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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to try Arch to see what the fuss was about after I got badly burned by the Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade. I'm not a Linux newbie by any stretch and I managed to get it set up in a virtual machine, but when it came time to install the community package installer, I just couldn't do it. I was no doubt doing something stupid. But after fiddling with it for half an hour, I sat back and said to myself, "If I can't even install the installer, what is maintenance going to be like for anything remotely complicated?"

And that's when I realized that while it's fun to tweak and fiddle, I have real work to do and doing things like fighting with a package manager and installing drivers is not very high on my to-do list. I ended up rolling back to 11.04, which I'll probably stick with for some time.

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I'm curious what you mean by "community package installer"? If you're referring to Yaourt, that is an unofficial, third-party wrapper script that is unsupported by the Arch Linux developers and isn't required by any means. It does add some convenience for building packages from the AUR (Arch User Repository), but it's much safer to actually examine those PKGBUILDs to make sure they're sane. You also shouldn't need it for regular community repository packages, as those can be installed via pacman just fine.

If you do want something from the AUR, are customizing one of the official packages, or are trying your hand at packaging something else, editing PKGBUILD files and using makepkg manually is pretty straight forward once you've done it once or twice.

The community is very helpful and responsive...on the forums, mailing list, and on IRC. Feel free to stop by if you ever want to give it another shot and get stuck.

Just a note, yaourt asks you if you want to examine and edit PKGBUILDs builds every time it builds a package, I really fail to see what the advantage of doing all the steps manually is.

Use --noconfirm.

You should've tried this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Yaourt

That's exactly what I was trying to install. I just couldn't get it to work. No doubt some simple step I had overlooked, but not being able to install the installer was extremely frustrating.

Download tarball, unpack, run `makepkg`, run `pacman -U <pkg>.tar.gz`. It's all here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR#Installing_packages

Or the even easier:

#> vim /etc/pacman.conf [archlinuxfr] Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch #> pacman -Sy yaourt

Once ago, I spent a few hours during the night installing Arch, painfully managed to set most of stuff working and then... formatted it the hell out. Just as you say, my computer and my OS are my tools too, and tools only. I need to get my shit done, not spend all days long quircking every basic detail just to make it work. Even if my disk crashes I can set up a fully configured and working Debian with all most needed software, repos downloaded and ready to do real work in one hour flat. And if I wanted real challenge and had way too much free time, I'd probably try LFS. Or shoot myself in the foot.

If you don't like the way Ubuntu went, go with Debian (sid if you like the warm feeling of having the newest stuff).

Even if my disk crashes I can set up a fully configured and working Debian with all most needed software, repos downloaded and ready to do real work in one hour flat.

I can do this with Arch Linux. I can't imagine what you could've had so much trouble with.

Welcome to HN. I see you've been here for a couple of months. Please review the guidelines. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're trying to say Arch doesn't take more work to get up and running? Even OP says otherwise, so please...

OP here. That 2 hour estimate is for people who have never done an Arch install. I think 1 hour is reasonable for someone who's done it a few times to go from nothing to a fully working system.

That said, I won't argue that it's still a good bit more work than setting up other distros.

I ran with an arch install for about a semester, similarly after not liking Ubuntu's direction. I figured it was also a nice time to try out a tiling window manage so I used xmonad. It was fun for a bit and the rolling release cycle was nice, but when it comes down to it every small change takes too much time. You end up hunting down config files or hacking things to work the way you want them and it can burn hours.

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