13 ms·

Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

277 points by mxschumacher 4y ago

pndy 4y ago
> Liam Proven Tue 15 Mar 2022 // 10:25 UTC
- lproven 4y ago
  Yep, that's me. Surprised but happy to see this resurface now.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
Interesting to see the documentation emphasized here. I don't use Arch, but I often see the arch wiki in google results for linux stuff I look up. Makes me wonder why wikis aren't used more for documentation.
- Macha 4y ago
  Other distros have wikis but tend to focus more on documentation the distro specific details. Since Arch packages have very minimal modifications from upstream, this means much of the content from the ArchWiki is applicable across distros. But then once you have one wiki covering the generic advice, there's less motivation for others to duplicate that effort anyway.
  - lnxg33k1 4y ago
    I use gentoo, and still have arch wiki in bookmarks as go-to place to look for docs
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      In fairness, the Gentoo wiki is my second favorite wiki that's largely applicable to all Linux distros:)
- massysett 4y ago
  Wikis take a lot of maintenance by a determined core of contributors, or else the pages deteriorate into a pile of incoherent edits. Occasionally I see this even on the Arch wiki. Main text says “do this.” That’s followed by some text saying “I tried this and it didn’t work.” That’s followed by a text box saying “that method is deprecated.”
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    But that's still better then just having the main text saying "do this" where "this" is wrong. And that's often the case for non-wiki documentation.
    - massysett 4y ago
      True, but where docs have a dedicated, core maintenance crew, they can maintain the docs in a good state with less effort. With a wiki, the problem is that drive-by editors can degrade a good product, requiring constant work by the core contributors to revert bad edits. My main point was as a response to the original question, which was: why aren’t more docs in wiki form? I think one reason for that is that good docs require dedicated contributors, and I think a wiki does little to nothing to reduce their burden. The myth of the wiki is that by erecting it, drive-by contributors will build a great product. I don’t think any quality wiki was built that way.
- digitallyfree 4y ago
  I'm a deb-based user but I constantly refer to the Arch wiki to understand best practices and solve problems. No other distro has this level of self-serve documentation that's actually updated and easy to understand.
- ilyt 4y ago
  In before that was Gentoo wiki, no matter what problem the Gentoo wiki was likely and good search result. ... till they had a failure and discovered none of their backups was working. Check your backups kids.
ddevault 4y ago
Small? No. Simple? No. Great documentation? Yes.
- anthk 4y ago
  >Great documentation? Yes. Compared to BSD's, mediocre and subject to dramatic changes by nature.
  - lproven 4y ago
    I disagree, actually. (For clarity, I wrote this article, 9 months ago.) This year I have done short reviews of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. IMHO the docs for Arch are more helpful than any of theirs.
    - anthk 4y ago
      How short? help #in the terminal. man afterboot Also, the OpenBSD FAQ.
    - nijave 4y ago
      Subjective, but I also find Arch documentation to be "better" because it more frequently answers my question in less time. You could say *BSD documentation is more "comprehensive" but I usually find myself wading through an ocean to find what I'm looking for. On top of that, every time you try to look elsewhere, you just see RTFM. I can respect the sentiment, but having different variations of the same documentation can help understanding imo
  - ddevault 4y ago
    Well, great documentation with the caveat that good upstream documentation is always preferable to the Arch wiki.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      Main virtue of Arch. They don’t patch. Upstream documentation will apply as is. I think Arch generally got its philosophy right. It’s pretty much the minimal set of tools to get an easy to update binary distribution. They don’t touch what they don’t have to.
pantalaimon 4y ago
What I really like about Arch is how minimal & fast it can be without resorting to 'exotic' software or libraries. I recently installed Archlinux32 on an old Pentium II machine just for the fun of it and was pleasantly surprised that it still feels reasonably responsive (I didn't get X11 to work yet though as the GPU driver for that machine apparently never reached mainline or was removed in the meantime). Everything is managed by systemd/networkd the way it's authors intended. No custom scripts or other cruft or bloat. No 'helpful' background services to update man pages or the package database. It's also refreshing how fast pacman is compared to apt.
- anthk 4y ago
  Arch is not minimal. Debian netinstall does the same. Alpine is. If you think Arch is fast, try Alpine x86. On X.Org, VESA works everywhere.
  - kadotus 4y ago
    Can you elaborate? In what way is Alpine more minimal than Arch? (I really just don't know) Also are you suggesting that Debian netinstall is not minimal?
    - gnull 4y ago
      Alpine base rootfs is just a few megabytes, while Arch is like 100-200MB. I usually encounter Alpine in Docker containers when people want to wrap just one specific service and have save space on things that are not essential for it (it would be wasteful to ship your 20MB app in a 200MB Arch/Debian container). I didn't know Alpine was useful as a working machine though.
      - anthk 4y ago
        It works fine on older machines. setup-xorg after the installing process, add a light WM such as wmaker or jwm for parent commenter's pentium II and he/she is done.
      - 4y ago
nixcraft 4y ago
Only 8 month late (this is an old article from 15/March/2022).
trabant00 4y ago
While some may see it as a learning tool I have used Arch on my workstations for 14 years. The last time I remember having to manually fix things was when it migrated to systemd. I am a linux sysadmin so I might be biased but I think people overestimate the effort required to get exactly what you want and nothing more out of an Arch setup.
- jasperry 4y ago
  A more recent update that required some work was switching to PipeWire for audio. But it was mainly about knowing which packages to remove and replace, and now audio works without a hitch for me, better than PulseAudio ever did.
- joveian 4y ago
