7 ms·

So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? There's no "sellingpoint" in the article except this "dig" at the other distros : "apt-ge

So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? There's no "sellingpoint" in the article except this "dig" at the other distros : "apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk breaking everything)"

fest 9y ago
From my personal experience: upstream packages get updated a lot more frequently, even faster than in debian-testing repo.
- int_19h 9y ago
  Arch should probably be compared to Debian unstable, not testing. Testing can be pretty slow, especially close to the next stable release - and that's by design.
bbv-if 9y ago
And he didn't mention that in Arch a routine upgrade can break everything which rather doesn't happen in the release-based distros. It has happened to me more that once over the last 8 years. I still use it nevertheless, but it's definitely not for everyone.
- arc_of_descent 9y ago
  I used Arch Linux around 4 years back. I did a routine upgrade and it broke my system. What is this rolling release fiasco? Even Ubuntu, which I use now has a "release" (technically an pt-get upgrade), almost every other day. But I've never had it break my system. If you keep your Ubuntu updated a dist-upgrade works just fine. I might try Arch again, but for now I'm sticking to Ubuntu.
  - zdkl 9y ago
    No judgement, I've been in the same place. What you describe sounds like the consequence of installing a lot of packages. Arch "prefers" when you strip it down to what you need, if only because that way you don't need to worry about too many version mismatches.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      So if you actually try to use the system for more than a handful of things, it tends to break? That's not very reassuring.
      - zdkl 9y ago
        You put it well in another thread with "it absolutely isn't [...] a good distro for people who just want to get on with life." If you're looking for your computer to Just Work(tm) look elsewhere. However I stand by my comment about it being an outstanding learning tool for the curious & future sysadmins.
- number6 9y ago
  This Never happened to me in 5 years of arch. I always considered this a hoax. How did Arch break?
  - bbv-if 9y ago
    To name a few: when systemd was introduced; when there were changes made to the file structure (moving everything to /usr); when kde4 was replaced with kde5. And there were more issues, I just don't remember all of them. Reading the news before the update could have helped sometimes but I don't do that every time I execute `pacman -Syu` for various reasons; and sometimes problems are unexpected or just bugs fixed on the next update.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      I will second this, I faced these exact same issues, for the same reasons. If you don't subscribe to the Arch news feed, you're taking a chance on every upgrade, that your system will not boot correctly.
      - zdkl 9y ago
        Yeah but that's the point of Arch: teaching new blood to RTFM when it's patchday. You can trivially fubar an arch install by updating your base install+user additions if you're not in the loop with the releases of whatever you installed.
        KozmoNau7 9y ago
        That also makes it a bad distro to choose unless you want to be a hardcore sysadmin and micromanage your personal system. That's generally what distro maintainers are supposed to minimize for the end users. I see people recommending Arch for newbies, who maybe just want to dip their toes. They're figuratively thrown into the deep end, and I just don't think that's a particularly good idea for most people.
        9y ago
- agumonkey 9y ago
  In years I might have had 3 breakage, it didn't feel like a specific issue because for instance ubuntu upgrade install didn't work well enough either.
bananicorn 9y ago
It's something you kinda have to try to actually feel the difference. I can tell you a few things I noticed after a few months of use: -Pacman (their package manager) is amazing - and if you want to install community packages from the AUR[0], you can use yaourt (if they've got dependencies on other AUR packages), or just git clone the package and run makepkg -si I've never had any problems with it, and I've messed around a lot with my system. -No bloat at all, you'll learn a whole lot from setting up your own system -No choices are made for you, it's yours and yours alone. -It's actually surprisingly stable, though you should be careful before you upgrade. -It's always bleeding edge (maybe not always a good thing, hence you have to think before upgrading packages) I have to read the article now though. [0]https://aur.archlinux.org/ https://aur.archlinux.org/
- fareesh 9y ago
  Feels like it's great for hobbyists and enthusiasts. I use Ubuntu LTS as my primary desktop OS for work. It sounds like my work would slow down a lot if I had to worry about this other stuff all the time. Maybe I'll install it on an extra drive at some point and tinker with it.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  "No bloat at all" Is this really, honestly a problem anymore? I'm running Linux Mint 18.2 on my 2011-vintage refurbed T420 (4GB RAM, 320GB old-fashioned hard drive) and it feels every bit as speedy as Arch on the same machine.
- diffeomorphism 9y ago
  > pacman is amazing From a user point of view, how would you notice this "amazingness"? Having used yum, dnf, zypper, apt-get, apt, emerge and also pacman for a while I only saw very superficial differences and maybe formatting. (packaging is different,yes, but usage? Also speed is apples to oranges and "pretty" output I don't really care for.) > no bloat at all. _Any distro_ does that. Either use the netinstall or open the archinstall guide and replace pacstrap by debootstrap. Heck, for opensuse you even get the full package manager during installation and can select/deselect any package you want. How is arch any different? > surprisingly stable, though you should be careful before you upgrade. So much less stable than, say, debian testing.
