Arch Conf 2020 Streaming [video]
streaming.media.ccc.de
streaming.media.ccc.de
There was a talk about the streaming setup as well, 35c3 I think, but can't find the recording now.
Otherwise it's nice to see open source communities helping each other, instead of going the easy YouTube way that most are doing today. Chat/QA over Freenode is also refreshing to see!
C3VOC is the main stream and are kind enough to do a restream towards the twitch channel to have some better reach, along with the chat.
I'll do a writeup of all the Open Broadcaster Software that has been done along with an FTP drop with the resources :) Everything is CC-licensed as well.
I think switching from debian/ubuntu/fedora (used to distro-hop as I wasn't ever really happy with them) to Arch Linux was probably one of the most productive things I've ever done, and I would recommend any daily linux user to switch to it (especially if you're a dev/hacker-minded person).
The learning curve was a little steep at first, but the hump was over in very little time and it was worth it. I learned how things really worked inside what previously was a bit of a black box. This meant I could take better care of it, would be more efficient at finding things I may want to change or fix, and nothing ever felt irrecoverably lost to the point I would have to reinstall.
In fact, I had a pretty bad SSD hiccup after a power surge a few weeks ago. The sort of thing that would have taken a Windows laptop out: A lot of system files were blanked out. I still don't know exactly what caused the crash itself, but I ended up with an unbootable system. Old me may have reinstalled the whole thing, but instead I ended up booting arch on a flash drive, debugging the issue, figuring out what had happened, fixing it, and ended up with a working system I'm typing this from.
Now to be clear, if I don't want to deal with this kind of shit, nothing prevents me from a wipe&reinstall. Nothing stops me from running my stuff on a VM I don't have to manage, either. It's important not to let yourself completely waste your time on distractions. But this is meant as an advert on what Arch Linux taught me fairly passively over the years: Within the space of a couple of hours total, I was able to prepare a bootable usb, chroot into the broken system, debug bootloader issues, debug graphics issues, debug kernel module loading issues, and more. I never felt outside my comfort zone.
Oh, and this also isn't my job. It just made me a hell of a lot better at my job, as these skills entirely transfer over to devops etc.
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With all that said: Arch is very much no-fuss compared to Ubuntu. I had to deal with a lot of new stuff to learn the first few weeks, then practically nothing over most of the next decade. When using Ubuntu, I constantly had to deal with distractions… and when I end up ssh'd on an Ubuntu system, I still do have to deal with distractions to this day.
I can imagine problems arising when using certain hardware and drivers, but then you would like experience problems on other distributions from time to time as well.
The issue I'm having is (I think) hardware related. I'm a bit afraid to update systemd since by doing it several times before I got a kernel crash during install which left the system in an odd place. requiring me to boot up from usb to correct the installation. I can deal with it, but this is not something I particularly enjoy. I currently have almost 2GB of pending updates because of this, which I think defeats the purpose of rolling release distro.
I was actually thinking about trying out some other distros, maybe debian. With hopes that it will fix the kernel crashes. Another thought that I had, was to switch to FreeBSD, the only thing currently preventing me is the lack of Docker.
Sometimes pacman upgrades also spits out manual commands for you to follow after an upgrade, while I never had that happen on Ubuntu (using it for my laptop), guess that could be a turnoff for some too.
Arch does not have releases, it’s unstable by definition.
Rolling does not imply non-stable. Stability is the sum of many factors and to me, consistent packaging is key to that. Ubuntu and other distros that package software unconventionally is a maintenance headache for the original software authors and the enduser both. I frankly don’t understand why anyone would use it as a desktop driver.
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/official_repositories#t...
That being said it probably took me 3-4 evenings to set up an encrypted disk and boot loader correctly, and another few weeks to tweak the window manager and various configs to be exactly how I like them.
The best part, however, is that once you’ve got it there, the system really feel like yours.
The same user has a guide for an install with an encrypted boot partition (which I have not used): https://gist.github.com/HardenedArray/ee3041c04165926fca02de...
IMO these guides are superior to what is on the Arch wiki.
This is it. There is an up-front cost to configuring your system, but once you have, you know what is there and how it is configured, so if something does go wrong, you know roughly where to look and how to deal with it.
Things that "just work" tend to have more "magic" going on that becomes a big pain when it breaks or doesn't do what you want.
