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Arch Linux – Do it yourself

145 points by dolftax 12y ago

anonbanker 12y ago
I trust Arch far more than other distros, but I can't really use it in a production environment. Unless you take the care to automate the upgrades every 1-3 months, your machine will quickly require a handful of hacks to fix. As a gentoo lover, this isn't very difficult, but when you have, say, a customized digital audio workstation for a client, that needs to "just work" during upgrades (which, debian/KXStudio handles admirably), yaourt -Syu is like rolling the dice whether or not things will continue to build. AUR aside (even though, as an expert, it's a fantastic resource), the repositories need keys trusted before they can be used, but nowhere in the documentation is this mentioned. When browsing the forums, you are often encouraged to not use keys, and just do everything unsecured. I no longer trust Debian or Canonical, so I'm trying to migrate to a distribution not registered in (or under the control of) a Nation State involved in Five Eyes agreements, which is pretty much limiting me to Manjaro, Arch and Gentoo.
ephexeve 12y ago
It's a nice article, though for me, the Arch wiki is clear enough.
burntsushi 12y ago
There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial, but the canonical install instructions for Arch are instructive and detailed: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide Also, if you want to use Arch in a dependable way, subscribing to arch-announce is important[1]. It's a low traffic mailing list that notifies you of any manual steps you may need to take during a package upgrade. (I've been using Arch for years, both at home and at work. I love it.) [1] - https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-announce https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-announce
- HDevo 12y ago
  Just wanted to add that if you're not into mailing lists, the official Arch Linux News[1] page seems to be the same thing as arch-announce. It also has an Atom/RSS feed[2]. [1] https://www.archlinux.org/news/ https://www.archlinux.org/news/ [2] https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/ https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/
  - chx 12y ago
    Also https://twitter.com/archlinux https://twitter.com/archlinux . And yes, Arch rocks.
- joncameron 12y ago
  >There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial That's often true, but I was disappointed that this was little more than a rephrased version of what's on the Arch Wiki. I love the Arch documentation on the Wiki. It's perfect for me– laid out well, easy to follow, arranged in a logical wiki order, and stuffed with insanely useful tips. The pages on stuff like tmux are fantastic.
  - spystath 12y ago
    Most of the time the information is already in the wiki. And it's nice how the installation guide covers every corner case. I smoothly migrated my laptop from a simple installation to luks+lvm, just by following the guide. You can actually read TFM because it's already there. It's also kinda funny how many google searches that relate with configuration issues on linux link back to the arch wiki. Definitely documentation is one of the stronger parts of arch.
- doktrin 12y ago
  This deserves to be a visible comment. The arch documentation is pretty phenomenal, and may be some of the best distro-specific documentation I've ever come across. That said, I've just moved back to mint after about a year with arch. At the end of the day, arch required a little too much of my time and attention. Still a great distro, though.
  - Arguggi 12y ago
    Shameless plug: I've been trying a list with every issue I encounter while using arch [0], as of today I've had ~10 issues in ~170 days. Each issue has taken me ~5 minutes to solve. [0] https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/list.html https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/list.html
- hobarrera 12y ago
  Indeed, the great upside about following the wiki for installation, is that you actually learn how all the pieces fit together - and can actually fix things yourself later on (or diverge slightly from the instructions if you want something different).
digi_owl 12y ago
Would not Linux From Scratch get even closer to "do it yourself"? http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
- lake99 12y ago
  Yes, but at the end of it all, you have a fully supported distro with Arch. And by "supported", I mean that there are regular updates for your packages, very good instructions to learn stuff, an excellent support forum, etc.
- spystath 12y ago
  LFS is probably as close to DIY as possible, however it still requires you to compile everything. I suppose Arch is DIY while still providing binary packages (faster installation) and a more or less standard linux installation while still allowing you to customise it to you heart's content. Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured (see custom init, custom udev etc). This is not bad, but different. I am not a Gentoo user so please correct me if my assumptions are wrong. All these 3 options, however, encourage the user to familiarise themselves with the system internals, which is a good option if one wants to dwelve a bit deeper into linux. Arch is probably the most accessible of the lot.
  - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    > Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured (see custom init, custom udev etc). Gentoo offers even more freedom of customization than Arch. Choose your init system, your udev variant, your main Python version, set around 100 build time options for ffmpeg and so on. LFS is great for learning and looking under the hood, but for a system that you actually use daily, Gentoo has no rival.
    - Nullabillity 12y ago
      If customization is a goal I'd look into Nix(OS) as well. Source distro with binary caches for the default build options. Oh, and your setup becomes trivial to reproduce (just copy the config files). Oh, and you can easily revert your machine to a previously known working state if you screw something up.
the1 12y ago
Wait until you set up printer, scanner, samba, virtual box, graphics card.
TuxLyn 12y ago
I've blogged about Arch Linux back in 2014. If anyone interested; http://www.distrogeeks.com/arch-linux-2014-install/ http://www.distrogeeks.com/arch-linux-2014-install/
- Arguggi 12y ago
  TFA and your blog post both mention SLiM as a login manager, according to the Arch wiki[0]: "The SliM project has been abandoned (the project homepage is down, leaving a github mirror), and is not fully compatible to systemd, including logind sessions. Consider using a different Display manager or Xinitrc." Lightdm [1] seems to be a better alternative. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightDM https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightDM
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Slim still works if you don't go the systemd route though. Guix use it for instance.
  - adwf 12y ago
    Slim is still working for me on systemd here. Didn't even know it was abandoned... I guess I'll give LightDM a look, just in case. Thanks for the heads up!