doktrin 9y ago
> So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest I'm a former Arch user, and I can't honestly think of any concrete reason that would matter to most people. In my case it was first and foremost a tinkering project, as Arch provides an easy and thoroughly documented way to assemble a bespoke Linux environment. A more glib answer would be "because Arch gives you street cred without the hassle of Gentoo"
zdkl 9y ago
In my opinion, the selling point is that arch requires you to take interest into how it works and some level of understanding of the major parts. To get a working arch install you'll be taken through The Install Guide that summarises the steps necessary to have a base install with links to relevant specialised articles. Once you have a bootable system, they provide links for further customisation if your system. The amazing thing is that by contrast to ubuntu et al. you're by default left with the strict minimal bootable linux system and anything else you want/need on your machine, it's explicitely your responsability to ensure proper operation (dependency versioning, program specific configuration and maintenance). It's fairly overwhelming initially, but the tools arch gives you to cope with the "it's your mess" are second to none (pacman/yaourt is amazing)
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  This is both the great strength and great weakness of Arch. I did use it for awhile but in the end I got tired of playing sys admin on my home machine. The nature of the system is that updates can absolutely bork the system at any time so you have to keep up to date with potential issues before doing updates. Many other distros do this work for you so you only have to worry every couple of years (or six months if you want). Don't get me wrong, Arch is great if you're willing to keep up the effort but it does require more attention than more mainstream distros.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    Arch takes real care not to let the system bork at any time due to an update. There is a very clear caveat to that. Check the arch news site before you do a system update. About 4 times a year, they make a potentially braking change, and inform users of this via that site.
- pnutjam 9y ago
  OpenSUSE has the option for slim installs, has a rolling release version and a LTS kernel version. I'm a big fan. I have CentOS at work, with a couple Arch boxes that predate me. I do not agree with is statement, "updates never break anything". Ours have a history of breaking, which is why I assume they were abandoned, but we do run custom software.
crocowhile 9y ago
I have been an arch user for more than 10 years now and three things make the difference for me: - a very mature community of users. The arch docs and forums are really good. If you ever have a problem, you'll find a solution in no more than a few clicks - an extremely tidy package manager. The choice of packages is huge and - more importantly - creating and maintaining a package is extremely easy. Way easier than making .debs or .rpms - it just works. I've used arch for more than a decade on all my machines, including servers. I never had major issues. Annoyances coming from upstream are unavoidable of course, but the distro is well organised that identify the problem and rolling back is super easy.
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months. It wouldn't even boot because they changed to systemd in the meantime. So it only works if you sink in significant time.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    It really does require you to be subscribed to the Arch news feed, in case any packages require special manual procedures to install correctly. And don't wait too long between updates, because apparently some newer versions of packages don't know how to properly upgrade from older versions.
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    > I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months It does indeed 'just work', it only doesn't if you fail to understand what rolling release means. There is usually a painless way to upgrade even after a long time, you just have to use pacdiff and read archlinux.org a bit more carefully than if you update daily/weekly. Also, how does Apple not 'just work'?* * 'just works' refers to a general idea of it being in good working condition and not behaving unexpectedly, if you use it in a reasonable manner, it doesn't mean that every cranky misconfiguration of a tool you just came up with will somehow read you mind and deduce how you intend it to behave.
int_19h 9y ago
For me, the biggest point in favor of Arch is that it is a binary distro that seems to be closest to "vanilla" - meaning that packages are generally built directly from upstream, without heavy distro-specific patchsets applied by maintainers. There's still plenty of patches, mind you, but they're usually there to ensure that it builds and installs correctly in Arch environment, not to change functionality. I also find Pacman to be noticeably faster than all other binary package managers. I just did a full package upgrade on a laptop that hasn't been upgraded since the beginning of this year, and yet it was able to compute a (fairly lengthy) list of packages to upgrade faster than I could blink.
- jwilk 9y ago
  Making /usr/bin/python point to Python 3 doesn't sound very vanilla to me.
  - bartkmq 9y ago
    He defines 'vanilla' to mean 'build from upstream with little distro-specific changes'. So what does this have to do with making Python 3 the default python interpreter? I bet this symlink is not even part of the python source code; it's always a choice made by the distro maintainers. Arch is known to be always cutting edge even if this sometimes means breaking stuff so this decision is not exactly surprising.
