What makes Arch stand out?

cesura · 2010-08-07 05:28:21

cactus wrote:

tacos
poutine

Didn't see that one coming...

Last edited by cesura (2010-08-07 05:28:30)

Acecero · 2010-08-07 23:30:04

itsbrad212 wrote:

cactus wrote:
tacos
poutine
Didn't see that one coming...

I knew that one was coming...

marfig · 2010-08-08 02:24:37

I'll echo more or less what I wrote on some other thread on some other forum around here...

A Linux newb perspective

Teaching
Arch, or similar distros, are the only possible choice. You can say I tried them all. SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, etc... all are nice but all they really do is teach you how to use a GUI. A GUI is a GUI is a GUI. Been doing that since the GEM on the Amstrad PC1512, back in the late 80s, and they hardly changed since then. It takes a monkey to use a GUI. True story.

But these distros are still Linux. What happens is that the real deal is hidden behind a heavily customized system that makes you feel you are learning how engines work by driving cars. It doesn't work that way. You learn how engines work by lifting the hood. At worst, these distros promote laziness and ignorance, at best they are distracting and considerably increase the time needed to properly study how Linux works.

Arch is hard on a beginner like myself. Frustrating sometimes. Scary and confusing. It's perfect!
It forces me to think, to learn and to understand. Every challenge that forces me to spend time searching for a solution and finally implementing it gets imprinted in my mind by sheer force. And will stay there for a long time.

Distros like Ubuntu, SuSE, or Fedora aren't a mistake. They serve the part of the population that doesn't want to get technical. The mistake was telling people these were great tools to learn Linux. They aren't. Neither they are as nearly as motivating as distros the likes of Arch. Their good purpose, and the only thing that should ever have been advertised, is they let everyone use Linux regardless of how technically-oriented they are.

Community
The community is nice, I guess. It's a web community, whatever. I don't personally evaluate a community value by some Niceness Index. What I find is that the Arch community is active and generally to the point. I don't seem to get here 20 answers to a question in which 1 is probably right and the rest is snarky|wrong|offtopic|misunderstanding|ignorant

Then there's the Real community (with the big R). The folks behind Arch, building, testing and coding. Arch is not special in any way. There's devoted people everywhere. Lets do without the rose tinted glasses. What's important is that there seems to be devoted and capable contributors in a good enough abundance to keep Arch rolling and remain a highly respected distro in the general community of linux users. Hopefully I'll gain enough proficiency to soon be part of the gang. For now I'll keep being breastfeed by your work.

Documentation
Bloody great Wiki! 'nough said.

And
I liked the logo.

Last edited by marfig (2010-08-08 02:29:34)

cesura · 2010-08-08 03:29:33

marfig wrote:

And
I liked the logo.

Agreed Take that Larry the Cow...

mDuo13 · 2010-08-09 00:08:21

Yeah, has to be the wiki. While back on Mint, too often I was searching up answers to my questions and adapting them from the Arch or occasionally Gentoo wikis, because Mint's forums and even Ubuntu's wiki are surprisingly lacking by comparison.

I also like the Arch Way. Simpler is better. I like being in total control.

I don't rave about how good Pacman is (it's alright; it bugged me until I discovered about the d option) but it's pretty passable. And I definitely couldn't use Arch x86_64 without the AUR, which would be a pain if yaourt didn't make it so dang easy.

alexandrite · 2010-08-09 12:50:16

Allan wrote:

Yep... that is right people... We really do not care what you think!

It's practically your catch phrase.

whaevr · 2010-08-10 01:26:39

Allan wrote:

Yep... that is right people... We really do not care what you think!

I could see this on a shirt

"ARCH LINUX"
"We really dont care what you think! "

Maybe have a clipart/picture of a taco under the quote too...yes! <3

edit:
Also I love arch because no matter how much I configure my setup DE/WM/whatever Im going to want to remake it completely sooner or later; arch lets me do this easily. Gives me an ironfist control over everything, plus gotta <3 the rolling release. Ubuntu is nice & pretty at first but eventually the little things annoy me, A LOT.

Arch FTW.

Last edited by whaevr (2010-08-10 01:31:02)

marfig · 2010-08-10 01:59:33

whaevr wrote:

Maybe have a clipart/picture of a taco under the quote too...yes! <3

anonymous_user · 2010-08-10 03:33:26

whaevr wrote:

"ARCH LINUX"
"We really dont care what you think!"