  - TuxLyn 12y ago
    Yes officially it is, but notice the date the post was made. It was before the SLiM abandoned :-) I use my self and would recommend LightDM instead of SLiM now. But thank you for pointing this out. I'll post new arch install article one of this days ^_^ I would also like to say that I've been using Arch Linux since 2011 and it works for my development needs. I'm using it with 3-monitors on two separate "GeForce GT 610" video cards. I've tried many other distros including Ubuntu and Fedora both GNOME/KDE. I prefer Arch + XFCE + LightDM my self :-)
1234567890123 12y ago
Why not Gentoo, which provides source packages. Compile it yourself!
- yiyus 12y ago
  Why not getting the source in paper? Type it yourself!
- rakoo 12y ago
  Archlinux also provides source packages, in the form of ABS (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System) for "official" packages and AUR (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository) for "unofficial" packages (in the "not officially supported" meaning).
danielstocks 12y ago
For those of you interested in running ArchLinux on Macbook hardware; I find this guide/overview pretty comprehensive: https://gist.github.com/terlar/6143325 https://gist.github.com/terlar/6143325
ekimekim 12y ago
Only tangentially related, but I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions. What is the point of separating / from /home? I know the /boot thing is due to max size stuff on certain modes of boot, but shouldn't be required for UEFI? And I really don't understand why you'd want to run swap. On a modern machine with huge amounts of RAM, if a process is using enough RAM that you need to start swapping it to disk, I'd rather just invoke the OOM killer and kill the badly behaved process, instead of slowing my system to a crawl while it tries to access memory at disk speeds.
- spaar 12y ago
  I'd say the advantage of seperating / and /home is that it makes a re-install more painless. You can keep your personal data and config without copying it to another drive and just reformat / alone. And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning the article has.
  - FreeFull 12y ago
    I have managed to switch from a different distro to Arch without losing my /home by deleting everything other than /home. I imagine it would be tougher if the distro I switched to wasn't Arch.
    - thrownaway122 12y ago
      Some time ago I messed around and somehow managed to break my Ubuntu system so that it wouldn't boot. Instead of bothering to work out how to fix it I just re-installed (with a different version number) and kept my old /home partition. It all worked out of the box.
      - FreeFull 12y ago
        Yeah, what I meant was that I had my /home on / rather than on a separate partition, and managed to install a completely different linux distro anyway without losing it.
tomswartz07 12y ago
For myself, I appreciate the fact that almost all of the Arch packages are 'un-fooled-around-with'. Very often, I've run into issues with Ubuntu packages solely because they have their own strange versioning, and roll certain patches into weird versions. I think it boils down to the management philosophy: Ubuntu tries to make it 'as easy as possible', whereas Arch says, 'if you have a bug or problem, take it up with that program's developer'.
- lloeki 12y ago
  > Ubuntu tries to make it 'as easy as possible', whereas Arch says, 'if you have a bug or problem, take it up with that program's developer'. Arch says 'as vanilla as possible'.
collyw 12y ago
I will recommend Manjaro for anyone that wants arch without the install hassles. https://manjaro.github.io/ https://manjaro.github.io/
- hntuesday 12y ago
  I went with Antergos (http://antergos.com/ http://antergos.com/) and I love it. The install is hassle free also. It's fairly light, looks good, and gives you plenty of DE options without getting bloated.
- ryenus 12y ago
  Thanks for sharing this! An installer for Arch Linux is something I've been wondering for quite a while and didn't know it already exists :-)
  - collyw 12y ago
    If I had the time, I would like to try a real install, as I am sure I would learn a fair bit, but sadly I don't (or I have higher priorities).
- bcook 12y ago
  I REALLY wanted to like Manjaro, but it was too buggy. When it was running, it was a smoother, more functional GUI than my barebones Openbox window-manager, which was great. But... During the past 5+ years, I rarely ever had a problem with Arch Linux that is not 100% my fault. Manjaro... it had some problem every few days; updates DB would become corrupt, random freezes, login GUI would stop functioning... I suppose my main complaint was that Manjaro could be great it it simply eased the installation and setup of Arch Linux. I do not understand why they use a completely separate repository. Hopefully they continue to improve!
  - collyw 12y ago
    I have Ubuntu on one machine, Mint on my work desktop and Manjaro on another. Manjaro is by far the most stable and problem free. It required a bit of tweaking to set up, and there have been a couple of times when I needed to run a command to reset the package manager to a usable state though. (To be fair I push the Mint box hardest in terms of installing stuff and tweaking things. Its only been good since I went to XFCE as Cinnamon tended to hog the CPU randomly).
zx2c4 12y ago
Gentoo is a much more rewarding and educational experience: https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/ https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/ https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page
- richmt 12y ago
  I've been using arch for quite a while, and I was wondering if you could explain why gentoo would be more rewarding for someone like me.
  - charliefg 12y ago
    Tick 3 for Gentoo: [] Do you enjoy building everything to the minutest specification, regardless of bins being available? [] Do you like the idea of building/rebuilding the entire system into your hardware instead of performing a quick fresh installation? [] Let's say you've been lazy with updates -- would you mind emerge ragging the CPU for 15+ hours? (Disclosure: I love Arch but (believe it or not) I've been die-hard Gentoo for a couple of years, even got two versions of the same T-Shirt -- which I feel is appropriate)
    - adwf 12y ago
      It was no.3 that eventually killed Gentoo for me. Took a three week holiday and it must've been a busy release period or something, because when I came back I had an unholy hell of packages needing updating. The worst part was there were multiple dependencies that just wouldn't compile. I fixed the first couple, but when you have a 3hr+ OpenOffice compile fail on you inexplicably... I just want my computer to work without worrying about all that! It used to be that people would say "Then why are you using Linux? go back to Win/Mac", but nowadays a perfectly stable, maintainable and fast Linux is easily achievable. I think this is the major reason behind Gentoo's declining popularity recently. Having said that, I learnt a huge amount about Linux just by unbreaking all the bizarre things that risky Gentoo emerges did to my system :) Ultimately, it all comes down to how I'd rather spend my time. Hours and hours every month running a big emerge on Gentoo, or a few seconds in pacman on Arch? I have work to do on my computer and eventually the process of just running the Gentoo updates was occupying too much time that I could be spending on actual work.