    - jwilk 9y ago
      Removing an API that vast majority of Python programs were using (at that time), and replacing it with something incompatible is not a "little distro-specific change".
  - int_19h 9y ago
    At the point where that was done, there was no formalized convention on it. Arch maintainers decided that it's preferable to default to the latest and greatest (which seems to be the general policy, and it meshes well with a bleeding-edge rolling release IMO). It was a mistake for Python specifically because of idiosyncrasies of Python 2 vs 3 story, and they have since corrected that mistake.
jcelerier 9y ago
> So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? I've used a bunch of distros over the years, starting at Red Hat Linux 5.2 when I was a kid, Mandrake linux 7,8, Ubuntu from 8.04 to 12.04, Debian stable, testing, unstable, sid, and finally Arch. Arch has been, by far, the most hassle-free when I see some software on the web and want to use it on my machine. Also the only one where I wasn't able to botch the system as to make it either unable to install any package or unbootable, while it happened quite often with Debian and Ubuntu. AUR is fantastic, both as an user and a software author: it means that I just have to make a small script to make my software available easily to other arch users, vs the ungodly process to get a package into Debian and Ubuntu ; also I can be fairly confident that my users will always have a somewhat up-to-date version of my software. Pacman installs stuff much faster than apt or yum in my experience; updates seem almost instantaneous. The best is that as a software developer you always get the most recent version of libraries and compilers: gcc 7.2, qt 5.9, etc. Likewise for desktop environments: KDE updates come very quickly. Some packages also have "git" versions available on the AUR; for instance the creative coding toolkit openframeworks is available in the AUR both as the latest stable version, 0.9.8, released a year and so ago, and the latest nightly git version which has a lot of improvements. It's very useful if you report a bug in some software and the author fixes it in git master : means that you can often just do `yaourt -S software-i-use-git` and have it be recompiled automatically with the fix, vs trying to follow the build procedure yourself. If you have a recent computer, older kernels and mesa sometimes don't cut it while in arch you get the latest stable kernel very shortly after its release. It uses systemd meaning that the general system config is very simple.
CannisterFlux 9y ago
The rolling release model - you always have the latest stuff. Latest git, firefox, pidgin, all the latest released version of dev libraries and tools. The AUR is handy for installing proprietary stuff like google-chrome, hipchat, no-machine, or packaging up things you install outside Arch but need e.g. old free software that isn't in Arch. Generally Arch doesn't patch upstream software unless it is absolutely necessary and they are keen to drop patches when an issue is fixed, so if you read on a project's website that the config file is in /etc/whatever.conf then it will be. In other distros they move stuff around in a more capricious way. The dist-upgrade thing is also kinda true. It's not that it breaks everything - I use Ubuntu too, and I don't think I've ever had an upgrade break on me in 10+ years - but you need to set aside a few hours to upgrade the world each time. With a rolling release you can spread those few hours out over the 6 months. Just a few minutes a day or per week. Also, because you go from one release to the next, as the upstream developer envisioned, the compatibility of programs between versions tends to work out OK. Whereas in a longer-term release there can be big version jumps that the upstream dev did not really anticipate, causing things to break. For example, maybe some feature gets deprecated and there are some months were releases show a warning "hey, this feature is going away, do this other thing instead". You can sort it out early in Arch. But in another distro, you go from the release with a feature to a release without it, and no smooth transition between versions. And all at once, so "everything" breaks/changes that same day.
exDM69 9y ago
Less "downstream" patches to packages than most other distros. This is consequence and a prerequisite of rolling release. Debian-based distros can have quite a lot of downstream modifications, the OpenSSL random bug being the most infamous. A lot of this is due to having long term releases which causes the need to have new software work with old dependency libraries and vice versa.
AsyncAwait 9y ago
It's a system where you don't have a bunch of preinstalled bloatware you don't need, giving you a better idea of what is actually on your system, meaning also a better idea of how to tweak it or have an idea of what's going on if something unexpected happens. The package manager is much simpler and more transparent than apt, i.e. it apt always felt like a more obfuscated package manager, it writes to files I don't know about on its own, processes various triggers etc. paceman can also do this, but it's PKGBUILD format is really straightforward text description on how to build and configure a package, giving you greater visibility as to what's going on. Then there's the rolling release model, not having to reinstall is extremely nice. Overall, it is just a very clean distort, where the tools are intuitive and transparent and you can administer the system as fast as you can type in just a few days. Plus, the Arch Wiki is by far the best source on all things Linux.
giancarlostoro 9y ago
Not really sure, I think the best Linux distort is whichever one you're the most comfortable and productive using. No need in forcing yourself to use a distro that gets in your way.