It really depends on how you use your system, for me, Arch is perfect, but for some, it's just going to be an annoyance to set up for little gain over something where it is done for you.
What was hard about that part? Is it something you have to do by hand?
I've been using Linux since 2010 and when I went through this process, it took me several evenings to get it right as well, but now I have a much better understanding of how my system actually works under the hood. It's a valuable exercise, but comparing it to the polished install experience that e.g. Ubuntu or Fedora have, it's a pretty fair amount of work required.
Also took me a few days to become knowledgable enough to be able to setup the system as I really wanted it.
Encryption is definitely something you want to learn enough about to be comfortable with before diving into it and encrypting your entire system. Great starting point what you need to understand: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_...
It feels like you're in control of everything. Not like you know everything, but you know that if something is going to be on your way, you'll be able to find a solution (and learn something new which is applicable to other distros as well) in the day because things are simple (!= easy) and the Arch wiki is awesome.
Somehow, I'd say the feeling is a bit similar to the one I had when I definitely switched from Windows XP to Kubuntu back in the days, except you don't have to change your habits with regard to software you use.
In addition to that, you're almost always having the latest version of everything, including the kernel. No more unsupported hardware, no more outdated driver, no more missing feature, no more other OS you can't run in a container because of your host kernel being too old.
One thing, though: there are two cases where I wouldn't use Arch (but I didn't use Ubuntu for these either): computers I use like once or twice per year and production servers. Having close to nothing to upgrade is a feature for me there, so I use Debian stable.
One day, a Gnome update breaks all plugins, in one case making login in X impossible unless you manually deactivate stuff using the shell. The next time, a kernel update makes sound stop working after waking up from standby. It's mostly small regressions, and they usually get fixed a week later, but something temporarily stops working at least once every 2 months.
However, Arch also makes it much, much easier to run recent versions of, basically everything. You never have to fiddle around with 3rd-party package repos, you just install stuff and it works. It's how package managers are supposed to work, but not the experience I've ever had with Debian and Ubuntu. Of course, the fact that Pacman is fantastically fast compared to apt doesn't hurt either.
I love Arch. In aggregate, I think it prevents more headaches than it causes. But you have to be prepared for some unexpected problems and fiddling around.
lol, that's just Gnome for you. For a long time, deliberately breaking plugins and themes was an officially stated policy of the Gnome developers, with the goal of forcing users into the extension-free Adwaita monoculture by attrition.
Now when the next gen Radeons are coming, running the latest kernel starts to make sense again...
After a while, though, I switched to KDE and life's good again.
[1] https://github.com/mishoo/boring-gnome-mishoo.github.com
I run Arch on headless servers and can't relate - maybe there's a connection there.
Not with Arch, though. I have not run into a problem that I couldn't easily fix. I've been using it daily for a few years now, and I really love everything about it.
I usually enjoy having fairly up-to-date software and doing this is often a pain on Ubuntu. You have to chase down alternative ppas, which may or may not work well with other ppas. Sometimes there's nothing available and you have to build your own – I've had this issue when I was trying Ubuntu 20.04 right after it came out and wanted to have my BT LDAC headphones working [0]. Some guy came up with a custom build after a while, not sure what the situation currently is.
I use i3 and wanted to experiment with a compositor. At the time Ubuntu had an old version of compton. I would have had to mainain my own install of picom. I don't much enjoy doing things manually when they can be automated. Ditto for alacritty. They used to provide .deb packages, but not anylonger. Sure, installing alacritty is fairly simple, but again, it would have to be maintained up to date separately from the main packages. I don't enjoy that.
In the end, Arch just gets out of my way. I only have to run a full system update every so often (once a week works for me) and I have the latest and greateast of everything. And in case something's missing from the official repo, there's the AUR (a sort of "user-managed ppa" with packages built from source) and if using a helper, this is kept up to date automatically.
I understand some people don't really care about what they're using as long as whatever applications they run work fine, so I get the appeal of something as stable as Ubuntu, especially if not running brand new hardware requiring the absolute latest kernel for support.
Before two years ago, when I got a new computer, the last time I had to install Arch it still had an installer.
Quick releases of new software is amazing. I've had very few issues and when they are appear it's usually solved within hours. I love the rolling updates, and the wiki is really helpful and easy to read/navigate most of the time.