nextos 12y ago
I really like Arch, because contrary to the popular belief it is the most hassle-free distro I've encountered. As vanilla and up-to-date as possible, but with the right amount of automation (binary pkgs and great simple utilities) baked in. That said, some distros like nix and guix are addressing a much needed problem now---how to be able to get reproducible builds. Sadly, they haven't learnt many lessons Arch taught us. Last time I tried nix, installing mutt eventually pulled in python as a dependency!
- coldpie 12y ago
  > I really like Arch, because contrary to the popular belief it is the most hassle free distro I've encountered. I completely agree. I tried switching to Linux a few times in high school (early-mid '00s), and always had false starts with Fedora or Ubuntu. Usually the package manager would break and everything would fall to pieces. I ended up installing Arch as a Subversion server for some personal projects, and that's what finally made it click. I use Arch exclusively at work and at home. I do Linux development, which means I have to test out our product on other distros, usually Ubuntu. Eight-plus years later, and Ubuntu's package manager still falls over nine times out of ten. Fedora falls over. Mint falls over. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Arch Just Works. It's dead simple, requires very little maintenance, and when something does go wrong (maybe once a year), it's easy to fix or roll back. Arch is just files on a hard drive, not some nebulous set of five different package sources and databases and "releases" and blech.
  - pimeys 12y ago
    I've been using Arch on my workstation and on my laptop for several years already. I can sign all the points you gave in here and I really appreciate how easy it is to setup and use the distribution. Although many years ago I had problems when updating, in the recent years everything just works and I don't need to worry about upgrading the whole distro every 6 months.
    - dougmany 12y ago
      That is good to hear. I used Arch and loved it until that upgrade thing you mentioned a few years ago. It basically made a machine I had unusable so I stopped using Arch altogether. Maybe it is time to go back.
mmarx 12y ago
Interestingly, this is about as much “do it yourself” as installing debian via debootstrap instead of the installer.
hydera5 12y ago
I almost did this but ended up installing Gentoo! I've loved it, its a great way to learn your way around Linux and learn new skills!
hydera5 12y ago
I almost did this but ended up installing Gentoo! I've loved it, its a great way to learn your way around Linux and learn new skills!
olalonde 12y ago
> The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it! -Linus Torvalds Surprisingly, Linus is actually quite critical of the more technical Linux distributions. Here's another quote from him: > And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I'm a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don't want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be "overly technical" - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc. > Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I've never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu. https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/linus-torvalds,-geek-of-the-week/ https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/linus-t... Not that I think it takes anything away from Arch, but I thought it was an interesting piece of trivia.
- nextos 12y ago
  I don't think Linus opinion is necessarily against Arch. I am using Arch precisely because I don't want to fight my OS! I also found Gentoo, let alone Linux from Scratch, very complicated and time consuming. The nice thing about Arch is that it hits the sweet spot between simplicity, technicality and easiness. In my opinion having vanilla binary up-to-date packages is the way to go.
  - laumars 12y ago
    I completely agree. Arch is one of the more "technical" distributions to get to a desktop. Particularly when compared with Ubuntu and such like. But once the desktop is running, Arch is one of the easiest distros to maintain. For example: 1) despite the many criticisms levelled at a rolling release model, I've found it to be more reliable and generally less painful than upgrading between Debian / Ubuntu (for example) releases. 2) pacman is, in my personal opinion, a nicer command line tool than apt-get / apt-cache / aptitude / etc. I do quite like some of the RPM-based tools though (yum, zypper, etc). 3) Adding 3rd party repos in Arch is probably on a par with PPAs, however yaourt (AUR) almost makes it completely unnecessary to ever look for another 3rd party repo again. That's not to say everything is perfect though: Occasionally updates need to be applied manually; being bleeding edge can be a double edged sword sometimes; and I really did prefer the old BSD-inspired rc.conf over the new system of various files scattered around /etc and the much debated systemd. But each to their own on that one.
crypt1d 12y ago
Surprised to see a tutorial on Arch linux on front page. As a sys admin, I appreciate the effort to tune everything to your needs, and Arch has its place there for sure. As a user, I just want things to work. So I usually stay away from tweak-everything-you-can distros. So now on one hand you have the distros that do pretty much everything for you (ubuntu style), and on the other you have to do the tweaking for yourself(arch, gentoo, slackware, etc). I, for one, would prefer some middle ground - eg, a system being able to predict the most optimal setup for my box, but also allow me to tweak it should I prefer something different. RHEL/CentOS seems to be slowly getting this, and I enjoy its tools quite a lot (tuned daemon for kernel params optimization, kickstart for package customizations, etc.)
- bstamour 12y ago
  What you described is basically slackware. If you install the whole image (roughly 6 gb) you get a working desktop machine that's easy to keep up to date (just run slackpkg update once in a while). Yet when it comes to tweaking, it's easy, because everything is a shell script or text file, no binary blobs of weird file formats. It actually reminds me a lot of FreeBSD.
  - crypt1d 12y ago
    Idk, 6gb seems excessive. I'd prefer a small footprint system (eg, my centos VM images take 1GB after installation), and to do the tweaking during installation.
    - bstamour 12y ago
      I thought so too, but then I reminded myself that my laptop has a 256 gb solid state drive. 6 gb for a fully loaded system is pretty small in comparison.
- SSLy 12y ago