  It depends on how uncommon what you want is, although I agree it is very low effort in general. For example, there was not too long ago an issue with the kernel not booting from syslinux for a few weeks. Also, arch-announce mentions a manual fix needed if you have a particular package installed every few months, so good to subscribe to that and fix as described if needed. https://lists.archlinux.org/mailman3/lists/arch-announce.lists.archlinux.org/ https://lists.archlinux.org/mailman3/lists/arch-announce.lis... My suggestions: 1) Keep both linux and linux-lts installed since otherwise you have no backup if the one you normally use doesn't work. 2) Always fully update the system since dependencies aren't always fully specified and a partial update can damage the rest of the system. If you need to hold back a package, add it to the IgnorePkg= line in /etc/pacman.conf until it works again. 3) Avoid AUR except for rare cases where you review the package manually (always avoid AUR helpers). 4) Don't be too lazy even though things mostly just work, check your boot logs at least every year or so to improve the chance of fixing issues before they cause trouble and look for and deal with pacnew files at least a few times a year.
- autophagian 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I started my linux use with everything-bundled distros like Ubuntu but I really appreciated Arch for giving me a better sense of how things tend to hang together. Made me much more comfortable transitioning into sysadmin/sre stuff.
bradrn 4y ago
> The installation process, and the documentation behind it, lead to the third virtue: a complete installation tends to be very small and simple, because you only install the bits you need. If you don't know what bits you need, the documentation will help you to work it out, and the result is something that is both fairly minimal and that, with luck, you understand. You know what's in there because you installed it. I feel this gets to the core of why I like Arch so much. I’m a Linux novice, so for a long time I ran Ubuntu VMs when I needed to do stuff on Linux (this being before WSL). It worked well enough, but I never really felt that I properly knew what I was doing. Then I tried installing Arch in a VM… and it took me several days and several attempts, but when I finally got it working I felt, for the first time ever, like I actually understood the system I was using. Now I have a webserver running Arch, and only a week or two ago installed Arch on an old PC to see if I could get a desktop working. Of course, Arch is not easy, especially for a non-expert such as myself. Sometimes I have no idea how to solve a problem, or even what kind of software I need in the first place. For this reason, I’m planning to install Debian instead on the new laptop I’ve ordered (to replace my ~10 year old machine running Windows), in the hopes that it might have more stuff working out of the box. Still, I’d say that trying out Arch has immeasurably improved my knowledge, not just of Linux but of the underlying concepts behind modern computing. (Oh, and the documentation’s amazing too!)
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "For this reason, I’m planning to install Debian instead on the new laptop I’ve ordered" Maybe have a look at manjaro, it is based on arch, but comes prepackaged, so you can just boot up the luve image and install, if everything works.
  - bradrn 4y ago
    I’ve heard of Manjaro, but on the occasions when I’ve brought it up in conversation, people have almost unanimously warned me off from it in fairly strong terms… not entirely sure why, but that alone makes me reluctant to use it.
    - 4y ago
Lapsa 4y ago
BTW I Use Arch
laerus 4y ago
pacman corrupted my installation twice in a year. Obviously I did something wrong but who knows.
- jorgemf 4y ago
  probably you installed something manually at some point, otherwise pacman does nothing wrong. Rarely you have to touch something manually because a mayor upgrade, but I think it has been like 4-6 times in 20 years for me. If you want to install something manually in arch it is better to create a package first (if it is not already in aur). That way pacman can check for corruptions before installing anything
  - randbox 4y ago
    Pacman works when updating all packages simultaneously. However when updating only a requested package it can break by failing to pull in other packages which need to be updated simultaneously. For instance, pacman can break pacman and sudo by updating OpenSSL to a newer version than the currently installed version of pacman and sudo expect.
- 8t88t8tttt8 4y ago
  Do you mean "an update required manual intervention but I did not pay attention and as a result my system was broken later"? If not, do you have links to the bug reports?
- chazeon 4y ago
  Ubuntu’s release upgrade also corrupts my system, so it’s not just pacman
- Jnr 4y ago
  I have been using it for 10+ years and it hasn't corrupted things for me. It can't corrupt. It could get a bit tricky if you update very rarely, like once a year, but not sure what else there is to do to break things. Please elaborate a bit more.
  - 4y ago
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
I appreciate the straightforward install and wide availability available of packages, but in practice always using the latest packages system wide can be annoying. For example right now the latest gdb is broken on both my machines, and since i’m not as keen to participate in troubleshooting new software I think I’ll be moving to a more stable distro pretty soon https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=274056 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=274056
- pantalaimon 4y ago
  It's possible to downgrade packages though https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/downgrading_packages https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/downgrading_packages
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
nathias 4y ago
I've been runing arch for 7 years, I had to reinstall once to fix something I broke with deleting python packages but I never had problems with just updating the system ...
samgranieri 4y ago
I just discovered Arch Linux this year, and I’m running it on a few raspberry pis. I love getting the latest packages, and the docs are great. Arch works well for me because I like updating my homebrew Mac user land daily, and updating Arch just feels natural.
_piif 4y ago
