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Comment by jeena | Hacker News Reader

On Arch Linux installing GNOME does not install all of the GNOME apps, just the shell. The rest I only install if I want it. What I like most is their calendar and their address book.

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Switching to Arch was revelatory, and I've been using some form of Linux at work or home since 2001.

It's hard for me to describe, or quantify. But it's almost like, with a distro that embraces the Linux-ness of Linux, one that's not trying to be like Mac OS or Windows, you're able to cut to the heart of your user experience and make it your own.

Plus, rolling release, bro. I don't need monolithic version releases, I just have Arch now.

Arch is insanely stable given it uses rolling updates. I'm not quite sure how they pull it off. I've had far worse problems with Fedora and Ubuntu, which sometimes are not even fixable because you can't easily update to the latest upstream releases (most noticeably with the kernel). On Arch, I run `pacman -Syu` every month and my system stays up to date with basically no downtime.

Does Arch have anything similar to Ubuntu/Debian's Alternatives System [1][2]? This is very useful for managing different versions of the same package/s and I tend to rely on it for a number of things.

[1]:https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives [2]:http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man8/update-alte...

You can freeze package versions, and there are also archives of older packages. But generally most of the repos only have the latest released packages.

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