  I use arch for few years already and I've found out that actually one does not need to make any tweaks - in 99% of cases, just install the package you want and it just works. The only thing I've replaced is font rendering pipeline -- I use the outstandingly beautiful bohoomil's repository[0]. And that's it, everything else is right there. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality#Custom_repository https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality#Custom_repos...
damcedami 12y ago
Most interesting thing I want to see was bash script (or other way) to automate install and configure the post-installed system, like this gist https://gist.github.com/julionc/4162347 https://gist.github.com/julionc/4162347
- SSLy 12y ago
  https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui Though, I can't vouch for quality of this, I don't use it
  - clearing 12y ago
    I used aui for my recent arch install, and it's helpful for things you might forget (like installing wpa_supplicant, wouldn't have bought an ethernet cable for my very first install...). I'd recommend figuring out the steps in the FIFO section yourself, as it is largely dependent on how you partition your system, and one would benefit from learning about things like mkinitcpio.
mhax 12y ago
Arch is awesome and I've used it at home and work for years, but the rolling release cycle means that you must keep on top of upgrades. I was once a little too slack (no pun intended) and had several hundred packages that needed upgrading and there was simply no easy way of making it work. It was around the time of the systemd introduction, so that may have been a significant complicating factor.
- vitoreiji 12y ago
  Yes, the systemd introduction was a special time in Arch land. A lot of systems got broken in those days. The only comparable time I can recall right now is when they dropped GRUB Legacy. People who upgraded carelessly were unable to boot. These are the two single big events in 8 years or so I've been using Arch.
  - jvreeland 12y ago
    The filesystem package changes have caused no end of issues to people who did't read the news and just Syu'd :)
    - mitosis 12y ago
      Exactly. You're not supposed to pacman -Syu without looking. Part of your duty when you choose to install Arch is to take a few minutes every week to keep on top of what's new. Call it basic hygiene.
      - deelowe 12y ago
        Yet none of the setup guides really stress this and there's no preferred method to keep up to date on things. Arch really needs a better system for making it obvious when nontrivial updates are about to happen. Note, I use pacmatic, which pulls the news feeds, but it took me getting bitten a few times before I learned to do this.
    - amyjess 12y ago
      I really wish Arch had something similar to Gentoo's "eselect news" system that actually displays these notices alongside system updates and lets you query news articles from your terminal.
kitd 12y ago
First Installing Arch Linux is pretty difficult task when you atempt to do it for your first time if you are not familiar with command line and basics of linux. But I would suggest you to install Arch Linux as you will gain a very good insight on how linux works. then If you got no idea what dd is, arch ain't for you friend! ... do not follow
- ddoolin 12y ago
  Came here to post the same thing. Very strange 180 there. I had no idea what dd was when I first got into Arch, but if I had let that deter me, I never would have gotten past the first step. I also don't think understanding dd is very critical to being able to use Arch as a whole.
  - wyclif 12y ago
    I agree—the problem is that it does not logically follow and is contradictory, but he is right that knowledge of the CLI makes things a lot easier. However, I'm with you in that I don't think there should be any pressure not to try it anyway. I have a custom-built desktop machine that I can install anything I want on, so if something breaks or falls over, I can simply reinstall another OS (while getting real work done on my laptop).
- DanBC 12y ago
  Using four spaces to quote text breaks your post for people reading on mobile.
  - kitd 12y ago
    Thanks
- stephenboyd 12y ago
  That was my reaction, too. Out of curiosity, I searched the beginner's installation guide (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide) for dd, and there's no mention of it. The man page for dd was more informative. It's a standard convert and copy tool that I've never used despite pretty much living in a terminal for the past two years. I still think arch might be for me.
notfoss 12y ago
Please add 2014 to the submission title. Also, Since Arch is a rolling release distro, it is encouraged to always refer to the latest documentation over at the Arch Wiki.
levifig 12y ago
So glad to see this on the front-page of HN! Arch is a great distro but, like Linux in general, is struggling for support and promotion. Now, I'm no believer in "Linux on the Desktop" any time soon (will it finally be 2015? :P), but I'm a firm believer in Linux as a multi-purpose tool that any hacker worth his/her salt should not only have in their toolbox, but also be proficient on. And not just for server usage, which is a bit more common, but on the desktop. I learned a LOT about computers from running distros like Gentoo and Arch, where you have to make decisions and learn the process and components that make things tick. I highly recommend Arch. It's a super flexible and clean distro, that requires a bit more upfront investment to get installed, but I find it easier to maintain, with the biggest and friendliest support community, and very customizable.
Thriptic 12y ago
Is arch relatively approachable for a linux noob who has logged a bit of time on Redhat and Ubuntu?
- rhinoceraptor 12y ago
  You should be able to get a Gnome/KDE installation running in a VM without a lot of trouble. If you're going to try it on hardware, Intel graphics and networking will probably work best. Also, the arch wiki is a great resource, in general: https://wiki.archlinux.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/
- rakoo 12y ago
  I'd advise against it. There's no point in trying arch just for the sake of it. My advice, based on my own experience: - keep using the distribution you know - dig inside its components to understand what they do - once you understand what they do, try using an alternative... - ... until you ultimately realize you don't need it that much, or just want to see what it's like without this component, remove it - once you get deep down in the customization of your distro you start to realize that the top-down approach is interesting but there'll always be something you didn't know. At that point, it makes sense to try the bottom-up approach: start from nothing, and install the components one by one. The point is that since you've already dug inside your previous distro you know what those components are, whether they are needed or not, and what the alternatives are. You won't spend time understanding these and spend more time on the actual building of a distro. This is where Arch comes in.
zer0rest 12y ago
Been using Arch as my main operating system for a while now, I love it, but I'm eager to try CRUX, just need another pc.