fest 9y ago

From my personal experience: upstream packages get updated a lot more frequently, even faster than in debian-testing repo.

int_19h 9y ago
Arch should probably be compared to Debian unstable, not testing. Testing can be pretty slow, especially close to the next stable release - and that's by design.

bbv-if 9y ago

And he didn't mention that in Arch a routine upgrade can break everything which rather doesn't happen in the release-based distros. It has happened to me more that once over the last 8 years. I still use it nevertheless, but it's definitely not for everyone.

arc_of_descent 9y ago
I used Arch Linux around 4 years back. I did a routine upgrade and it broke my system. What is this rolling release fiasco? Even Ubuntu, which I use now has a "release" (technically an pt-get upgrade), almost every other day. But I've never had it break my system. If you keep your Ubuntu updated a dist-upgrade works just fine. I might try Arch again, but for now I'm sticking to Ubuntu.
- zdkl 9y ago
  No judgement, I've been in the same place. What you describe sounds like the consequence of installing a lot of packages. Arch "prefers" when you strip it down to what you need, if only because that way you don't need to worry about too many version mismatches.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    So if you actually try to use the system for more than a handful of things, it tends to break? That's not very reassuring.
    - zdkl 9y ago
      You put it well in another thread with "it absolutely isn't [...] a good distro for people who just want to get on with life." If you're looking for your computer to Just Work(tm) look elsewhere. However I stand by my comment about it being an outstanding learning tool for the curious & future sysadmins.
number6 9y ago
This Never happened to me in 5 years of arch. I always considered this a hoax. How did Arch break?
- bbv-if 9y ago
  To name a few: when systemd was introduced; when there were changes made to the file structure (moving everything to /usr); when kde4 was replaced with kde5. And there were more issues, I just don't remember all of them. Reading the news before the update could have helped sometimes but I don't do that every time I execute `pacman -Syu` for various reasons; and sometimes problems are unexpected or just bugs fixed on the next update.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    I will second this, I faced these exact same issues, for the same reasons. If you don't subscribe to the Arch news feed, you're taking a chance on every upgrade, that your system will not boot correctly.
    - zdkl 9y ago
      Yeah but that's the point of Arch: teaching new blood to RTFM when it's patchday. You can trivially fubar an arch install by updating your base install+user additions if you're not in the loop with the releases of whatever you installed.
      - KozmoNau7 9y ago
        That also makes it a bad distro to choose unless you want to be a hardcore sysadmin and micromanage your personal system. That's generally what distro maintainers are supposed to minimize for the end users. I see people recommending Arch for newbies, who maybe just want to dip their toes. They're figuratively thrown into the deep end, and I just don't think that's a particularly good idea for most people.
        9y ago
agumonkey 9y ago
In years I might have had 3 breakage, it didn't feel like a specific issue because for instance ubuntu upgrade install didn't work well enough either.

