So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? There's no "sellingpoint" in the article except this "dig" at the other distros :
"apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk breaking everything)"
"apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk breaking everything)"
I also find Pacman to be noticeably faster than all other binary package managers. I just did a full package upgrade on a laptop that hasn't been upgraded since the beginning of this year, and yet it was able to compute a (fairly lengthy) list of packages to upgrade faster than I could blink.
Arch is known to be always cutting edge even if this sometimes means breaking stuff so this decision is not exactly surprising.
To get a working arch install you'll be taken through The Install Guide that summarises the steps necessary to have a base install with links to relevant specialised articles. Once you have a bootable system, they provide links for further customisation if your system.
The amazing thing is that by contrast to ubuntu et al. you're by default left with the strict minimal bootable linux system and anything else you want/need on your machine, it's explicitely your responsability to ensure proper operation (dependency versioning, program specific configuration and maintenance). It's fairly overwhelming initially, but the tools arch gives you to cope with the "it's your mess" are second to none (pacman/yaourt is amazing)
The nature of the system is that updates can absolutely bork the system at any time so you have to keep up to date with potential issues before doing updates. Many other distros do this work for you so you only have to worry every couple of years (or six months if you want).
Don't get me wrong, Arch is great if you're willing to keep up the effort but it does require more attention than more mainstream distros.
I have CentOS at work, with a couple Arch boxes that predate me. I do not agree with is statement, "updates never break anything". Ours have a history of breaking, which is why I assume they were abandoned, but we do run custom software.
No one has recommended yaourt for years, but thanks to SEO I guess it still comes up https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_helpers#Comparison_...
I've used a bunch of distros over the years, starting at Red Hat Linux 5.2 when I was a kid, Mandrake linux 7,8, Ubuntu from 8.04 to 12.04, Debian stable, testing, unstable, sid, and finally Arch.
Arch has been, by far, the most hassle-free when I see some software on the web and want to use it on my machine. Also the only one where I wasn't able to botch the system as to make it either unable to install any package or unbootable, while it happened quite often with Debian and Ubuntu.
AUR is fantastic, both as an user and a software author: it means that I just have to make a small script to make my software available easily to other arch users, vs the ungodly process to get a package into Debian and Ubuntu ; also I can be fairly confident that my users will always have a somewhat up-to-date version of my software.
Pacman installs stuff much faster than apt or yum in my experience; updates seem almost instantaneous. The best is that as a software developer you always get the most recent version of libraries and compilers: gcc 7.2, qt 5.9, etc. Likewise for desktop environments: KDE updates come very quickly.
Some packages also have "git" versions available on the AUR; for instance the creative coding toolkit openframeworks is available in the AUR both as the latest stable version, 0.9.8, released a year and so ago, and the latest nightly git version which has a lot of improvements. It's very useful if you report a bug in some software and the author fixes it in git master : means that you can often just do `yaourt -S software-i-use-git` and have it be recompiled automatically with the fix, vs trying to follow the build procedure yourself.
If you have a recent computer, older kernels and mesa sometimes don't cut it while in arch you get the latest stable kernel very shortly after its release.
It uses systemd meaning that the general system config is very simple.
-Pacman (their package manager) is amazing - and if you want to install community packages from the AUR[0], you can use yaourt (if they've got dependencies on other AUR packages), or just git clone the package and run makepkg -si
I've never had any problems with it, and I've messed around a lot with my system.
-No bloat at all, you'll learn a whole lot from setting up your own system
-No choices are made for you, it's yours and yours alone.
-It's actually surprisingly stable, though you should be careful before you upgrade.
-It's always bleeding edge (maybe not always a good thing, hence you have to think before upgrading packages)
I have to read the article now though.
Is this really, honestly a problem anymore?
I'm running Linux Mint 18.2 on my 2011-vintage refurbed T420 (4GB RAM, 320GB old-fashioned hard drive) and it feels every bit as speedy as Arch on the same machine.
From a user point of view, how would you notice this "amazingness"? Having used yum, dnf, zypper, apt-get, apt, emerge and also pacman for a while I only saw very superficial differences and maybe formatting. (packaging is different,yes, but usage? Also speed is apples to oranges and "pretty" output I don't really care for.)
> no bloat at all.
_Any distro_ does that. Either use the netinstall or open the archinstall guide and replace pacstrap by debootstrap. Heck, for opensuse you even get the full package manager during installation and can select/deselect any package you want. How is arch any different?
> surprisingly stable, though you should be careful before you upgrade.
So much less stable than, say, debian testing.
Generally Arch doesn't patch upstream software unless it is absolutely necessary and they are keen to drop patches when an issue is fixed, so if you read on a project's website that the config file is in /etc/whatever.conf then it will be. In other distros they move stuff around in a more capricious way.