145 points by dolftax 12y ago

I trust Arch far more than other distros, but I can't really use it in a production environment. Unless you take the care to automate the upgrades every 1-3 months, your machine will quickly require a handful of hacks to fix. As a gentoo lover, this isn't very difficult, but when you have, say, a customized digital audio workstation for a client, that needs to "just work" during upgrades (which, debian/KXStudio handles admirably), yaourt -Syu is like rolling the dice whether or not things will continue to build. AUR aside (even though, as an expert, it's a fantastic resource), the repositories need keys trusted before they can be used, but nowhere in the documentation is this mentioned. When browsing the forums, you are often encouraged to not use keys, and just do everything unsecured. I no longer trust Debian or Canonical, so I'm trying to migrate to a distribution not registered in (or under the control of) a Nation State involved in Five Eyes agreements, which is pretty much limiting me to Manjaro, Arch and Gentoo.

ephexeve 12y ago

It's a nice article, though for me, the Arch wiki is clear enough.

burntsushi 12y ago

There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial, but the canonical install instructions for Arch are instructive and detailed: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide Also, if you want to use Arch in a dependable way, subscribing to arch-announce is important[1]. It's a low traffic mailing list that notifies you of any manual steps you may need to take during a package upgrade. (I've been using Arch for years, both at home and at work. I love it.) [1] - https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-announce https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/arch-announce

HDevo 12y ago
Just wanted to add that if you're not into mailing lists, the official Arch Linux News[1] page seems to be the same thing as arch-announce. It also has an Atom/RSS feed[2]. [1] https://www.archlinux.org/news/ https://www.archlinux.org/news/ [2] https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/ https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/
- chx 12y ago
  Also https://twitter.com/archlinux https://twitter.com/archlinux . And yes, Arch rocks.
joncameron 12y ago
>There's value in a shorter more targeted tutorial That's often true, but I was disappointed that this was little more than a rephrased version of what's on the Arch Wiki. I love the Arch documentation on the Wiki. It's perfect for me– laid out well, easy to follow, arranged in a logical wiki order, and stuffed with insanely useful tips. The pages on stuff like tmux are fantastic.
- spystath 12y ago
  Most of the time the information is already in the wiki. And it's nice how the installation guide covers every corner case. I smoothly migrated my laptop from a simple installation to luks+lvm, just by following the guide. You can actually read TFM because it's already there. It's also kinda funny how many google searches that relate with configuration issues on linux link back to the arch wiki. Definitely documentation is one of the stronger parts of arch.
doktrin 12y ago
This deserves to be a visible comment. The arch documentation is pretty phenomenal, and may be some of the best distro-specific documentation I've ever come across. That said, I've just moved back to mint after about a year with arch. At the end of the day, arch required a little too much of my time and attention. Still a great distro, though.
- Arguggi 12y ago
  Shameless plug: I've been trying a list with every issue I encounter while using arch [0], as of today I've had ~10 issues in ~170 days. Each issue has taken me ~5 minutes to solve. [0] https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/list.html https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/list.html
hobarrera 12y ago
Indeed, the great upside about following the wiki for installation, is that you actually learn how all the pieces fit together - and can actually fix things yourself later on (or diverge slightly from the instructions if you want something different).

digi_owl 12y ago

Would not Linux From Scratch get even closer to "do it yourself"? http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

lake99 12y ago
Yes, but at the end of it all, you have a fully supported distro with Arch. And by "supported", I mean that there are regular updates for your packages, very good instructions to learn stuff, an excellent support forum, etc.
spystath 12y ago
LFS is probably as close to DIY as possible, however it still requires you to compile everything. I suppose Arch is DIY while still providing binary packages (faster installation) and a more or less standard linux installation while still allowing you to customise it to you heart's content. Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured (see custom init, custom udev etc). This is not bad, but different. I am not a Gentoo user so please correct me if my assumptions are wrong. All these 3 options, however, encourage the user to familiarise themselves with the system internals, which is a good option if one wants to dwelve a bit deeper into linux. Arch is probably the most accessible of the lot.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  > Gentoo is probably in-between these two, although I believe Gentoo is a more opinionated distribution than Arch regarding how the system is structured (see custom init, custom udev etc). Gentoo offers even more freedom of customization than Arch. Choose your init system, your udev variant, your main Python version, set around 100 build time options for ffmpeg and so on. LFS is great for learning and looking under the hood, but for a system that you actually use daily, Gentoo has no rival.
  - Nullabillity 12y ago
    If customization is a goal I'd look into Nix(OS) as well. Source distro with binary caches for the default build options. Oh, and your setup becomes trivial to reproduce (just copy the config files). Oh, and you can easily revert your machine to a previously known working state if you screw something up.

the1 12y ago

Wait until you set up printer, scanner, samba, virtual box, graphics card.

TuxLyn 12y ago

I've blogged about Arch Linux back in 2014. If anyone interested; http://www.distrogeeks.com/arch-linux-2014-install/ http://www.distrogeeks.com/arch-linux-2014-install/

Arguggi 12y ago
TFA and your blog post both mention SLiM as a login manager, according to the Arch wiki[0]: "The SliM project has been abandoned (the project homepage is down, leaving a github mirror), and is not fully compatible to systemd, including logind sessions. Consider using a different Display manager or Xinitrc." Lightdm [1] seems to be a better alternative. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightDM https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightDM
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Slim still works if you don't go the systemd route though. Guix use it for instance.
- adwf 12y ago
  Slim is still working for me on systemd here. Didn't even know it was abandoned... I guess I'll give LightDM a look, just in case. Thanks for the heads up!
- TuxLyn 12y ago
  Yes officially it is, but notice the date the post was made. It was before the SLiM abandoned :-) I use my self and would recommend LightDM instead of SLiM now. But thank you for pointing this out. I'll post new arch install article one of this days ^_^ I would also like to say that I've been using Arch Linux since 2011 and it works for my development needs. I'm using it with 3-monitors on two separate "GeForce GT 610" video cards. I've tried many other distros including Ubuntu and Fedora both GNOME/KDE. I prefer Arch + XFCE + LightDM my self :-)