bananicorn 9y ago

It's something you kinda have to try to actually feel the difference. I can tell you a few things I noticed after a few months of use: -Pacman (their package manager) is amazing - and if you want to install community packages from the AUR[0], you can use yaourt (if they've got dependencies on other AUR packages), or just git clone the package and run makepkg -si I've never had any problems with it, and I've messed around a lot with my system. -No bloat at all, you'll learn a whole lot from setting up your own system -No choices are made for you, it's yours and yours alone. -It's actually surprisingly stable, though you should be careful before you upgrade. -It's always bleeding edge (maybe not always a good thing, hence you have to think before upgrading packages) I have to read the article now though. [0]https://aur.archlinux.org/ https://aur.archlinux.org/

fareesh 9y ago
Feels like it's great for hobbyists and enthusiasts. I use Ubuntu LTS as my primary desktop OS for work. It sounds like my work would slow down a lot if I had to worry about this other stuff all the time. Maybe I'll install it on an extra drive at some point and tinker with it.
KozmoNau7 9y ago
"No bloat at all" Is this really, honestly a problem anymore? I'm running Linux Mint 18.2 on my 2011-vintage refurbed T420 (4GB RAM, 320GB old-fashioned hard drive) and it feels every bit as speedy as Arch on the same machine.
diffeomorphism 9y ago
> pacman is amazing From a user point of view, how would you notice this "amazingness"? Having used yum, dnf, zypper, apt-get, apt, emerge and also pacman for a while I only saw very superficial differences and maybe formatting. (packaging is different,yes, but usage? Also speed is apples to oranges and "pretty" output I don't really care for.) > no bloat at all. _Any distro_ does that. Either use the netinstall or open the archinstall guide and replace pacstrap by debootstrap. Heck, for opensuse you even get the full package manager during installation and can select/deselect any package you want. How is arch any different? > surprisingly stable, though you should be careful before you upgrade. So much less stable than, say, debian testing.

doktrin 9y ago

> So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest I'm a former Arch user, and I can't honestly think of any concrete reason that would matter to most people. In my case it was first and foremost a tinkering project, as Arch provides an easy and thoroughly documented way to assemble a bespoke Linux environment. A more glib answer would be "because Arch gives you street cred without the hassle of Gentoo"

zdkl 9y ago

In my opinion, the selling point is that arch requires you to take interest into how it works and some level of understanding of the major parts. To get a working arch install you'll be taken through The Install Guide that summarises the steps necessary to have a base install with links to relevant specialised articles. Once you have a bootable system, they provide links for further customisation if your system. The amazing thing is that by contrast to ubuntu et al. you're by default left with the strict minimal bootable linux system and anything else you want/need on your machine, it's explicitely your responsability to ensure proper operation (dependency versioning, program specific configuration and maintenance). It's fairly overwhelming initially, but the tools arch gives you to cope with the "it's your mess" are second to none (pacman/yaourt is amazing)