Arch has served me well over the years on almost every piece of hardware I owned and is still my goto for a "traditional" FHS distro. The documentation is top notch, it's fairly unopinionated and I love the simplistic nature of it (everything in the repos is just unpatched upstream software, for the most part at least). Recently made the jump to NixOS though and been really happy with the additional features it offers.
dvratil 4y ago
What I miss mentioned here is AUR and the fact that almost any software that you can think of is packaged there. You read about some cool software (like git-bug I learned about today here on HN), you do `yay -S cool-software` and it's there. On Ubuntu or Debian? Not so much...
- green726 4y ago
  I agree. The AUR is one of the biggest reasons I use an Arch-based distro (endeavour). If it wasn’t for the AUR, I, a pretty quick learner but also lazy person, would be using fedora or something.
- coletonodonnell 4y ago
  The AUR is the main thing I miss after moving from Arch to Gentoo, the scope of the applications on the AUR is crazy, and for the most part in my experience it's usually up to date and reliable. In my opinion, the AUR alone is enough reason to install Arch or an Arch-Based Distro.
mcbuilder 4y ago
I've been using Arch for well over 10 years, they say it's true that you "learn Linux" using Arch. It's an excellent distro, but a few things make it a great learning OS. First it's as vanilla as possible, which mean that packages are modified as little as possible from upstream. This means you don't learn anything distro-specific by mistake, and you actually learn more how the package is intended to function. The second is great documentation and community. The Arch wiki is full of common tweaks that you'll likely have to do, many other distro's may have just held your hand and assumed you wanted those boxes checked, but Arch makes you check them. Being minimal also helps, it really doesn't overwhelm you. Arch doesn't, it's just that only at a time is usually broken, so you're doing something like that.
- matthews2 4y ago
  I'm not so sure about learning. I think that you're mostly just learning how to administer an Arch Linux system. After using and contributing to Gentoo for a few years, I don't think I could confidently explain how all of the pieces of the desktop graphics and audio stack fit together - I just installed it and it worked.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Been using Pop OS for a while for the It Just Works(tm) experience, but I'm missing Arch more and more. Mainstream Linux distros feel a lot more like Windows these days. Sure they require less condiguration, but they're also mich harder to mess around with. Starting up htop reveals a jungle of daemons and weird systemd shit I don't even know what does. Systemd is a terribly documented nightmare to configure, etc. It's so nice in Arch to know pretty much know what everything is for because I was the one who installed it. And to have documentation that isn't infuriating to navigate.
- dartharva 4y ago
  It's been two weeks since I installed Arch on my daily driver laptop, and I have to say it actually gave me a more flawless OOTB experience than Pop, Ubuntu or Fedora could. The archinstall script automatically selects and installs all required packages for you'll need to get a working system up and running, and it configures xorg and proprietary drivers for you so that you don't have to. I haven't had to mess around anything honestly, I'll suggest you give it a look again.
Ptchd 4y ago
Just discovered pikaur, an AUR helper/package manager for Arch... it's great.
oxplot 4y ago
Meanwhile my personal installation is 8 years old. It was initially installed on a desktop on btrfs and has since moved between three laptops and across to ext4 and now xfs. 150K lines in pacman log file. I love it.
wvh 4y ago
The main benefit of Arch Linux to me is that when you do a drive-by patch to some software project, it is not unthinkable that the fix reaches you through upstream and an Arch package update in a matter of hours. This flow is not possible with distributions that run pretty out of date software and have long release cycles: the version that's included with the distribution is usually too old to be able to check out the source, test and directly apply fixes to the upstream repository, and getting those fixes back would take months. This also applies to security updates, as it's easier to rely on instant upstream project updates than on some distribution package owner to remember and backport those fixes.
- subsection1h 4y ago
  > This flow is not possible with distributions that run pretty out of date software I use Debian Stable and Fedora on my systems and I have the latest versions of all of the software of which I want the latest versions because I can install software from source like a big boy. And my installers don't have version numbers hard-coded in them like PKGBUILDs do, so I get the latest versions immediately.
wesapien 4y ago
How does a similar Nix OS setup compare as far as number of packages? Is Nix just as minimal as Arch?
- rgoulter 4y ago
  In terms of addressing "you want to know what your system has got", OP argues Arch is good because Arch will only have what you install. With NixOS, the whole system configuration is declared starting from a single configuration file. So, NixOS is great for addressing "I forgot how I set <whatever> up". You'll likely end up using more disk space with NixOS if you're changing your system, since NixOS has functionality which makes it easy to rollback the system to earlier configurations.
  - tlavoie 4y ago
    I'm fairly new to NixOS, but suspect that a NixOS install might end up smaller over time. With the ability to try out one-off package installs that don't become part of the more permanent config, and the "garbage collection" mechanism that cleans up, I think I at least would have less long-term cruft.
dartharva 4y ago
Arch is awesome and was the distro that finally got me to stop sticking to Windows. Every other distro I tried had some flaw that kept on making its experience subpar, and I have tried a lot of distros - Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, and a few more. I was staying away from Arch for its reportedly complex installation. But this month I decided to take the bullet and, to my surprise, got a fast and flawless system installed within minutes! Archinstall now makes it just as easy to install as anything else, the AUR is awesome and has everything you'll ever need, and the wiki is just unparalleled. This distro leaves all others in the dust in terms of speed and software availability; I will highly recommend it to everyone looking for a no-nonsense and up-to-date system.
- subsection1h 4y ago