1234567890123 12y ago

Why not Gentoo, which provides source packages. Compile it yourself!

yiyus 12y ago
Why not getting the source in paper? Type it yourself!
rakoo 12y ago
Archlinux also provides source packages, in the form of ABS (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System) for "official" packages and AUR (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository) for "unofficial" packages (in the "not officially supported" meaning).

danielstocks 12y ago

For those of you interested in running ArchLinux on Macbook hardware; I find this guide/overview pretty comprehensive: https://gist.github.com/terlar/6143325 https://gist.github.com/terlar/6143325

ekimekim 12y ago

Only tangentially related, but I find it weird that guides like this still suggest seperate root, home, boot and swap partitions. What is the point of separating / from /home? I know the /boot thing is due to max size stuff on certain modes of boot, but shouldn't be required for UEFI? And I really don't understand why you'd want to run swap. On a modern machine with huge amounts of RAM, if a process is using enough RAM that you need to start swapping it to disk, I'd rather just invoke the OOM killer and kill the badly behaved process, instead of slowing my system to a crawl while it tries to access memory at disk speeds.

spaar 12y ago
I'd say the advantage of seperating / and /home is that it makes a re-install more painless. You can keep your personal data and config without copying it to another drive and just reformat / alone. And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning the article has.
- FreeFull 12y ago
  I have managed to switch from a different distro to Arch without losing my /home by deleting everything other than /home. I imagine it would be tougher if the distro I switched to wasn't Arch.
  - thrownaway122 12y ago
    Some time ago I messed around and somehow managed to break my Ubuntu system so that it wouldn't boot. Instead of bothering to work out how to fix it I just re-installed (with a different version number) and kept my old /home partition. It all worked out of the box.
    - FreeFull 12y ago
      Yeah, what I meant was that I had my /home on / rather than on a separate partition, and managed to install a completely different linux distro anyway without losing it.

tomswartz07 12y ago

For myself, I appreciate the fact that almost all of the Arch packages are 'un-fooled-around-with'. Very often, I've run into issues with Ubuntu packages solely because they have their own strange versioning, and roll certain patches into weird versions. I think it boils down to the management philosophy: Ubuntu tries to make it 'as easy as possible', whereas Arch says, 'if you have a bug or problem, take it up with that program's developer'.

lloeki 12y ago
> Ubuntu tries to make it 'as easy as possible', whereas Arch says, 'if you have a bug or problem, take it up with that program's developer'. Arch says 'as vanilla as possible'.

collyw 12y ago

I will recommend Manjaro for anyone that wants arch without the install hassles. https://manjaro.github.io/ https://manjaro.github.io/

hntuesday 12y ago
I went with Antergos (http://antergos.com/ http://antergos.com/) and I love it. The install is hassle free also. It's fairly light, looks good, and gives you plenty of DE options without getting bloated.
ryenus 12y ago
Thanks for sharing this! An installer for Arch Linux is something I've been wondering for quite a while and didn't know it already exists :-)
- collyw 12y ago
  If I had the time, I would like to try a real install, as I am sure I would learn a fair bit, but sadly I don't (or I have higher priorities).
bcook 12y ago
I REALLY wanted to like Manjaro, but it was too buggy. When it was running, it was a smoother, more functional GUI than my barebones Openbox window-manager, which was great. But... During the past 5+ years, I rarely ever had a problem with Arch Linux that is not 100% my fault. Manjaro... it had some problem every few days; updates DB would become corrupt, random freezes, login GUI would stop functioning... I suppose my main complaint was that Manjaro could be great it it simply eased the installation and setup of Arch Linux. I do not understand why they use a completely separate repository. Hopefully they continue to improve!
- collyw 12y ago
  I have Ubuntu on one machine, Mint on my work desktop and Manjaro on another. Manjaro is by far the most stable and problem free. It required a bit of tweaking to set up, and there have been a couple of times when I needed to run a command to reset the package manager to a usable state though. (To be fair I push the Mint box hardest in terms of installing stuff and tweaking things. Its only been good since I went to XFCE as Cinnamon tended to hog the CPU randomly).

zx2c4 12y ago

Gentoo is a much more rewarding and educational experience: https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/ https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/ https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page

richmt 12y ago
I've been using arch for quite a while, and I was wondering if you could explain why gentoo would be more rewarding for someone like me.
- charliefg 12y ago
  Tick 3 for Gentoo: [] Do you enjoy building everything to the minutest specification, regardless of bins being available? [] Do you like the idea of building/rebuilding the entire system into your hardware instead of performing a quick fresh installation? [] Let's say you've been lazy with updates -- would you mind emerge ragging the CPU for 15+ hours? (Disclosure: I love Arch but (believe it or not) I've been die-hard Gentoo for a couple of years, even got two versions of the same T-Shirt -- which I feel is appropriate)
  - adwf 12y ago
    It was no.3 that eventually killed Gentoo for me. Took a three week holiday and it must've been a busy release period or something, because when I came back I had an unholy hell of packages needing updating. The worst part was there were multiple dependencies that just wouldn't compile. I fixed the first couple, but when you have a 3hr+ OpenOffice compile fail on you inexplicably... I just want my computer to work without worrying about all that! It used to be that people would say "Then why are you using Linux? go back to Win/Mac", but nowadays a perfectly stable, maintainable and fast Linux is easily achievable. I think this is the major reason behind Gentoo's declining popularity recently. Having said that, I learnt a huge amount about Linux just by unbreaking all the bizarre things that risky Gentoo emerges did to my system :) Ultimately, it all comes down to how I'd rather spend my time. Hours and hours every month running a big emerge on Gentoo, or a few seconds in pacman on Arch? I have work to do on my computer and eventually the process of just running the Gentoo updates was occupying too much time that I could be spending on actual work.