As a general principle, installing a package usually just puts the files in the right places - if there's a system service that needs to be configured to run, you usually need to do that yourself, usually with systemd. You will be forced to learn a little more about what's running on your system and how it's configured than you typically would on a Debian/Ubuntu system, which tends to be more hands off. A lot of what you learn transfers, though, so eventually you'll just feel like you understand the software you use better.
One difference I don't particularly like is that Arch systems typically have one or two kernel installations (e.g. linux and linux-lts), and updates overwrite them directly, even the one you booted from. Most other systems are configured to leave the kernel you booted from alone, install updates alongside it, and only offer to remove an older kernel once you've rebooted into a newer one.
In theory, an botched update could render your system unbootable, although in practice, this is rare. But this does require you to reboot more often than you might on Debian/Ubuntu, particularly if you're on a laptop and you like to hibernate, or if you do things that need to load/unload kernel modules with any regularity (e.g. plugging in some usb devices).
In fact, noticing that I kept seeing good reference material there is what prompted me to give Arch a try in the first place.
The benefits are bleeding edge packages, latest kernel, a lean and mean system (<700 packages for me).
Some drawbacks are that getting exotic hardware to work requires more effort than say Fedora. But the wiki is helpful.
I don't think I've reinstalled my workstation's Arch instllation ever since (just kept rsyncing to a new drive, when the old one was morally outlived). So Arch itself is great in this respect.
The distributed software itself breaks from time to time (it's bleeding edge, so that's expected), but that's not really on Arch Linux, and largely depends on your choice of software. (my DE never failed to run, I use i3wm)
The most annoying thing about arch linux is kernel updates remove the currently running kernel's modules from the filesystem, so if you hotplug a device that needs a module to be loaded, you'll have to reboot first. The systems that keep the previous kernel version installed are a bit better in this respect.
So now I load modules for all devices I expect to connect on boot. This makes it less painful.
I’ve been running the same arch install on my thinkpad and moving it to newer models for over a decade! Compare that to Ubuntu or fedora where I’d have to upgrade every six months to get support for this or that and it would be a nightmare.
One thing that is frustrating about the project is that I’ve donated to it several times and still don’t know if that money ever made it to the people running the project or was put to good use.
I've used Ubuntu at work, and I've had problems with it, which are not as debuggable as in Arch, because there's less documentation.
Rolling release + great docs is what made Gentoo great 15 years ago. Arch is the same, but better, because it doesn't break.
The rolling release philosophy works like a charm. Before Arch I have used Ubuntu, Mandrake, Debian, RedHat, Caldera and some other for sure.
That said, when setting up machines for others I pick the current LTS release of Kubuntu and install unattended-upgrades to ensure security updates get maintained. It provides a much better ongoing maintenance story for machines that are less "pets" and more "tools".
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Due to a disk crash, I recently had to reinstall Arch for the first time in quite a few years. IMO the install process has become more opaque. I seem to remember the wiki use to have a newbie install guide which was really helpful and explained a lot of things as you go, or at least what the common practices were or the pros and cons of different options. That seems to be gone and anything that may be an opinion seems to be excised from any install instructions, and you're left to stumble around different pages a lot more, which is a bit of a shame.
I also use it on my MacBook Pro, but I did have an issue with an update which broke my install. Reinstalling was a little hairier (some kernel flags needed) than on my desktop but now it’s quite stable.
Also I’d recommend getting familiar with and picking a tool for PKGBUILDs and AUR. I like aur-sync and friends but there are options.
Ubuntu has the goal to be usable by users who don't know what a command line is. Many more bells and whistles are installed in Ubuntu by default. If you need to use non-free software like Skype or Zoom you are more likely to find Ubuntu packages than Arch packages for it.
I'm a hacker but I prefer that my computer just works without fuss so that I can do actual work. Why is fighting with an OS seen as some huge universe-brain achievement?
This is exactly the reason I run arch. I have repaired loads of colleagues fedora installs that broke during dist-upgrade. And I the two times I tried to dist-upgrade old ubuntu installs went catastrophically wrong.
With arch I update every day or once a week and don't have to worry.