That would definitely make a nice t-shirt.

Diablos · 2010-08-11 17:13:08

o/ complete linux newb here. D: but ive been meaning to switch over from windows to linux for a long time now and have been reluctant to do so because of my crack addiction to gaming. seriously need to find a gamers anonymous for therapy. lol. but i just got fed up with fixing window's usual shenanigans on my computer and everyone else's. i was that guy that everyone brought their windows computers to.. to have them fixed. D: which i became very proficient at..... unfortunately.

i tried a majority of the other linux distros: mint, ubu, fedora, etc... minus gentoo (after reading about the skill level necessary for it...i decided i wasnt ready for it.... yet. might try it out in the future)

i definitely like arch the best out of all the distros i tried. and it was also the hardest to learn by far.... FAR... (@ my linux knowledge from scratch) it took me almost 3 days to get it setup. (a majority of that time was spent reading the awesome wiki from top to bottom several times+googling alot of things)

took maybe less than half an hour to install the first time. and then i realized i was an idiot and didnt select some necessary things. reinstalled with problems fixed. the main struggle for me was configuring the networking. was used to be pampered by instant networking....but figuring out how not to be an r-tard and making ethernet work took me like half a day. and then i spent a day and a half getting my wireless card to work. (b43.. ) for some reason i kept think about b52 (the airplane) every time i went to type it in the command line.

actually i learned a ton about linux just installing+configuring arch i didnt get from the other distros so thats a big plus for me. and i am in love with using the command line now... a possibly scandalous relationship with it. lol. i also like the extreme freedom for customization.. possibly the biggest plus about arch.

Labello · 2010-08-11 18:39:22

my mummy makes arch stand out!

cebru · 2010-08-11 18:50:40

marfig wrote:

whaevr wrote:
Maybe have a clipart/picture of a taco under the quote too...yes! <3
http://www.quiettech.org/img/talktothehand.jpg

Haha, that's great!

What makes Arch stand out for me:

cebru · 2010-08-11 18:57:17

marfig wrote:

whaevr wrote:
Maybe have a clipart/picture of a taco under the quote too...yes! <3
http://www.quiettech.org/img/talktothehand.jpg

Haha, that's great!

What makes Arch stand out for me:

- The logo and website looks nice, clean and simple. Made for a great first impression. Much like Arch itself.
- Documentation is really good
- Rolling release model. Upgrading X distro every Y month got tiring and was so time consuming
- pacman, ABS and AUR
- "The Arch Way"
- The community
- I got so much more control over my system compared to distros I used previously

FrozenFox · 2010-08-12 10:04:04

Everything everybody else already said, but one addition:

The practical approach taken to licensing stuff and the simple/centralized way of dealing with them manually when necessary. I can appreciate the work other distros go to keeping their packages pure, but holy crap is it painful there to get what you want done sometimes. For example, mp3 streaming support in mpd in many distros is disabled until you recompile it manually with some extra packages/sources. With Arch, even if something of the sort were done, you could install a package from AUR with no effort via one command to deal with it pretty much every time instead of painful package creation (or raw configure, make, make install) processes. This is my biggest irritation with other distros, and the few times I've strayed from arch, that brought me back (with less hair on my head and more foaming at the mouth to show for it).

..Arch might require some time spent towards configuration occasionally, but for me, it's not comparable whatsoever to how much time I've needlessly wasted trying to get what I want/need elsewhere which shouldn't be difficult at all.

Last edited by FrozenFox (2010-08-12 10:13:51)

Nilern · 2010-08-29 12:28:35

-ArchWiki
-AUR

-When a problem occurs, you learn to use UNIX/Linux. On Ubuntu, you Google frantically and find forums posts like "this worked for me, do these commands". On Arch, you go to the wiki and find out how the system works and thus, why it doesn't work.
-The difficulty of configuration is mostly stable. With a GUI, basic things are very easy, but something more complex might be almost impossible. (Ever tried configuring daemons on Ubuntu? There's an ncurses tool that isn't installed by default and no one told you about. I had to use the GNOME session tool. A configuration file doesn't exist.)

lasu1 · 2010-08-29 15:10:05

I started on Arch about 1 year ago.

The reason I use Arch is that it works better than any other OS/distro I've installed on my machine. This is very subjective, I know. However, my Arch machine is faster and more responsive than any other I've used. Also, I have no difficulty getting anything to work.

