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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

In terms of linux documentation, generally, I have two recommendations. One, install Arch Linux in a VM and mess around with it a bit. Not because I particularly like it, or use it for any production purposes. But because the Arch wiki is such a wealth of information on individual daemons and subsystems.

Secondly, make use of the Arch wiki. By knowing at least the basics of how Arch is organized, you can better discern what technical reference material is unique to specific quirks of arch, and what is general to the same daemons running on debian or centos (postfix or dovecot, for instance).

examples of generically useful reference:

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

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

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

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You do know that Debian supports an Arch-like install workflow via debootstrap, right? See https://wiki.debian.org/Debootstrap on the Debian Wiki for details.

I definitely wish this install method had a good guide. Having figured it out myself and installed Sid in the past, it really makes for a nice rolling-release distribution experience when combined with apt-listbugs. It's definitely not for the faint of heart!

Does https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apds03.en.html fit the bill for you? It's a bit outdated (does anyone still use lilo? It also talks of MBRs and grub-pc instead of grub-efi) and an updated version would be great, but you can substitute the modern replacements for the old stuff and it'll do the trick. An update to that guide would be nice. Nonetheless, I've installed dozens of systems that way (clean install of the new release on a second partition, set everything up, reboot for an upgrade with less than 5 minutes of downtime and the option to go back to the old install at any time with a simple reboot (which is a requirement for these machines)) and it works fantastically.

I also use sid (with apt-listbugs) on my personal machines and can't remember the last time I had something break. You should definitely know your way around a Debian system in case something does break, but it's not any more prone to breakage than Arch in my opinion.

The Arch wiki is today's Gentoo wiki. I don't use either distro, but end up finding my solutions on the Arch wiki more often than not.

There is a Debian Wiki, of course. It is not quite at the same level as those two, unfortunately. Contrast:

* https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Nosh

* https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Runit

* https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/S6_and_s6-rc-based_init_system

* https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Runlevels

* https://wiki.debian.org/runit?action=info

* https://wiki.debian.org/RunLevel

I've never installed Arch, but regularly end up finding the info I need on the Arch wiki. Amazing resource indeed!

If you want to understand how the parts of a working Linux system come together build Linux From Scratch once, fully manually while going through every step.

Arch Linux is like every other binary Linux distribution, only more difficult to admin for no reason. Hell if you squint hard enough even Gentoo has more of a reason to exist. A package managed that is source code first.

Second that. Before arch, my desktop linux experience ended with me breaking the system and not having a clue on recovery (a few attempts at slackware and one attempt of debian).

Arch's install process hit the right balance of me knowing how various low level components work together (bootloader, kernel, xserver) and overwhelming me with LFS.

I did eventually migrate to ubuntu LTS server + awesomewm for a few reasons:

  * at the time I was using dozens of AUR packages (ROS) that depended on boost and some other libraries, which made each update a several hour endevaour of re-compiling those packages,
  * the latest and greatest versions of each package got painful, as something I was working on relied on older versions of those packages (might be some codebase that needed particular gcc version or something like that).

However, I am forever grateful for the things I learned during the few years of me using arch.

I once encouraged everyone looking to learn Linux to install Gentoo. The Gentoo forums contained a wide variety of troubleshooting and debugging information including a wide variety of not just system configurations, but software build configurations.

Then I encouraged them to uninstall it once they realized they're fighting gentoo eccentricities, rather than learning about unix build systems. But you learn a lot about unix build systems in the time, and the journey to that understanding is what's important.

I think Arch has overtaken that role in many respects, except instead of forum posts it's a wiki and a whole lot more are design decisions optimizing for something different rather than eccentricities optimizing for "That's how it was done".

I tried to install Arch a month ago, and after about 20-30 mins of doing some progress I gave up. It did not feel like it was time well-spent for a non-Linux (at the time) person.

Wait I see how Arch Linux is the first recommendation, what's the second exactly?

I somehow forgot to type that in and now added it. Second point was to make use of the arch wiki as general non-arch linux reference.

I installed arch, and it was so much faster that it is now my favorite distribution.

Ubuntu by comparison is a slow intrusive distribution.

I do use debian-ish by way of raspbian.

I love Arch compared to Ubuntu, but I haven't noticed a speed difference. What kinds of things do you see a difference in?

Pacman is way faster than apt (or used to be, when I was using it).

Oh right, it does feel that way. Somehow the package manager didn't come to my mind when I said that :-) anything else you've noticed?

If you want to make pacman feel really fast, try DNF.

brb while I install Fedora or CentOS8 and wipe out all my stuff. In other words, both of those distros on the desktop are the same good idea as arch on the server. Speaking from experience.

getting to the desktop is instant. shutting down is instant.

I have an arch server. I just tested and can do "sudo reboot", it becomes unpingable after 2 seconds. The turnaround from shutdown to sshing back into it is just over 20 seconds. (I'll bet it would be faster if I didn't have the 5-beep no keyboard sound at boot)

Arch comes with a desktop? :-) (Which desktop are you talking about?)

the one with the desktop was gnome. I think I installed gnome and gnome-extra

Whether a distro will seem "slow" or "fast" is almost entirely down to which desktop is installed by default on that distro. But users should know that they are not limited to that default desktop, and they can just type a few commands and switch to some lighter desktop if their hardware doesn’t smoothly run the default. Therefore, it is rather a waste of time to completely switch to a different distro just for the sake of speedups.

The desktop is relevant, but so is the default selection of background services. On Debian, choosing a lightweight desktop is trivial (no need to download a separate image, unless you're specifically doing a live install) and the background services are a lot more streamlined as well.

i had gnome on ubuntu and gnome on arch, and arch was significantly faster. I should try a debian install.

Probably the background services and the fact that Arch doesn't come with AppArmor or SELinux running OOTB.

I've done some testing and if you install minimal Gnome on Arch and minimal Gnome on Debian Testing/Sid (Gnome version on Stable is few versions behind) you pretty much get the same speed and memory usage. Much faster than Fedora and even Ubuntu.

To install minimal Gnome on Debian, use the netinst.iso, untick everything on the last step where it asks you to choose a DE, log in after installation is complete, do apt install gnome-core and reboot into a very minimal Gnome. I write this from that setup.

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