  > the AUR is awesome and has everything you'll ever need But what if I need packages created and maintained by vetted, qualified devs rather than the unvetted randos that upload PGBUILDs to the AUR? Many of the AUR contributors I've looked into have no publicly-accessible real names, no personal websites, no LinkedIn accounts, and their GitHub accounts are only a couple years old with Japanese cartoon characters as their account photos.
  - joveian 4y ago
    I wouldn't auto update from AUR but you can easily download a snapshot of the PKGBUILD of particular software you want from the Arch website and verify that it isn't doing anything questionable (and fix it if it is) then build it yourself. It is a simple format and easy to review, it is rare to see patches or non-obvious build steps. Personally, I have a dedicated aur user with some aliases that grab a URL from a fifo and print it, download, and extract. There are also often packages that pull the latest version from git and can be easily updated to use release branches if you want. Because of the focus on upstreaming fixes rather than keeping patches you can also just build outside the package system and install to /usr/local and you will still benefit from the project likely having received patches to build on Arch (if they don't test it themselves). Even if not yet fixed upstream, any random issue you encounter usually already has a bug filed by an Arch user unless you are extremely quick about updating.
kreig 4y ago
Using Arch Linux since 2009 as my main desktop OS, and after 3 complete PC ugprades, I never had to reinstall it. It has been working pretty well for me, except for a couple of issues that I ran over these years (e.g. the transition to systemd in 2012/2013, or no pacman -Syu for several weeks).
Operative0198 4y ago
Arch isn't just simple, it is smart too. With alpm-hooks [0], it is possible to run specific commands pre or post-install/upgrade of packages. E.g re-sign secure UKIs with my keys after the intel-ucode package updates. This example and more such refined tools such as the AUR that add massive quality of life improvements to the overall Linux user experience is what keeps me happy at Arch. [0] https://archlinux.org/pacman/alpm-hooks.5.html https://archlinux.org/pacman/alpm-hooks.5.html
Semaphor 4y ago
I run arch on my VPS. Before, I ran Debian, but if you need a special package version, or something, it just feels almost as hard as getting a newer IIS version on Windows. I got sick of it, removed Debian, and installed Arch from scratch. My Linux experience was pretty minimal. Some trying out on desktop in the early 2000s and later again after Ubuntu became a thing, but I always got weird errors. Then some in university, and again a bit to administer my VPS or rPi. Arch was a breath of fresh air, not only could I get current packages, everything was so well documented! The wiki is, as the article rightfully says, amazing. Now, even when I’m not using arch (I have a small Proxmox server with Debian and Debian containers), I still use the archwiki as I know it will help me for everything but Debian specific things. My first arch install (before that, I never installed an OS without an installer) took maybe 2 hours.
horlux 4y ago
I was a big fan of Arch for several years but since the introduction of systemd I felt I lost control and didn't really knew what was running in my system anymore. Been using Voidlinux for the last 2 years and I just can't go back to Arch
eternityforest 4y ago
I don't think I'm ever going to actually use Arch, but I do have to admit the documentation is amazing and they have basically become the maintainers of Linux documentation in general.
datsudo 4y ago
AUR makes me stop on trying other distros. Oh that distro is great. Is there some community package repo in that, equivalent to Arch's AUR? None? NVM.
morbusfonticuli 4y ago
I've been using Debian Testing on my personal Notebooks since ~10yrs: throughout university, and the subsequent work life. During that time, I oftened wondered whether I should "play"/experiment more with other distros; after all I loved tinkering with my vim config and network setups etc. However, I've been just satisfied with the status quo, and more importantly: I just wanted to get shit done. Apt, dpkg, systemd. If I want to get bleeding-edge SW I'll build the upstream source manually. No big deal - won't happen too often. Getting older, I'm beginning to despise fixing the os more and more ... I just want the machine to work. This results perhaps from my day job, which involves openbsd-developing/tweaking ... And general a lot of cursing. Granted: I'm not a gamer or graphics-enthusiast, and use my computer primarily for development, writing, watching movies/pictures ... Your typical senior resident trapped in the body of a 30ish guy. I'm often wondering whether I'm just lazy and/or whether my attitude is the norm or rather the exception respective to Unix/Linux (power)users. Edit: forgot to say "big thank you" to the arch community! Over the years I consulted the archwiki endless times! Almost everytime really helpful (in contrast to the debian wiki, lol)
- tcrenshaw 4y ago
  I consider myself a Linux power user at this point; been running Linux as my primary os since 2007. I enjoy tinkering, but I like my distro to be rock solid; all of my Linux servers run debian stable. In no way would I say that you're "lazy", you just know what you're looking for in a daily driver. Debian is a fantastic choice and I used it as my primary OS for years. That being said, I do run Arch on my laptop and desktop these days; I like being a little closer to upstream. I don't run a ton of bleeding edge software, but using aur makes it incredibly easy to stay up to date. I am also extremely appreciative of the Arch wiki, no matter what distro I'm using it's one of the first places I check out if I'm having an issue.
4oo4 4y ago
I bought a Librem laptop and was trying to install Debian on it, only to find that there was a firmware bug that prevented me from using the installer. So instead, I read the Arch wiki and installed Debian Arch-style using the live ISO and debootstrap, and I've been installing Debian that way ever since. I've never used Arch because I like everything as boring as possible, but someday I might take the plunge. They're the first place I go for docs, regardless of what distro I'm using, except for maybe Alpine when I have to read docs on something strange like OpenRC, and have to go to Gentoo's wiki for that. The thing that makes the Arch docs so great is that it covers edge cases and has lots of examples.