nextos 12y ago

I really like Arch, because contrary to the popular belief it is the most hassle-free distro I've encountered. As vanilla and up-to-date as possible, but with the right amount of automation (binary pkgs and great simple utilities) baked in. That said, some distros like nix and guix are addressing a much needed problem now---how to be able to get reproducible builds. Sadly, they haven't learnt many lessons Arch taught us. Last time I tried nix, installing mutt eventually pulled in python as a dependency!

coldpie 12y ago
> I really like Arch, because contrary to the popular belief it is the most hassle free distro I've encountered. I completely agree. I tried switching to Linux a few times in high school (early-mid '00s), and always had false starts with Fedora or Ubuntu. Usually the package manager would break and everything would fall to pieces. I ended up installing Arch as a Subversion server for some personal projects, and that's what finally made it click. I use Arch exclusively at work and at home. I do Linux development, which means I have to test out our product on other distros, usually Ubuntu. Eight-plus years later, and Ubuntu's package manager still falls over nine times out of ten. Fedora falls over. Mint falls over. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Arch Just Works. It's dead simple, requires very little maintenance, and when something does go wrong (maybe once a year), it's easy to fix or roll back. Arch is just files on a hard drive, not some nebulous set of five different package sources and databases and "releases" and blech.
- pimeys 12y ago
  I've been using Arch on my workstation and on my laptop for several years already. I can sign all the points you gave in here and I really appreciate how easy it is to setup and use the distribution. Although many years ago I had problems when updating, in the recent years everything just works and I don't need to worry about upgrading the whole distro every 6 months.
  - dougmany 12y ago
    That is good to hear. I used Arch and loved it until that upgrade thing you mentioned a few years ago. It basically made a machine I had unusable so I stopped using Arch altogether. Maybe it is time to go back.

mmarx 12y ago

Interestingly, this is about as much “do it yourself” as installing debian via debootstrap instead of the installer.

hydera5 12y ago

I almost did this but ended up installing Gentoo! I've loved it, its a great way to learn your way around Linux and learn new skills!

hydera5 12y ago

I almost did this but ended up installing Gentoo! I've loved it, its a great way to learn your way around Linux and learn new skills!

olalonde 12y ago

> The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it! -Linus Torvalds Surprisingly, Linus is actually quite critical of the more technical Linux distributions. Here's another quote from him: > And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I'm a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don't want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be "overly technical" - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc. > Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I've never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu. https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/linus-torvalds,-geek-of-the-week/ https://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/linus-t... Not that I think it takes anything away from Arch, but I thought it was an interesting piece of trivia.

nextos 12y ago
I don't think Linus opinion is necessarily against Arch. I am using Arch precisely because I don't want to fight my OS! I also found Gentoo, let alone Linux from Scratch, very complicated and time consuming. The nice thing about Arch is that it hits the sweet spot between simplicity, technicality and easiness. In my opinion having vanilla binary up-to-date packages is the way to go.
- laumars 12y ago
  I completely agree. Arch is one of the more "technical" distributions to get to a desktop. Particularly when compared with Ubuntu and such like. But once the desktop is running, Arch is one of the easiest distros to maintain. For example: 1) despite the many criticisms levelled at a rolling release model, I've found it to be more reliable and generally less painful than upgrading between Debian / Ubuntu (for example) releases. 2) pacman is, in my personal opinion, a nicer command line tool than apt-get / apt-cache / aptitude / etc. I do quite like some of the RPM-based tools though (yum, zypper, etc). 3) Adding 3rd party repos in Arch is probably on a par with PPAs, however yaourt (AUR) almost makes it completely unnecessary to ever look for another 3rd party repo again. That's not to say everything is perfect though: Occasionally updates need to be applied manually; being bleeding edge can be a double edged sword sometimes; and I really did prefer the old BSD-inspired rc.conf over the new system of various files scattered around /etc and the much debated systemd. But each to their own on that one.

crypt1d 12y ago

Surprised to see a tutorial on Arch linux on front page. As a sys admin, I appreciate the effort to tune everything to your needs, and Arch has its place there for sure. As a user, I just want things to work. So I usually stay away from tweak-everything-you-can distros. So now on one hand you have the distros that do pretty much everything for you (ubuntu style), and on the other you have to do the tweaking for yourself(arch, gentoo, slackware, etc). I, for one, would prefer some middle ground - eg, a system being able to predict the most optimal setup for my box, but also allow me to tweak it should I prefer something different. RHEL/CentOS seems to be slowly getting this, and I enjoy its tools quite a lot (tuned daemon for kernel params optimization, kickstart for package customizations, etc.)

bstamour 12y ago
What you described is basically slackware. If you install the whole image (roughly 6 gb) you get a working desktop machine that's easy to keep up to date (just run slackpkg update once in a while). Yet when it comes to tweaking, it's easy, because everything is a shell script or text file, no binary blobs of weird file formats. It actually reminds me a lot of FreeBSD.
- crypt1d 12y ago
  Idk, 6gb seems excessive. I'd prefer a small footprint system (eg, my centos VM images take 1GB after installation), and to do the tweaking during installation.
  - bstamour 12y ago
    I thought so too, but then I reminded myself that my laptop has a 256 gb solid state drive. 6 gb for a fully loaded system is pretty small in comparison.
SSLy 12y ago
I use arch for few years already and I've found out that actually one does not need to make any tweaks - in 99% of cases, just install the package you want and it just works. The only thing I've replaced is font rendering pipeline -- I use the outstandingly beautiful bohoomil's repository[0]. And that's it, everything else is right there. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality#Custom_repository https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality#Custom_repos...