The only downside is the occasional upgrade snafu, but none have taken more than a few minutes of tinkering (or, in the 1 case of a bug that needed to be fixed: LESS THAN ONE HOUR for an fixed package to be available.) Sorry for writing that last bit in caps...but, seriously...it was less than one hour.

I'd like to emphasize that, for me, the big plus is just that everything works. There is nothing odd or weird about my system which I don't know how to decipher. I really, really like Arch and am unlikely to switch at this point.

OH, I forgot to add that Arch has been very stable for me. I usually only reboot after a kernel upgrade...no performance loss or anything.

TL;DR: Arch stands out for me because it works better on my hardware than any other alternative I've tried.

SilentRebellions · 2010-08-29 17:41:39

I'm sort of new to Arch (I tried out Chakra for a while, but left it because I'm a GNOME guy) and I finished my install about a month and a half ago.

I am convert and will never switch...

I am running GNOME and my system has never been so stable and fast. I love it and it is a stand out quality of Arch.

The biggest stand out for me though are what I call the "side effects" of the Arch philosophy.

I've been on Linux systems for a few years now, starting with Fedora and have used a bunch of distros since (Ubuntu, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, ZenWalk, etc) and I learned alot, but I never felt as comfortable working on a machine as I do now... because you have to get your hands a little dirty in the install, you learn a ton about your machine and Linux in general.

I have learned more about admining on Linux in the last month than the entire time on all the others because they were sooo automated, and when something goes wrong your lost.

Not with Arch though... you know the system because you took part in setting it up.

Also, the main reason I didn't move to Arch sooner was that I was slightly intimidated by the install by all the Ubuntu and Mandriva folks who said it was a ghastly thing to do.... which isn't true because Arch is so well documented and the community is amazing. I followed the wiki and only had to search the forums to get any answers I needed, because you guys actually answer questions!

So, what makes Arch stand out... runs fast and stable; great community and documentation; keeping it simple teaches the user about their system and Linux in general; and finally it can increase your confidence!

Basically, Arch stands out because it does what it does exceptionally well!

Great work to the developers and the community... you've made a first class system!

Carlwill · 2010-09-09 13:52:16

I list the reasons it stands out for me and why I use it:

- Extremely light (no useless applications or bloat. You install what you need and nothing more)
- Rolling release (No annoying release dates and upgrade problems)
- Bleeding Edge (I love getting to use the latest kernel or latest applications as soon as they're available)
- Pacman (Extremely easy and powerful package manager)
- Community & Wiki are hands down one of the best if not the best I have seen for any Linux distribution!

Last edited by Carlwill (2010-09-09 13:53:12)

bluesilvercan · 2010-09-11 05:19:03

It's the speed to me, pacman simply rocks. The other distros take forever and a day to install something. And I love the fact that gnome/kde look like they are intended to look- not some vision that someone else has. It's a great distro for a family computer. The only thing I've done to it to make it more kid friendly is install crossover with Office 2003, the kids need to have Office for their homework, Openoffice just isn't quite there.

Last edited by bluesilvercan (2010-09-11 05:21:48)

zero_one · 2010-09-11 14:02:17

Myself and Slackware vs Pacman and Arch, pacman beats me everytime

Not to mention the documentation, freenode chan, extremely knowledgable and devoted community..

Frugi · 2010-09-13 02:21:18

The free software/opensource world is all about choices.
Arch is a simple way to have access to all those choices without being lost in a overly complicated maze.

Arch Linux

#51 2010-08-07 05:28:21

Re: What makes Arch stand out?

#52 2010-08-07 23:30:04

Re: What makes Arch stand out?

#53 2010-08-08 02:24:37

Re: What makes Arch stand out?

#54 2010-08-08 03:29:33

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#55 2010-08-09 00:08:21

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#56 2010-08-09 12:50:16

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#57 2010-08-10 01:26:39

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#58 2010-08-10 01:59:33

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#59 2010-08-10 03:33:26

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#60 2010-08-11 17:13:08

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#61 2010-08-11 18:39:22

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#62 2010-08-11 18:50:40

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#63 2010-08-11 18:57:17

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#64 2010-08-12 10:04:04

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#65 2010-08-29 12:28:35

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#66 2010-08-29 15:10:05

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#67 2010-08-29 17:41:39

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#68 2010-09-09 13:52:16

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#69 2010-09-11 05:19:03

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#70 2010-09-11 14:02:17

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#71 2010-09-13 02:21:18

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