My experience has been exactly the opposite. Nowhere is it easier and as hassle free as on arch to run non-free and proprietary software without(!) depending in the vendor for distro specific packages that happen to work in your distro version.
Skype, zoom, msteams all install and work out of the box.
In ubuntu, when you update, you just update.
In arch, when you update, "It is your responsibility to first go to arch website and see if there is any breakage or issue that needs to be handled manually. If yes, follow the instructions. If they're unclear, spend hours on Arch Wiki. Then go ahead and update."
But wait, there's more. If you don't do arch updates regularly, like if for some reason you couldn't update for 6 months, all bets are off. You'd be lucky if your update works at all. In the 99% chance that it doesn't, "they" advise you to take the snapshots (that are archived every few days) and update snapshot-by-snapshot. So if it's 20 snapshots you've missed, you update from snapshot 0 to 1, then 1 to 2, then 2 to 3, and so on. And if during any of the updates, there was some required manual fixup, you're SOL.
If you are in the mood for going hardcore, just clear up your weekend, get a spare hard drive, and do LFS [0]. Once you've completed that project, trash that install (it was only for your learning), and go back to Ubuntu as a daily driver. Now you can tell arch fanboys to go eat a carrot, cz 99.9% of them know jack compared to what you know now. (side note: doing LFS would be enlightening enough that you'll start having ideas and/or future projects of your own. Have at it).
If you don't like Ubuntu cruft like bloated desktop, snap, cloud-init on ubuntu server, what not, there's a gazillion ways to go about it. You can simply 'purge' (remove completely) then after install. Or do minimal server install and then install only the packages you want. Or you can pick a sane Ubuntu variant like Xubuntu. If you're a tiling wm user, just pick regolith [1] (it'll make your life so much easier).
If Ubuntu LTS packages aren't recent enough and you need to use the latest version of some package, you can either install it in your home directory, or use a docker image if available (or build your own).
However, as far as I can tell, it should not be a problem to wait 6 months (or even years?) to update. There are periodic reddit threads where someone updates a years-old Arch installation just fine.
It is soooooooooo nice to be back on Ubuntu. I appreciate the people that like and develop Arch linux (and especially anyone that contributes to the wiki is a true hero), but it's not a good distro for your daily driver:
1. "immature" packaging. It's crazy to me how much manual intervention is needed during routine package upgrades. This can be major break-your-system stuff (they have a mailing list for those types of changes so make sure to subscribe), or just stuff that could be done for you but isn't (like updating your db during postgres upgrades).
2. Tiny official repos. You're going to have to rely on the user-submitted repos for most of your packaging needs. It's cool how easy it is to make a package and submit it to the AUR, but I don't love the idea of installing random user-submitted stuff for the bulk of my software needs.
3. No debug symbols. Maybe this doesn't affect most people but it is very annoying that there is no (convenient) way to get debug symbols for a package /lib. If a program crashes on you and you want to fix it, the official solution is to rebuild a package (and all its dependencies as necessary) on your own system to get debug symbols. In contrast, ubuntu/fedora/etc. will install a debug symbols package for you (automatically, I think) when a program crashes.
In terms of learning Linux fundamentals: arch could teach you some things (LFS would be even better--but I wouldn't sue either for my daily driver when better options exist.
Can you expand on this? My system contains a total of 20 "foreign" packages from the AUR and private sources, installed over a period of 5 years. It's certainly not even close to "most of my packaging needs", because I have 1267 "native" packages installed.
Some of these foreign packages could be in the official repositories, but most are modified or built-from-source versions of existing packages, software that is now in the repositories but wasn't when I installed it, or don't belong in the repositories at all.
Interesting, having used Arch for several years now after previously having used Ubuntu and Fedora, this isn't my impression at all. In particular, there are a lot of nonfree things that are in the core Arch repos that Ubuntu and Fedora don't tend to include. I tended to need things that weren't in the repos at least as often on Ubuntu as I do on Arch, but had to use either third-party PPAs or compile from source to get them.
Objectively speaking, Arch has ~60K official packages, which is more than Debian and Ubuntu at ~50K each. I don't think many distros even have more packages than Arch. The official repos aren't tiny at all.
Automating AUR updates is asking for trouble anyway.
`sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack && sudo pacman -Syyu`
i am quite confused, why updating mirrors needs to be followed with an dist upgrade.