277 points by mxschumacher 4y ago

pndy 4y ago

> Liam Proven Tue 15 Mar 2022 // 10:25 UTC

lproven 4y ago
Yep, that's me. Surprised but happy to see this resurface now.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

Interesting to see the documentation emphasized here. I don't use Arch, but I often see the arch wiki in google results for linux stuff I look up. Makes me wonder why wikis aren't used more for documentation.

Macha 4y ago
Other distros have wikis but tend to focus more on documentation the distro specific details. Since Arch packages have very minimal modifications from upstream, this means much of the content from the ArchWiki is applicable across distros. But then once you have one wiki covering the generic advice, there's less motivation for others to duplicate that effort anyway.
- lnxg33k1 4y ago
  I use gentoo, and still have arch wiki in bookmarks as go-to place to look for docs
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    In fairness, the Gentoo wiki is my second favorite wiki that's largely applicable to all Linux distros:)
massysett 4y ago
Wikis take a lot of maintenance by a determined core of contributors, or else the pages deteriorate into a pile of incoherent edits. Occasionally I see this even on the Arch wiki. Main text says “do this.” That’s followed by some text saying “I tried this and it didn’t work.” That’s followed by a text box saying “that method is deprecated.”
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  But that's still better then just having the main text saying "do this" where "this" is wrong. And that's often the case for non-wiki documentation.
  - massysett 4y ago
    True, but where docs have a dedicated, core maintenance crew, they can maintain the docs in a good state with less effort. With a wiki, the problem is that drive-by editors can degrade a good product, requiring constant work by the core contributors to revert bad edits. My main point was as a response to the original question, which was: why aren’t more docs in wiki form? I think one reason for that is that good docs require dedicated contributors, and I think a wiki does little to nothing to reduce their burden. The myth of the wiki is that by erecting it, drive-by contributors will build a great product. I don’t think any quality wiki was built that way.
digitallyfree 4y ago
I'm a deb-based user but I constantly refer to the Arch wiki to understand best practices and solve problems. No other distro has this level of self-serve documentation that's actually updated and easy to understand.
ilyt 4y ago
In before that was Gentoo wiki, no matter what problem the Gentoo wiki was likely and good search result. ... till they had a failure and discovered none of their backups was working. Check your backups kids.

ddevault 4y ago

Small? No. Simple? No. Great documentation? Yes.

anthk 4y ago
>Great documentation? Yes. Compared to BSD's, mediocre and subject to dramatic changes by nature.
- lproven 4y ago
  I disagree, actually. (For clarity, I wrote this article, 9 months ago.) This year I have done short reviews of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. IMHO the docs for Arch are more helpful than any of theirs.
  - anthk 4y ago
    How short? help #in the terminal. man afterboot Also, the OpenBSD FAQ.
  - nijave 4y ago
    Subjective, but I also find Arch documentation to be "better" because it more frequently answers my question in less time. You could say *BSD documentation is more "comprehensive" but I usually find myself wading through an ocean to find what I'm looking for. On top of that, every time you try to look elsewhere, you just see RTFM. I can respect the sentiment, but having different variations of the same documentation can help understanding imo
- ddevault 4y ago
  Well, great documentation with the caveat that good upstream documentation is always preferable to the Arch wiki.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Main virtue of Arch. They don’t patch. Upstream documentation will apply as is. I think Arch generally got its philosophy right. It’s pretty much the minimal set of tools to get an easy to update binary distribution. They don’t touch what they don’t have to.

pantalaimon 4y ago

What I really like about Arch is how minimal & fast it can be without resorting to 'exotic' software or libraries. I recently installed Archlinux32 on an old Pentium II machine just for the fun of it and was pleasantly surprised that it still feels reasonably responsive (I didn't get X11 to work yet though as the GPU driver for that machine apparently never reached mainline or was removed in the meantime). Everything is managed by systemd/networkd the way it's authors intended. No custom scripts or other cruft or bloat. No 'helpful' background services to update man pages or the package database. It's also refreshing how fast pacman is compared to apt.

anthk 4y ago
Arch is not minimal. Debian netinstall does the same. Alpine is. If you think Arch is fast, try Alpine x86. On X.Org, VESA works everywhere.
- kadotus 4y ago
  Can you elaborate? In what way is Alpine more minimal than Arch? (I really just don't know) Also are you suggesting that Debian netinstall is not minimal?
  - gnull 4y ago
    Alpine base rootfs is just a few megabytes, while Arch is like 100-200MB. I usually encounter Alpine in Docker containers when people want to wrap just one specific service and have save space on things that are not essential for it (it would be wasteful to ship your 20MB app in a 200MB Arch/Debian container). I didn't know Alpine was useful as a working machine though.
    - anthk 4y ago
      It works fine on older machines. setup-xorg after the installing process, add a light WM such as wmaker or jwm for parent commenter's pentium II and he/she is done.
    - 4y ago

nixcraft 4y ago

Only 8 month late (this is an old article from 15/March/2022).

trabant00 4y ago

While some may see it as a learning tool I have used Arch on my workstations for 14 years. The last time I remember having to manually fix things was when it migrated to systemd. I am a linux sysadmin so I might be biased but I think people overestimate the effort required to get exactly what you want and nothing more out of an Arch setup.

