24 ms·

I am happy using the command line and even prefer it to GUIs. I've always thought that Arch was a "project" distro, like having a car you work on every weekend.

I am happy using the command line and even prefer it to GUIs. I've always thought that Arch was a "project" distro, like having a car you work on every weekend. I spend enough hours fussing with systems already, so I want my desktop to "just work". In the past I thought Ubuntu was the "just works" distribution, but perhaps that is changing. "Never breaks" is pretty appealing. Maybe my stereotype about Arch is wrong!

coldpie 11y ago
I've been using Arch for a decade, and it's the only Linux distro whose package management I find to be sane. I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out. Occasionally (once or twice a month), I'll need to manually port my changes to a config file into a new version of that config file. Rarely (once a year), I'll need to hunt down and fix something that broke. For example, a few years ago the proprietary nvidia drivers dropped support for my graphics card, so X refused to start until I installed the legacy drivers. Extremely rarely (count-on-one-hand), Arch will make a major system change that requires manual intervention, such as the switch from SysV to systemd. Breaking changes like those are noted on the arch-announce mailing list and the homepage <https://www.archlinux.org/> https://www.archlinux.org/>. It has an intimidating install process, but once you understand the system and have it up and running, it's actually very low maintenance. I attribute this to the fact that it doesn't try to "do anything for you," which usually actually means "break the system for you" in my experience.
- deong 11y ago
  > I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out. For anyone else thinking of trying arch, this bit is actually important. The one sure way to make Arch break is to try and treat it like debian stable where you just get a working system and then expect to not touch anything for several months at a time. If you do that in arch, you'll likely be unable to use the package manager for much of anything, because the versions of things you have installed will have rolled off the end of the "rolling release" system. Arch expects you to do an upgrade of all installed packages ("pacman -Syu") at least every couple of weeks -- daily is a pretty common pattern. He's right, that the process is almost always completely painless, but you still have to do it. Wait too long and the upgrade command simply won't work without you doing a fair amount of manual recovery.
starquake 11y ago
Configuring has become a lot easier. I also preferred the desktop to "just work" but with a little work at the beginning I now have a laptop that "just works". Every now and then you have to do some more work because of a major upgrade of some software package. But I prefer that over a major upgrade of the entire OS every few years. I also feel like more non-standard stuff is supported properly. No fiddling with unofficial packages. Just use AUR. (Which technically also is unsupported but still has quite good quality packages)
adamors 11y ago
That definitely was my experience with Arch. In my early twenties it was fun and I learnt a lot but it was also a huge time sink. Come to think of it, that was my problem with desktop Linux in general: small things broke frequently and often times I was tweaking/fixing the OS late into the night. So I built a Hackintosh 3 years ago and never looked back, haha. It's more stable than any distro I've used.
- coldpie 11y ago
  Did you use it in the ol' rc.conf days? :) Things have improved greatly since the systemd switch.
cfallin 11y ago
The initial install is certainly that way -- the install media drops you to a command line and you get to partition/format disks, write network config files, etc., yourself -- but once it's running, things are very smooth. Everything is close to upstream so you don't have distro-specific crud that breaks randomly. It's a rolling release model so you just update daily or weekly and don't worry about big (12.04 -> 14.04) jumps. And as GP mentioned, the package repository is pretty comprehensive, and the community-contributed packages (AURs) exist for every obscure thing you could imagine -- Skype, Steam, etc. Definitely worth a try IMHO.

coldpie 11y ago

I've been using Arch for a decade, and it's the only Linux distro whose package management I find to be sane. I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out. Occasionally (once or twice a month), I'll need to manually port my changes to a config file into a new version of that config file. Rarely (once a year), I'll need to hunt down and fix something that broke. For example, a few years ago the proprietary nvidia drivers dropped support for my graphics card, so X refused to start until I installed the legacy drivers. Extremely rarely (count-on-one-hand), Arch will make a major system change that requires manual intervention, such as the switch from SysV to systemd. Breaking changes like those are noted on the arch-announce mailing list and the homepage <https://www.archlinux.org/> https://www.archlinux.org/>. It has an intimidating install process, but once you understand the system and have it up and running, it's actually very low maintenance. I attribute this to the fact that it doesn't try to "do anything for you," which usually actually means "break the system for you" in my experience.

deong 11y ago
> I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out. For anyone else thinking of trying arch, this bit is actually important. The one sure way to make Arch break is to try and treat it like debian stable where you just get a working system and then expect to not touch anything for several months at a time. If you do that in arch, you'll likely be unable to use the package manager for much of anything, because the versions of things you have installed will have rolled off the end of the "rolling release" system. Arch expects you to do an upgrade of all installed packages ("pacman -Syu") at least every couple of weeks -- daily is a pretty common pattern. He's right, that the process is almost always completely painless, but you still have to do it. Wait too long and the upgrade command simply won't work without you doing a fair amount of manual recovery.

starquake 11y ago

Configuring has become a lot easier. I also preferred the desktop to "just work" but with a little work at the beginning I now have a laptop that "just works". Every now and then you have to do some more work because of a major upgrade of some software package. But I prefer that over a major upgrade of the entire OS every few years. I also feel like more non-standard stuff is supported properly. No fiddling with unofficial packages. Just use AUR. (Which technically also is unsupported but still has quite good quality packages)

adamors 11y ago

That definitely was my experience with Arch. In my early twenties it was fun and I learnt a lot but it was also a huge time sink. Come to think of it, that was my problem with desktop Linux in general: small things broke frequently and often times I was tweaking/fixing the OS late into the night. So I built a Hackintosh 3 years ago and never looked back, haha. It's more stable than any distro I've used.

coldpie 11y ago
Did you use it in the ol' rc.conf days? :) Things have improved greatly since the systemd switch.

cfallin 11y ago

The initial install is certainly that way -- the install media drops you to a command line and you get to partition/format disks, write network config files, etc., yourself -- but once it's running, things are very smooth. Everything is close to upstream so you don't have distro-specific crud that breaks randomly. It's a rolling release model so you just update daily or weekly and don't worry about big (12.04 -> 14.04) jumps. And as GP mentioned, the package repository is pretty comprehensive, and the community-contributed packages (AURs) exist for every obscure thing you could imagine -- Skype, Steam, etc. Definitely worth a try IMHO.