ChrisSD 9y ago
This is both the great strength and great weakness of Arch. I did use it for awhile but in the end I got tired of playing sys admin on my home machine. The nature of the system is that updates can absolutely bork the system at any time so you have to keep up to date with potential issues before doing updates. Many other distros do this work for you so you only have to worry every couple of years (or six months if you want). Don't get me wrong, Arch is great if you're willing to keep up the effort but it does require more attention than more mainstream distros.
- rocqua 9y ago
  Arch takes real care not to let the system bork at any time due to an update. There is a very clear caveat to that. Check the arch news site before you do a system update. About 4 times a year, they make a potentially braking change, and inform users of this via that site.
pnutjam 9y ago
OpenSUSE has the option for slim installs, has a rolling release version and a LTS kernel version. I'm a big fan. I have CentOS at work, with a couple Arch boxes that predate me. I do not agree with is statement, "updates never break anything". Ours have a history of breaking, which is why I assume they were abandoned, but we do run custom software.

crocowhile 9y ago

I have been an arch user for more than 10 years now and three things make the difference for me: - a very mature community of users. The arch docs and forums are really good. If you ever have a problem, you'll find a solution in no more than a few clicks - an extremely tidy package manager. The choice of packages is huge and - more importantly - creating and maintaining a package is extremely easy. Way easier than making .debs or .rpms - it just works. I've used arch for more than a decade on all my machines, including servers. I never had major issues. Annoyances coming from upstream are unavoidable of course, but the distro is well organised that identify the problem and rolling back is super easy.

jiggunjer 9y ago
I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months. It wouldn't even boot because they changed to systemd in the meantime. So it only works if you sink in significant time.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  It really does require you to be subscribed to the Arch news feed, in case any packages require special manual procedures to install correctly. And don't wait too long between updates, because apparently some newer versions of packages don't know how to properly upgrade from older versions.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  > I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months It does indeed 'just work', it only doesn't if you fail to understand what rolling release means. There is usually a painless way to upgrade even after a long time, you just have to use pacdiff and read archlinux.org a bit more carefully than if you update daily/weekly. Also, how does Apple not 'just work'?* * 'just works' refers to a general idea of it being in good working condition and not behaving unexpectedly, if you use it in a reasonable manner, it doesn't mean that every cranky misconfiguration of a tool you just came up with will somehow read you mind and deduce how you intend it to behave.

int_19h 9y ago

For me, the biggest point in favor of Arch is that it is a binary distro that seems to be closest to "vanilla" - meaning that packages are generally built directly from upstream, without heavy distro-specific patchsets applied by maintainers. There's still plenty of patches, mind you, but they're usually there to ensure that it builds and installs correctly in Arch environment, not to change functionality. I also find Pacman to be noticeably faster than all other binary package managers. I just did a full package upgrade on a laptop that hasn't been upgraded since the beginning of this year, and yet it was able to compute a (fairly lengthy) list of packages to upgrade faster than I could blink.

jwilk 9y ago
Making /usr/bin/python point to Python 3 doesn't sound very vanilla to me.
- bartkmq 9y ago
  He defines 'vanilla' to mean 'build from upstream with little distro-specific changes'. So what does this have to do with making Python 3 the default python interpreter? I bet this symlink is not even part of the python source code; it's always a choice made by the distro maintainers. Arch is known to be always cutting edge even if this sometimes means breaking stuff so this decision is not exactly surprising.
  - jwilk 9y ago
    Removing an API that vast majority of Python programs were using (at that time), and replacing it with something incompatible is not a "little distro-specific change".
- int_19h 9y ago
  At the point where that was done, there was no formalized convention on it. Arch maintainers decided that it's preferable to default to the latest and greatest (which seems to be the general policy, and it meshes well with a bleeding-edge rolling release IMO). It was a mistake for Python specifically because of idiosyncrasies of Python 2 vs 3 story, and they have since corrected that mistake.

