Arch Linux: The Simple, Flexible (and Fast) Distro
linux-mag.com
linux-mag.com
"Arch doesn't offer such a facility as it goes against TheArchWay. SUSE, therefore, is widely regarded as more appropriate for less-experienced users, or those who want a more GUI-driven environment, autoconfiguration and expected functionality out of the box. "
Such an elegant way of saying SUSE IS 4 teh noobz and i use arch kuz i'm hardcore.
Having been there and back again I find myself on FC, because it's stable. I know that I can update the fucking thing whenever, or not even update for a year and it won't fuck up my install. Unlike Arch which if you don't update for 1-3 month's you're guaranteed a fuckup because you missed 2 critical updates and there's no way to get them unless you feel like manually finding the actual packages and installing them.
That page misses an important aspect, Arch sucks for stability, programming, and people who hate typing pacman -Syu every damn day. Arguably stability and programming are finer points for the SUSE distro because, it's got a plethora of development packages which are installable at various versions (yast/zypper is a bit of a bitch about this though), as well as the fact that SUSE handles concurrent versions way better than Arch.
"Fedora has a scheduled release cycle. Arch is a rolling-release system. The Arch design approach is geared more toward lightweight elegance and minimalism rather than automation/autoconfiguration."
I also love this perl of wisdom, no it's not. I can get a minimal FC11 install, or I can install CentOS and get the same damn minimalism and elegance and lightweightness. How do you judge how lightweight a distro is? I can remove every component from fedora and suse. I don't need their gui tools installed, nor do I need their commandline-ncurses tools installed. If Fedora decided to support kmod then it'd have more modular packages than Arch, so what is this mythical lightweightness? Is Gentoo more light weight than Arch? Or Is the opposite true, because Gentoo's ebuild directory can span anywhere from 700mb (generous) to 2 gb.
Here's the bottom line, most OS comparison is FUD. In most distros moving the ease of use up just makes the window of use bigger (a more inclusive user base, ie people who only use the gui or people who only use the cli or a mix).
Also I enjoyed the fact that Arch pretty much says, we break patent law freely because we don't have a backing company who one can get money out of with a lawsuit:
"Fedora famously doesn't attempt to support the MP3 media format due to perceived patent issues. Arch is more lenient in its disposition toward MP3 and other media."
Maybe I'm jaded from all the "ZOMG ARCH LINUX" crap on /r/linux, but Arch isn't as 'teh awesome' as people make it out to be. In fact when you use x64-bit distro all the speed ups (some more than others) that Arch used to tout with i686 packages disappear.
As for development, its much better than debian- or redhat-based distros, because you don't ever have to install any -dev (or is it -devel?) packages, or go hunt down someone else's repo, because the version of a package you're using is obsolete and missing a feature you need, and won't be updated in mainline for another 4 months, if they even do it then.
Desktop packages are way more finicky, obviously you didn't use it when they switched from devfs to udev (Between 0.7 and 0.8 releases, I've used it on-n-off for 5+ mo at a time since 0.4) as other major infrastructure overhauls like the PAM overhaul 3. Then again it wasn't cool to use arch at that time.
Since Judd Left the team the releases have gotten a bit lazier, they used to come out every 4 months now it's every year if that.
>As for development, its much better than debian- or redhat-based distros, because you don't ever have to install any -dev (or is it -devel?) packages, or go hunt down someone else's repo, because the version of a package you're using is obsolete and missing a feature you need, and won't be updated in mainline for another 4 months, if they even do it then.
Enjoy working on something moderately complex then, when it automatically updates it for you it'll fuck up your entire code base, so this happens several times a year and you're fucked. So unless you want to do maintenance as you're trying to actually code something rolling release isn't for you unless you like pulling hair. Not only that but culling of features happens much more than addition.
Also your lack of understanding of -dev packages shows you've never really used other distros, SuSE, Fedora, and Debian support group installations of packages such as development packages, development tools, IDE's etc, as well as wildcards in their package managers. So that's a very very moot point.
Not only that but SUSE which is designed with the programmer in mind has several different repos which contain different versions and the most up to date versions of packages.
Oh and by the way, that whole ROlling vs Staged release thing only shows a difference when major architecture is overhauled the lines in reality between those two release styles are blurring, especially with the expansion of OSS and people who work with it. Example: FC11 has kde 4.3 in updates-testing (not rawhide), it originally shipped with 4.2.2, and right now 4.2.4-rsomething is stable. Also Arch isn't as bleeding edge as it lets on some updates have been withheld for months because the developers are too lazy to recompile stuff.
Oh and if you don't have a package you do what you do in Arch, you either make a spec file for it and compile it yourself or go to 3rd party repos (Arch has like 1 actual 3rd party repo I think, unlike the 5-6 for Fedora).
I find the 1 3rd party repo to be a far better situation. I've never even needed it, everything is in the main pacman repos, or AUR. If I need the latest git, I have to decide if I need Dag, or EPEL, or some other one. And compiling your own is trivial in Arch, a ~10-line description file vs the nightmare that is rpmbuild. I don't have any experience building .deb, so I can't comment on that.
IE, yum install mysql* ruby* gem* will get you everything
> And compiling your own is trivial in Arch, a ~10-line description file vs the nightmare that is rpmbuild.
Now you're just trolling.
While I'm sympathetic to your issues with RH (I recently left it - again) what you describe there is ridiculous.
yum install mysql mysql-server mysql-devel
And having to remember weird flags for pacman ("-Syu" to update? wtf?) is far worse. In fact, when I saw that it pretty much made me lose interest in playing with Arch at all. I love unix but pointless arcanity is stupid and user-hostile. "yum update" (or "apt-get upgrade") are much easier to remember, with no loss in functionality, and seeing complexity for complexity's sake like that in Arch is a bad sign to me.
I've been using Ubuntu for about 18 months now, but I've become disenchanted with certain things. After playing around with Arch in a virtual machine for a few weeks now, I'm really happy with how much I've learned about how things work, I've also been using KDE so the news about splitting into smaller packages has finally sealed the deal.
The documentation on their wiki is also another big plus.
I gave Arch a shot a few weeks ago, and I struggled to find a real advantage to using it.
What I did find instead, however, were a ton of broken packages because Arch had moved on to libjpeg7, but the packages hadn't.
Unfortunately, if you are forced to run Firefox the system resources immediately become a problem. Seamonkey is a viable alternative, but is dated. Chrome may be the way to go, but that is yet to be proven.
More important so, distros have different goals and mentalities. I don't think it would make sense, for example, to strip Ubuntu, for example, to make it run on a very old hardware. So, it's not _any_ distribution that you _can_ or _should_ run on older hardware. Some just don't suit.