damcedami 12y ago

Most interesting thing I want to see was bash script (or other way) to automate install and configure the post-installed system, like this gist https://gist.github.com/julionc/4162347 https://gist.github.com/julionc/4162347

SSLy 12y ago
https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui Though, I can't vouch for quality of this, I don't use it
- clearing 12y ago
  I used aui for my recent arch install, and it's helpful for things you might forget (like installing wpa_supplicant, wouldn't have bought an ethernet cable for my very first install...). I'd recommend figuring out the steps in the FIFO section yourself, as it is largely dependent on how you partition your system, and one would benefit from learning about things like mkinitcpio.

mhax 12y ago

Arch is awesome and I've used it at home and work for years, but the rolling release cycle means that you must keep on top of upgrades. I was once a little too slack (no pun intended) and had several hundred packages that needed upgrading and there was simply no easy way of making it work. It was around the time of the systemd introduction, so that may have been a significant complicating factor.

vitoreiji 12y ago
Yes, the systemd introduction was a special time in Arch land. A lot of systems got broken in those days. The only comparable time I can recall right now is when they dropped GRUB Legacy. People who upgraded carelessly were unable to boot. These are the two single big events in 8 years or so I've been using Arch.
- jvreeland 12y ago
  The filesystem package changes have caused no end of issues to people who did't read the news and just Syu'd :)
  - mitosis 12y ago
    Exactly. You're not supposed to pacman -Syu without looking. Part of your duty when you choose to install Arch is to take a few minutes every week to keep on top of what's new. Call it basic hygiene.
    - deelowe 12y ago
      Yet none of the setup guides really stress this and there's no preferred method to keep up to date on things. Arch really needs a better system for making it obvious when nontrivial updates are about to happen. Note, I use pacmatic, which pulls the news feeds, but it took me getting bitten a few times before I learned to do this.
  - amyjess 12y ago
    I really wish Arch had something similar to Gentoo's "eselect news" system that actually displays these notices alongside system updates and lets you query news articles from your terminal.

kitd 12y ago

First Installing Arch Linux is pretty difficult task when you atempt to do it for your first time if you are not familiar with command line and basics of linux. But I would suggest you to install Arch Linux as you will gain a very good insight on how linux works. then If you got no idea what dd is, arch ain't for you friend! ... do not follow

ddoolin 12y ago
Came here to post the same thing. Very strange 180 there. I had no idea what dd was when I first got into Arch, but if I had let that deter me, I never would have gotten past the first step. I also don't think understanding dd is very critical to being able to use Arch as a whole.
- wyclif 12y ago
  I agree—the problem is that it does not logically follow and is contradictory, but he is right that knowledge of the CLI makes things a lot easier. However, I'm with you in that I don't think there should be any pressure not to try it anyway. I have a custom-built desktop machine that I can install anything I want on, so if something breaks or falls over, I can simply reinstall another OS (while getting real work done on my laptop).
DanBC 12y ago
Using four spaces to quote text breaks your post for people reading on mobile.
- kitd 12y ago
  Thanks
stephenboyd 12y ago
That was my reaction, too. Out of curiosity, I searched the beginner's installation guide (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide) for dd, and there's no mention of it. The man page for dd was more informative. It's a standard convert and copy tool that I've never used despite pretty much living in a terminal for the past two years. I still think arch might be for me.

notfoss 12y ago

Please add 2014 to the submission title. Also, Since Arch is a rolling release distro, it is encouraged to always refer to the latest documentation over at the Arch Wiki.

levifig 12y ago

So glad to see this on the front-page of HN! Arch is a great distro but, like Linux in general, is struggling for support and promotion. Now, I'm no believer in "Linux on the Desktop" any time soon (will it finally be 2015? :P), but I'm a firm believer in Linux as a multi-purpose tool that any hacker worth his/her salt should not only have in their toolbox, but also be proficient on. And not just for server usage, which is a bit more common, but on the desktop. I learned a LOT about computers from running distros like Gentoo and Arch, where you have to make decisions and learn the process and components that make things tick. I highly recommend Arch. It's a super flexible and clean distro, that requires a bit more upfront investment to get installed, but I find it easier to maintain, with the biggest and friendliest support community, and very customizable.

Thriptic 12y ago

Is arch relatively approachable for a linux noob who has logged a bit of time on Redhat and Ubuntu?

rhinoceraptor 12y ago
You should be able to get a Gnome/KDE installation running in a VM without a lot of trouble. If you're going to try it on hardware, Intel graphics and networking will probably work best. Also, the arch wiki is a great resource, in general: https://wiki.archlinux.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/
rakoo 12y ago
I'd advise against it. There's no point in trying arch just for the sake of it. My advice, based on my own experience: - keep using the distribution you know - dig inside its components to understand what they do - once you understand what they do, try using an alternative... - ... until you ultimately realize you don't need it that much, or just want to see what it's like without this component, remove it - once you get deep down in the customization of your distro you start to realize that the top-down approach is interesting but there'll always be something you didn't know. At that point, it makes sense to try the bottom-up approach: start from nothing, and install the components one by one. The point is that since you've already dug inside your previous distro you know what those components are, whether they are needed or not, and what the alternatives are. You won't spend time understanding these and spend more time on the actual building of a distro. This is where Arch comes in.

zer0rest 12y ago

Been using Arch as my main operating system for a while now, I love it, but I'm eager to try CRUX, just need another pc.