jcelerier 9y ago

> So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? I've used a bunch of distros over the years, starting at Red Hat Linux 5.2 when I was a kid, Mandrake linux 7,8, Ubuntu from 8.04 to 12.04, Debian stable, testing, unstable, sid, and finally Arch. Arch has been, by far, the most hassle-free when I see some software on the web and want to use it on my machine. Also the only one where I wasn't able to botch the system as to make it either unable to install any package or unbootable, while it happened quite often with Debian and Ubuntu. AUR is fantastic, both as an user and a software author: it means that I just have to make a small script to make my software available easily to other arch users, vs the ungodly process to get a package into Debian and Ubuntu ; also I can be fairly confident that my users will always have a somewhat up-to-date version of my software. Pacman installs stuff much faster than apt or yum in my experience; updates seem almost instantaneous. The best is that as a software developer you always get the most recent version of libraries and compilers: gcc 7.2, qt 5.9, etc. Likewise for desktop environments: KDE updates come very quickly. Some packages also have "git" versions available on the AUR; for instance the creative coding toolkit openframeworks is available in the AUR both as the latest stable version, 0.9.8, released a year and so ago, and the latest nightly git version which has a lot of improvements. It's very useful if you report a bug in some software and the author fixes it in git master : means that you can often just do `yaourt -S software-i-use-git` and have it be recompiled automatically with the fix, vs trying to follow the build procedure yourself. If you have a recent computer, older kernels and mesa sometimes don't cut it while in arch you get the latest stable kernel very shortly after its release. It uses systemd meaning that the general system config is very simple.

CannisterFlux 9y ago

The rolling release model - you always have the latest stuff. Latest git, firefox, pidgin, all the latest released version of dev libraries and tools. The AUR is handy for installing proprietary stuff like google-chrome, hipchat, no-machine, or packaging up things you install outside Arch but need e.g. old free software that isn't in Arch. Generally Arch doesn't patch upstream software unless it is absolutely necessary and they are keen to drop patches when an issue is fixed, so if you read on a project's website that the config file is in /etc/whatever.conf then it will be. In other distros they move stuff around in a more capricious way. The dist-upgrade thing is also kinda true. It's not that it breaks everything - I use Ubuntu too, and I don't think I've ever had an upgrade break on me in 10+ years - but you need to set aside a few hours to upgrade the world each time. With a rolling release you can spread those few hours out over the 6 months. Just a few minutes a day or per week. Also, because you go from one release to the next, as the upstream developer envisioned, the compatibility of programs between versions tends to work out OK. Whereas in a longer-term release there can be big version jumps that the upstream dev did not really anticipate, causing things to break. For example, maybe some feature gets deprecated and there are some months were releases show a warning "hey, this feature is going away, do this other thing instead". You can sort it out early in Arch. But in another distro, you go from the release with a feature to a release without it, and no smooth transition between versions. And all at once, so "everything" breaks/changes that same day.

exDM69 9y ago

Less "downstream" patches to packages than most other distros. This is consequence and a prerequisite of rolling release. Debian-based distros can have quite a lot of downstream modifications, the OpenSSL random bug being the most infamous. A lot of this is due to having long term releases which causes the need to have new software work with old dependency libraries and vice versa.

AsyncAwait 9y ago

It's a system where you don't have a bunch of preinstalled bloatware you don't need, giving you a better idea of what is actually on your system, meaning also a better idea of how to tweak it or have an idea of what's going on if something unexpected happens. The package manager is much simpler and more transparent than apt, i.e. it apt always felt like a more obfuscated package manager, it writes to files I don't know about on its own, processes various triggers etc. paceman can also do this, but it's PKGBUILD format is really straightforward text description on how to build and configure a package, giving you greater visibility as to what's going on. Then there's the rolling release model, not having to reinstall is extremely nice. Overall, it is just a very clean distort, where the tools are intuitive and transparent and you can administer the system as fast as you can type in just a few days. Plus, the Arch Wiki is by far the best source on all things Linux.

giancarlostoro 9y ago

Not really sure, I think the best Linux distort is whichever one you're the most comfortable and productive using. No need in forcing yourself to use a distro that gets in your way.