Comment by s0l1dsnak3123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by s0l1dsnak3123 | Hacker News Reader

I fell in love with Arch about 5 years ago. I use it every day as my daily work machine: One of the best things about arch is its documentation - specifically its wiki. Arch lets you start off with a fairly simple installation, but you always have the option of moving off the beaten path and doing something different.

It's that flexibility which allows people to create arch installs with a very low memory footprint, or crazy-fast boot times, or bleeding-edge software.

Another part of Arch's allure is its overall simplicity: it is possible to learn how to administer the entire system within a day or two. The wiki makes it easy to read up and learn about how to configure a portion of your system should you want to, and the installation covers of your system covers most of the fundamentals anyway!

Pacman (and pacaur!) are great, and having the latest packages is also great (I've only needed to reinstall my Arch setup once in the 5+ years I've used it, by the way), but these days we have Docker and VMs which are fast and usable enough on commodity hardware that they can be used to safely compile and run custom packages if you really need them, so it's not quite as cool as it was back then, but having it integrated into your package management system (and getting updates from AUR maintainers on packages based on git clones!) is still very useful.

I usually describe Arch as the simplest possible binary distribution. It's just a thin layer (pacman mostly) on top of vanilla packages. This reduces complexity a lot. I understand most of what is going on in my install because I explicitly configured everything, and packages don't contain weird patches.

While I love Arch's ethos, I think the next step in distributions is to embrace declarative configuration, non-destructive actions and reproducible packages. NixOS & GuixSD provide this. And luckily there's still a lot of Arch ethos in their implementations. Namely, that your base system is totally barebones and you need to add (declare!) whatever you want to have.

Nix and Guix node packages are 8.2 and 8.1 respectively. Nix can't seem to find a couchdb package and guix is 1.6.1

Arch package have node 8.5.0 and couch is 2.1.0

When I read blogs about new software and I can't just packagemanager install/update it on I don't really see any more value than living on windows installing exe's from websites.

Every distro I've used except arch has a real case of documentation not living up to what's actually happening. I've used fedora a lot and it's sometimes hard to find current version docs. But what's worse it hard to know if 2+ versions ago docs are ok because that particular bit hasn't changed.

Nix has node 8.4 in its unstable channel, and it seems very easy to change[0].

I don't know about couch but it has 2.0 and the change to 2.1 shouldn't be big.

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/c699694cbf4400480fe4...

Yes, with nixos it's easy and _safe_ to install packages from unstable while running a stable system as default (installing stuff never breaks your system).

There's also a fairly new feature called overlays which are used to fully track upstream releases (there's overlays available for rust and Firfox Nightly for instance).

Your criticism is valid, but only temporarily. Lack of the packages in those 2 (in particularly Nix) is because the distro is pretty new in comparison and the community is not nearly as big as the ones of major distros.

On the other end, Nix's way is obviously a future in terms of package-management systems in comparison to the package-managers of the past - to a degree that I haven't seen anyone who read the docs ([1]) saying anything negative about the core ideas - I'd imagine that most people get blown away and become converts.

[1] https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html

Arch and Debian are both working on reproducible packages, but Debian is much further along in that process.

Arch build scripts are great, insofar as the entire packaging steps are open source and standardized, which in theory should make reproducibility easier.

I agree that Nix and Guix are superior in concept, but they don't seem production-ready.

> Nix and Guix are superior in concept, but they don't seem production-ready.

FWIW I have been using Guix and GuixSD in production since 2014. I use Guix with a cluster of several hundred nodes and on countless workstations.

> the simplest possible

I find Slackware easier to install. (IMHO, it's the sanest distribution of all. I have used many of them but kept coming back to Slackware.)

Why do you prefer Slackware to Arch?

1) Absolute stability (in my experience).

2) No dependency hell (you do not install what you will never use; one could use pkgsrc, if desired).

3) Does not use the rolling release paradigm (with the need to stay up to date, more or less, in order to avoid breaking the system).

4) More minimalist, saner feel. (It has to be more minimalist, as the maintenance team is small.)

5) No systemd (so far; not that I care much, but still feels nice).

6) Good community support.

>Koshkin

>Slackware is the sanest distribution of all

Are you a russian physicist?

>NixOS & GuixSD provide this.

Yes, as a decade+ user of Arch, these two are the only new distros that have made me consider switching, sort of waiting for some spare time (like a free weekend) to give each of them a try.

Same here!

GuixSD is really easy to get up and running. Like 5 commands: start network, partition, start guix, edit configuration and install.

I find NixOS a bit less elegant, but it has many extra features.

> While I love Arch's ethos, I think the next step in distributions is to embrace declarative configuration, non-destructive actions and reproducible packages. NixOS & GuixSD provide this. And luckily there's still a lot of Arch ethos in their implementations. Namely, that your base system is totally barebones and you need to add (declare!) whatever you want to have.

Probably the only reason I haven't given NixOS a chance beyond fiddling with it for a day or two is that I can't run binaries that weren't built from nix packages. I understand that this is essentially the whole point of the distro, but there are some times when using a downloaded binary is essentially unavoidable for me, so I'd love to be able to just say "let me use this binary, and I'll accept the fact that it'll get removed if I ever rebuild my system from scratch or go back to a previous build (even one that was built after I installed it)". It's possible that this is feasible but I just don't know how to do it, but unfortunately it's somewhat of a dealbreaker for me.

Arch focuses on being easy to understand for someone doing something weird. This comes at some cost of ease of use, simply because making something easy to use probably means making things happen 'automagically'. Things that work automagically are very hard to understand.

"One of the best things about arch is its documentation - specifically its wiki."

I don't know how it is now, it's been about a year since I needed the Arch wiki, but back then it was stuffed full of outdated articles, which were useless or even counterproductive in the context of current package versions.

A few of those exist, almost everything has caught up to systemd now though. That's a common problem with wiki's, the Ubuntu one is abysmal.

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