jasperry 4y ago
A more recent update that required some work was switching to PipeWire for audio. But it was mainly about knowing which packages to remove and replace, and now audio works without a hitch for me, better than PulseAudio ever did.
joveian 4y ago
It depends on how uncommon what you want is, although I agree it is very low effort in general. For example, there was not too long ago an issue with the kernel not booting from syslinux for a few weeks. Also, arch-announce mentions a manual fix needed if you have a particular package installed every few months, so good to subscribe to that and fix as described if needed. https://lists.archlinux.org/mailman3/lists/arch-announce.lists.archlinux.org/ https://lists.archlinux.org/mailman3/lists/arch-announce.lis... My suggestions: 1) Keep both linux and linux-lts installed since otherwise you have no backup if the one you normally use doesn't work. 2) Always fully update the system since dependencies aren't always fully specified and a partial update can damage the rest of the system. If you need to hold back a package, add it to the IgnorePkg= line in /etc/pacman.conf until it works again. 3) Avoid AUR except for rare cases where you review the package manually (always avoid AUR helpers). 4) Don't be too lazy even though things mostly just work, check your boot logs at least every year or so to improve the chance of fixing issues before they cause trouble and look for and deal with pacnew files at least a few times a year.
autophagian 4y ago
I'm in the same boat. I started my linux use with everything-bundled distros like Ubuntu but I really appreciated Arch for giving me a better sense of how things tend to hang together. Made me much more comfortable transitioning into sysadmin/sre stuff.

bradrn 4y ago

> The installation process, and the documentation behind it, lead to the third virtue: a complete installation tends to be very small and simple, because you only install the bits you need. If you don't know what bits you need, the documentation will help you to work it out, and the result is something that is both fairly minimal and that, with luck, you understand. You know what's in there because you installed it. I feel this gets to the core of why I like Arch so much. I’m a Linux novice, so for a long time I ran Ubuntu VMs when I needed to do stuff on Linux (this being before WSL). It worked well enough, but I never really felt that I properly knew what I was doing. Then I tried installing Arch in a VM… and it took me several days and several attempts, but when I finally got it working I felt, for the first time ever, like I actually understood the system I was using. Now I have a webserver running Arch, and only a week or two ago installed Arch on an old PC to see if I could get a desktop working. Of course, Arch is not easy, especially for a non-expert such as myself. Sometimes I have no idea how to solve a problem, or even what kind of software I need in the first place. For this reason, I’m planning to install Debian instead on the new laptop I’ve ordered (to replace my ~10 year old machine running Windows), in the hopes that it might have more stuff working out of the box. Still, I’d say that trying out Arch has immeasurably improved my knowledge, not just of Linux but of the underlying concepts behind modern computing. (Oh, and the documentation’s amazing too!)

hutzlibu 4y ago
"For this reason, I’m planning to install Debian instead on the new laptop I’ve ordered" Maybe have a look at manjaro, it is based on arch, but comes prepackaged, so you can just boot up the luve image and install, if everything works.
- bradrn 4y ago
  I’ve heard of Manjaro, but on the occasions when I’ve brought it up in conversation, people have almost unanimously warned me off from it in fairly strong terms… not entirely sure why, but that alone makes me reluctant to use it.
  - 4y ago

Lapsa 4y ago

BTW I Use Arch

laerus 4y ago

pacman corrupted my installation twice in a year. Obviously I did something wrong but who knows.

jorgemf 4y ago
probably you installed something manually at some point, otherwise pacman does nothing wrong. Rarely you have to touch something manually because a mayor upgrade, but I think it has been like 4-6 times in 20 years for me. If you want to install something manually in arch it is better to create a package first (if it is not already in aur). That way pacman can check for corruptions before installing anything
- randbox 4y ago
  Pacman works when updating all packages simultaneously. However when updating only a requested package it can break by failing to pull in other packages which need to be updated simultaneously. For instance, pacman can break pacman and sudo by updating OpenSSL to a newer version than the currently installed version of pacman and sudo expect.
8t88t8tttt8 4y ago
Do you mean "an update required manual intervention but I did not pay attention and as a result my system was broken later"? If not, do you have links to the bug reports?
chazeon 4y ago
Ubuntu’s release upgrade also corrupts my system, so it’s not just pacman
Jnr 4y ago
I have been using it for 10+ years and it hasn't corrupted things for me. It can't corrupt. It could get a bit tricky if you update very rarely, like once a year, but not sure what else there is to do to break things. Please elaborate a bit more.
- 4y ago

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago

I appreciate the straightforward install and wide availability available of packages, but in practice always using the latest packages system wide can be annoying. For example right now the latest gdb is broken on both my machines, and since i’m not as keen to participate in troubleshooting new software I think I’ll be moving to a more stable distro pretty soon https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=274056 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=274056

pantalaimon 4y ago
It's possible to downgrade packages though https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/downgrading_packages https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/downgrading_packages
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

nathias 4y ago

I've been runing arch for 7 years, I had to reinstall once to fix something I broke with deleting python packages but I never had problems with just updating the system ...

samgranieri 4y ago

I just discovered Arch Linux this year, and I’m running it on a few raspberry pis. I love getting the latest packages, and the docs are great. Arch works well for me because I like updating my homebrew Mac user land daily, and updating Arch just feels natural.

