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It’s been a while since I even have a laptop (just a gaming desktop PC with Windows), but I’m glad people recommend Arch Linux. It certainly was the best I wor

It’s been a while since I even have a laptop (just a gaming desktop PC with Windows), but I’m glad people recommend Arch Linux. It certainly was the best I worked with until two years ago, for several years. Sure, it’s got its quirks, but they help you a lot to learn new stuff, and after that, it’s much easier to set it up again in case you needed (I only needed it once every two years or so).

lykr0n 8y ago
Arch is great. If not the wiki, the AUR and Trizen. Almost every piece of software I would want a few commands away. It's also surprisingly stable.
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  I love Fedora but the Arch wiki is the best authoritative source of fixes ever.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Agreed, and I have only ever installed Manjaro.
    - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
      Yup. Used to be that the Ubuntu forums were awesome, but there was something about the Arch forums that weeded all the crap out, i've no idea what. I need to add them to the OSS projects I contribute to this year.
      - collyw 8y ago
        I guess as Linux got more popular, more people who didn't really know what they were doing joined in, usually on Ubuntu. The quality of answers dropped as a result. I think a higher bar to entry often keeps things better quality (coming from the dev world I am thinking about Django deployment versus PHP deployment). Arch was too much of a pain for me to install last time I checked, and its going to be way too much effort for anyone relatively new to Linux.
therein 8y ago
I can't ever go back to CentOS/RHEL or Debian/Ubuntu for my personal machine after having seen the flexibility that Arch provides. Don't get me wrong, technically you can make Ubuntu just as flexible but you have to try to configure it that way. All the conveniences they brought into these distros for simple package management actually sets you up for failure when you are doing larger upgrades. Not to mention that the packages in their repos are often out of date. I never had my Arch box fail me across upgrades, allowing me to actually be current in the code I run. It's a healthy middle between Gentoo and CentOS if you don't want to build it all from source but yet still be current. Even opkg and some IPAs are better than the package manager experience I had with apt-get or yum/dnf.
- icebraining 8y ago
  My Debian Unstable laptop installation is over ten years old (and on its third laptop), and the packages are pretty recent, since Unstable is a rolling version. And despite the name, it's pretty solid, I don't remember the last issue I had with it.
- alrs 8y ago
  You're never going to run Arch in production, so developing against "current" software means "hire a team of sysadmins to package all of these future-versions in to the conservative distro that we have in prod". With luck it will be less than $1M/yr. This is why people don't use homebrew anymore, either. If you're running a Mac you dev in a Docker container that reflects your production environment.
  - rl3 8y ago
    I think you're making assumptions here. GP said that Arch allows them to be current in the code they run. That doesn't mean they're developing against Arch.

lykr0n 8y ago

Arch is great. If not the wiki, the AUR and Trizen. Almost every piece of software I would want a few commands away. It's also surprisingly stable.

sofaofthedamned 8y ago
I love Fedora but the Arch wiki is the best authoritative source of fixes ever.
- collyw 8y ago
  Agreed, and I have only ever installed Manjaro.
  - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
    Yup. Used to be that the Ubuntu forums were awesome, but there was something about the Arch forums that weeded all the crap out, i've no idea what. I need to add them to the OSS projects I contribute to this year.
    - collyw 8y ago
      I guess as Linux got more popular, more people who didn't really know what they were doing joined in, usually on Ubuntu. The quality of answers dropped as a result. I think a higher bar to entry often keeps things better quality (coming from the dev world I am thinking about Django deployment versus PHP deployment). Arch was too much of a pain for me to install last time I checked, and its going to be way too much effort for anyone relatively new to Linux.

therein 8y ago

I can't ever go back to CentOS/RHEL or Debian/Ubuntu for my personal machine after having seen the flexibility that Arch provides. Don't get me wrong, technically you can make Ubuntu just as flexible but you have to try to configure it that way. All the conveniences they brought into these distros for simple package management actually sets you up for failure when you are doing larger upgrades. Not to mention that the packages in their repos are often out of date. I never had my Arch box fail me across upgrades, allowing me to actually be current in the code I run. It's a healthy middle between Gentoo and CentOS if you don't want to build it all from source but yet still be current. Even opkg and some IPAs are better than the package manager experience I had with apt-get or yum/dnf.

icebraining 8y ago
My Debian Unstable laptop installation is over ten years old (and on its third laptop), and the packages are pretty recent, since Unstable is a rolling version. And despite the name, it's pretty solid, I don't remember the last issue I had with it.
alrs 8y ago
You're never going to run Arch in production, so developing against "current" software means "hire a team of sysadmins to package all of these future-versions in to the conservative distro that we have in prod". With luck it will be less than $1M/yr. This is why people don't use homebrew anymore, either. If you're running a Mac you dev in a Docker container that reflects your production environment.
- rl3 8y ago
  I think you're making assumptions here. GP said that Arch allows them to be current in the code they run. That doesn't mean they're developing against Arch.