I appreciated having a system that just worked (well, most of the time) rather than having to spend hours taking care of the OS. I might give Arch another shot some time, maybe give it a chance and stick with it a bit longer. But for now I'm quite happy in the Ubuntu universe :-)

I kinda want a arch-to-gentoo browser extension.

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