_piif 4y ago

Arch has served me well over the years on almost every piece of hardware I owned and is still my goto for a "traditional" FHS distro. The documentation is top notch, it's fairly unopinionated and I love the simplistic nature of it (everything in the repos is just unpatched upstream software, for the most part at least). Recently made the jump to NixOS though and been really happy with the additional features it offers.

dvratil 4y ago

What I miss mentioned here is AUR and the fact that almost any software that you can think of is packaged there. You read about some cool software (like git-bug I learned about today here on HN), you do `yay -S cool-software` and it's there. On Ubuntu or Debian? Not so much...

green726 4y ago
I agree. The AUR is one of the biggest reasons I use an Arch-based distro (endeavour). If it wasn’t for the AUR, I, a pretty quick learner but also lazy person, would be using fedora or something.
coletonodonnell 4y ago
The AUR is the main thing I miss after moving from Arch to Gentoo, the scope of the applications on the AUR is crazy, and for the most part in my experience it's usually up to date and reliable. In my opinion, the AUR alone is enough reason to install Arch or an Arch-Based Distro.

mcbuilder 4y ago

I've been using Arch for well over 10 years, they say it's true that you "learn Linux" using Arch. It's an excellent distro, but a few things make it a great learning OS. First it's as vanilla as possible, which mean that packages are modified as little as possible from upstream. This means you don't learn anything distro-specific by mistake, and you actually learn more how the package is intended to function. The second is great documentation and community. The Arch wiki is full of common tweaks that you'll likely have to do, many other distro's may have just held your hand and assumed you wanted those boxes checked, but Arch makes you check them. Being minimal also helps, it really doesn't overwhelm you. Arch doesn't, it's just that only at a time is usually broken, so you're doing something like that.

matthews2 4y ago
I'm not so sure about learning. I think that you're mostly just learning how to administer an Arch Linux system. After using and contributing to Gentoo for a few years, I don't think I could confidently explain how all of the pieces of the desktop graphics and audio stack fit together - I just installed it and it worked.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

Been using Pop OS for a while for the It Just Works(tm) experience, but I'm missing Arch more and more. Mainstream Linux distros feel a lot more like Windows these days. Sure they require less condiguration, but they're also mich harder to mess around with. Starting up htop reveals a jungle of daemons and weird systemd shit I don't even know what does. Systemd is a terribly documented nightmare to configure, etc. It's so nice in Arch to know pretty much know what everything is for because I was the one who installed it. And to have documentation that isn't infuriating to navigate.

dartharva 4y ago
It's been two weeks since I installed Arch on my daily driver laptop, and I have to say it actually gave me a more flawless OOTB experience than Pop, Ubuntu or Fedora could. The archinstall script automatically selects and installs all required packages for you'll need to get a working system up and running, and it configures xorg and proprietary drivers for you so that you don't have to. I haven't had to mess around anything honestly, I'll suggest you give it a look again.

Ptchd 4y ago

Just discovered pikaur, an AUR helper/package manager for Arch... it's great.

oxplot 4y ago

Meanwhile my personal installation is 8 years old. It was initially installed on a desktop on btrfs and has since moved between three laptops and across to ext4 and now xfs. 150K lines in pacman log file. I love it.

wvh 4y ago

The main benefit of Arch Linux to me is that when you do a drive-by patch to some software project, it is not unthinkable that the fix reaches you through upstream and an Arch package update in a matter of hours. This flow is not possible with distributions that run pretty out of date software and have long release cycles: the version that's included with the distribution is usually too old to be able to check out the source, test and directly apply fixes to the upstream repository, and getting those fixes back would take months. This also applies to security updates, as it's easier to rely on instant upstream project updates than on some distribution package owner to remember and backport those fixes.

subsection1h 4y ago
> This flow is not possible with distributions that run pretty out of date software I use Debian Stable and Fedora on my systems and I have the latest versions of all of the software of which I want the latest versions because I can install software from source like a big boy. And my installers don't have version numbers hard-coded in them like PKGBUILDs do, so I get the latest versions immediately.

wesapien 4y ago

How does a similar Nix OS setup compare as far as number of packages? Is Nix just as minimal as Arch?

rgoulter 4y ago
In terms of addressing "you want to know what your system has got", OP argues Arch is good because Arch will only have what you install. With NixOS, the whole system configuration is declared starting from a single configuration file. So, NixOS is great for addressing "I forgot how I set <whatever> up". You'll likely end up using more disk space with NixOS if you're changing your system, since NixOS has functionality which makes it easy to rollback the system to earlier configurations.
- tlavoie 4y ago
  I'm fairly new to NixOS, but suspect that a NixOS install might end up smaller over time. With the ability to try out one-off package installs that don't become part of the more permanent config, and the "garbage collection" mechanism that cleans up, I think I at least would have less long-term cruft.

dartharva 4y ago

Arch is awesome and was the distro that finally got me to stop sticking to Windows. Every other distro I tried had some flaw that kept on making its experience subpar, and I have tried a lot of distros - Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, and a few more. I was staying away from Arch for its reportedly complex installation. But this month I decided to take the bullet and, to my surprise, got a fast and flawless system installed within minutes! Archinstall now makes it just as easy to install as anything else, the AUR is awesome and has everything you'll ever need, and the wiki is just unparalleled. This distro leaves all others in the dust in terms of speed and software availability; I will highly recommend it to everyone looking for a no-nonsense and up-to-date system.