The dist-upgrade thing is also kinda true. It's not that it breaks everything - I use Ubuntu too, and I don't think I've ever had an upgrade break on me in 10+ years - but you need to set aside a few hours to upgrade the world each time. With a rolling release you can spread those few hours out over the 6 months. Just a few minutes a day or per week. Also, because you go from one release to the next, as the upstream developer envisioned, the compatibility of programs between versions tends to work out OK. Whereas in a longer-term release there can be big version jumps that the upstream dev did not really anticipate, causing things to break. For example, maybe some feature gets deprecated and there are some months were releases show a warning "hey, this feature is going away, do this other thing instead". You can sort it out early in Arch. But in another distro, you go from the release with a feature to a release without it, and no smooth transition between versions. And all at once, so "everything" breaks/changes that same day.
- a very mature community of users. The arch docs and forums are really good. If you ever have a problem, you'll find a solution in no more than a few clicks
- an extremely tidy package manager. The choice of packages is huge and - more importantly - creating and maintaining a package is extremely easy. Way easier than making .debs or .rpms
- it just works. I've used arch for more than a decade on all my machines, including servers. I never had major issues. Annoyances coming from upstream are unavoidable of course, but the distro is well organised that identify the problem and rolling back is super easy.
It does indeed 'just work', it only doesn't if you fail to understand what rolling release means. There is usually a painless way to upgrade even after a long time, you just have to use pacdiff and read archlinux.org a bit more carefully than if you update daily/weekly.
Also, how does Apple not 'just work'?*
* 'just works' refers to a general idea of it being in good working condition and not behaving unexpectedly, if you use it in a reasonable manner, it doesn't mean that every cranky misconfiguration of a tool you just came up with will somehow read you mind and deduce how you intend it to behave.
With Mint (or Mac OS or Windows or Ubuntu), it updates automatically. Or if it doesn't, it flashes an icon, I click the icon, it updates for me.
That's what "it just works" means.
b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system.
c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad.
d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch.
That is part of the documentation. Users shouldn't have to subscribe to a news feeds in order to correctly update their systems. Do you subscribe to Microsoft's or Apple's update news feed? If you do, you're unlike 99.999% of users.
"b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system."
Mint does. Ubuntu does. A large number of other desktop-oriented distros do, without requiring their users to read news feeds for instructions on manual procedures.
"c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad."
Shit happens. Shit just seems to happen a lot more often on Arch (and Gentoo, for that matter).
"d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch."
I used Arch for ~9 years. I've had systems where it worked fine, and systems that required a lot of fiddling to work.
In contrast, Mint and Ubuntu has worked flawlessly, on those same systems.
Similarly, the config file merging process on Arch is basically 100% manual (I know pacdiff makes it a little easier, but still).
There's more, but I don't think a lot more. Also, if the automatic config in Ubuntu fails you, it's a lot harder to get in and manually override their settings.
And don't wait too long between updates, because apparently some newer versions of packages don't know how to properly upgrade from older versions.
Having said this, when it comes to updates, archlinux is really orders of magnitudes more efficient than any other distro I have ever tried.
I'm a former Arch user, and I can't honestly think of any concrete reason that would matter to most people. In my case it was first and foremost a tinkering project, as Arch provides an easy and thoroughly documented way to assemble a bespoke Linux environment.
A more glib answer would be "because Arch gives you street cred without the hassle of Gentoo"
The package manager is much simpler and more transparent than apt, i.e. it apt always felt like a more obfuscated package manager, it writes to files I don't know about on its own, processes various triggers etc. paceman can also do this, but it's PKGBUILD format is really straightforward text description on how to build and configure a package, giving you greater visibility as to what's going on.
Then there's the rolling release model, not having to reinstall is extremely nice.
Overall, it is just a very clean distort, where the tools are intuitive and transparent and you can administer the system as fast as you can type in just a few days.
Plus, the Arch Wiki is by far the best source on all things Linux.
Debian-based distros can have quite a lot of downstream modifications, the OpenSSL random bug being the most infamous. A lot of this is due to having long term releases which causes the need to have new software work with old dependency libraries and vice versa.
If you don't subscribe to the Arch news feed, you're taking a chance on every upgrade, that your system will not boot correctly.
You can trivially fubar an arch install by updating your base install+user additions if you're not in the loop with the releases of whatever you installed.
That's generally what distro maintainers are supposed to minimize for the end users.
I see people recommending Arch for newbies, who maybe just want to dip their toes. They're figuratively thrown into the deep end, and I just don't think that's a particularly good idea for most people.
Mint (or Ubuntu) is a perfectly good alternative to Windows or Mac OS for an easy and "risk free" experience. Most people are perfectly satisfied with a black box OS.
Not that Mint has to be a black box at all. There's plenty of room for hacking around, if you're into that.
What is this rolling release fiasco? Even Ubuntu, which I use now has a "release" (technically an pt-get upgrade), almost every other day. But I've never had it break my system. If you keep your Ubuntu updated a dist-upgrade works just fine.
I might try Arch again, but for now I'm sticking to Ubuntu.
What you describe sounds like the consequence of installing a lot of packages. Arch "prefers" when you strip it down to what you need, if only because that way you don't need to worry about too many version mismatches.
If you're looking for your computer to Just Work(tm) look elsewhere. However I stand by my comment about it being an outstanding learning tool for the curious & future sysadmins.