subsection1h 4y ago
> the AUR is awesome and has everything you'll ever need But what if I need packages created and maintained by vetted, qualified devs rather than the unvetted randos that upload PGBUILDs to the AUR? Many of the AUR contributors I've looked into have no publicly-accessible real names, no personal websites, no LinkedIn accounts, and their GitHub accounts are only a couple years old with Japanese cartoon characters as their account photos.
- joveian 4y ago
  I wouldn't auto update from AUR but you can easily download a snapshot of the PKGBUILD of particular software you want from the Arch website and verify that it isn't doing anything questionable (and fix it if it is) then build it yourself. It is a simple format and easy to review, it is rare to see patches or non-obvious build steps. Personally, I have a dedicated aur user with some aliases that grab a URL from a fifo and print it, download, and extract. There are also often packages that pull the latest version from git and can be easily updated to use release branches if you want. Because of the focus on upstreaming fixes rather than keeping patches you can also just build outside the package system and install to /usr/local and you will still benefit from the project likely having received patches to build on Arch (if they don't test it themselves). Even if not yet fixed upstream, any random issue you encounter usually already has a bug filed by an Arch user unless you are extremely quick about updating.

kreig 4y ago

Using Arch Linux since 2009 as my main desktop OS, and after 3 complete PC ugprades, I never had to reinstall it. It has been working pretty well for me, except for a couple of issues that I ran over these years (e.g. the transition to systemd in 2012/2013, or no pacman -Syu for several weeks).

Operative0198 4y ago

Arch isn't just simple, it is smart too. With alpm-hooks [0], it is possible to run specific commands pre or post-install/upgrade of packages. E.g re-sign secure UKIs with my keys after the intel-ucode package updates. This example and more such refined tools such as the AUR that add massive quality of life improvements to the overall Linux user experience is what keeps me happy at Arch. [0] https://archlinux.org/pacman/alpm-hooks.5.html https://archlinux.org/pacman/alpm-hooks.5.html

Semaphor 4y ago

I run arch on my VPS. Before, I ran Debian, but if you need a special package version, or something, it just feels almost as hard as getting a newer IIS version on Windows. I got sick of it, removed Debian, and installed Arch from scratch. My Linux experience was pretty minimal. Some trying out on desktop in the early 2000s and later again after Ubuntu became a thing, but I always got weird errors. Then some in university, and again a bit to administer my VPS or rPi. Arch was a breath of fresh air, not only could I get current packages, everything was so well documented! The wiki is, as the article rightfully says, amazing. Now, even when I’m not using arch (I have a small Proxmox server with Debian and Debian containers), I still use the archwiki as I know it will help me for everything but Debian specific things. My first arch install (before that, I never installed an OS without an installer) took maybe 2 hours.

horlux 4y ago

I was a big fan of Arch for several years but since the introduction of systemd I felt I lost control and didn't really knew what was running in my system anymore. Been using Voidlinux for the last 2 years and I just can't go back to Arch

eternityforest 4y ago

I don't think I'm ever going to actually use Arch, but I do have to admit the documentation is amazing and they have basically become the maintainers of Linux documentation in general.

datsudo 4y ago

AUR makes me stop on trying other distros. Oh that distro is great. Is there some community package repo in that, equivalent to Arch's AUR? None? NVM.

morbusfonticuli 4y ago

I've been using Debian Testing on my personal Notebooks since ~10yrs: throughout university, and the subsequent work life. During that time, I oftened wondered whether I should "play"/experiment more with other distros; after all I loved tinkering with my vim config and network setups etc. However, I've been just satisfied with the status quo, and more importantly: I just wanted to get shit done. Apt, dpkg, systemd. If I want to get bleeding-edge SW I'll build the upstream source manually. No big deal - won't happen too often. Getting older, I'm beginning to despise fixing the os more and more ... I just want the machine to work. This results perhaps from my day job, which involves openbsd-developing/tweaking ... And general a lot of cursing. Granted: I'm not a gamer or graphics-enthusiast, and use my computer primarily for development, writing, watching movies/pictures ... Your typical senior resident trapped in the body of a 30ish guy. I'm often wondering whether I'm just lazy and/or whether my attitude is the norm or rather the exception respective to Unix/Linux (power)users. Edit: forgot to say "big thank you" to the arch community! Over the years I consulted the archwiki endless times! Almost everytime really helpful (in contrast to the debian wiki, lol)

tcrenshaw 4y ago
I consider myself a Linux power user at this point; been running Linux as my primary os since 2007. I enjoy tinkering, but I like my distro to be rock solid; all of my Linux servers run debian stable. In no way would I say that you're "lazy", you just know what you're looking for in a daily driver. Debian is a fantastic choice and I used it as my primary OS for years. That being said, I do run Arch on my laptop and desktop these days; I like being a little closer to upstream. I don't run a ton of bleeding edge software, but using aur makes it incredibly easy to stay up to date. I am also extremely appreciative of the Arch wiki, no matter what distro I'm using it's one of the first places I check out if I'm having an issue.

4oo4 4y ago

I bought a Librem laptop and was trying to install Debian on it, only to find that there was a firmware bug that prevented me from using the installer. So instead, I read the Arch wiki and installed Debian Arch-style using the live ISO and debootstrap, and I've been installing Debian that way ever since. I've never used Arch because I like everything as boring as possible, but someday I might take the plunge. They're the first place I go for docs, regardless of what distro I'm using, except for maybe Alpine when I have to read docs on something strange like OpenRC, and have to go to Gentoo's wiki for that. The thing that makes the Arch docs so great is that it covers edge cases and has lots of examples.