The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

iBertus · 2005-07-06 05:33:41

Hmm... is Arch really the best? I like to think that it is, otherwise I'd spend more time hunting distros and less time really working. I used to swap distros pretty regular and haven't since trying Arch. I don't expect to start again anytime in the near future.

Lord Death wrote:

I'm going to go into windows and delete one by one file in C:WindowsSystem32. Till i screw something up, mwahaha! :twisted:

That'll take all of what, three minutes? Better plan something else for the rest of the day.

Danny · 2005-07-06 05:45:26

iBertus wrote:

Hmm... is Arch really the best? I like to think that it is, otherwise I'd spend more time hunting distros and less time really working. I used to swap distros pretty regular and haven't since trying Arch. I don't expect to start again anytime in the near future.
Lord Death wrote:
I'm going to go into windows and delete one by one file in C:WindowsSystem32. Till i screw something up, mwahaha! :twisted:
That'll take all of what, three minutes? Better plan something else for the rest of the day.

I'll go back to Arch after that and listen to some music.

mmgm · 2005-07-06 08:26:00

Lord Death wrote:

I'm going to go into windows and delete one by one file in C:WindowsSystem32. Till i screw something up, mwahaha! :twisted:

mkdir /mnt/StupidShit/
mount -t [vfat | ntfs] /path/to/win/partition /mnt/StupidShit
rm -r /mnt/StupidShit/Windows/ &

No need to leave your beloved Arch.

Danny · 2005-07-06 08:45:30

No but i want to see it fall apart and stop working. :twisted: Hehe then I'll go delete something else. :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

CyberTron · 2005-07-06 08:57:36

you vicious creature *muhahahaha*

deficite · 2005-07-06 17:15:00

I've never heard of an OS sadist until now. "You filthy little operating system! I'm going to delete winmm! You know you're worthless with it and you'll be worthless without it! Shut up, don't give me those stupid error messages! I'd remove moricons.dll from you if it only had some purpose after Windows 3.1!"

jlvsimoes · 2005-07-07 05:05:44

hehe sarah this is the ego trip topic

mr-tux · 2005-07-11 01:45:02

on and off on ubuntu linux or swiss cheese os then i tried gentoo and found out it just aint for me im still configering my arch linux but i'll keep it till the end

kristian · 2005-07-12 11:59:14

I love Arch too!!

However there is a few things that bothers me. When I run into a problem that I think is "Arch Linux"-specific or something like that, googeling for a solution is a mess. I'm getting a whole lot of hits about "GNU Arch". Why did you steal someone elses name!? And how did you forget to include "GNU" in the name of the distro?

(This is not ment to end in a flame-war. If it does, at least i have this note to hang on to, in my strugle to prove my innocence )

dtw · 2005-07-12 13:00:45

ummmm - there are rarely any Arch specific problems that aren't covered on the forums are there? You bee looking in the wrong place, dude

you could try -GNU in keywords too

iphitus · 2005-07-12 13:53:29

Theres a SCM tool called Arch, which is referred to as GNU Arch, which ruins all the search results.

iphitus

Mr.Elendig · 2005-07-21 19:23:24

arch isn't the best distro.

it's THE best distro :twisted:

darkcoder · 2005-07-21 23:50:04

for personal use, imho one of the best. But still lacks some things like automatic update, support for more administrative/system tools, etc.

thomas23 · 2005-07-22 01:04:59

But still lacks some things like automatic update

I'm quite new in linux, I first tried mandrake and found same problems and same solution than windows. Wich is, too much automated everywhere in every simgle process so the system depreciate quite fast, matter of mounts before seeing performance slowing down. And if you are unable to decode a bug report, forget about solving it. You lose less time doing a backup and reinstall everything. The automatic update might probably be the only good automated thing that Arch can use, but you don't need it to be hardcoded in pacman or somewhere else. I think (like I said, i'm new to linux) that a task scheduler should be able to execute a script on a weekly basis that would simply answer yes to every question pacman will ask. (Make me remember of that simpson episode when homer gets obese, works at home on a computer and replace himselfe with a balancing bird that always type "y" on the keyboard).

The point is that I would not trust automatic updates. My computer is going so well since I use Arch and I do everything myself. Most important of all, I learned a lot about linux. I have used Arch for 4 mounts now and I find it easier than Mandrake that i used for one mount as my first linux distro. With Arch, since I do everything, I can undo everything and I came to know my system pretty well. I have all the most recent packages, and I even made my own local repository for the packages I build. I'm not afraid of a console anymore so I have begin to write scripts to do repetitive tasks like uploading packages then update the database. Even if I have never see any other distro than mandrake, I belive that ArchLinux is the best distro ever made at the moment. You just have to get your hands dirty with command lines and the search button in Arch's forum and thats it!

My philosophy for having a stable system : take your time, read instructions and always remember what you've done. By doing things like that, I now have 2 desktop computers and 1 server running on Arch. And besides, running better than ever! Arch is not only the best distro, ArchLinux is the best operating system I have ever seen!

deficite · 2005-07-22 02:19:53

darkcoder wrote:

for personal use, imho one of the best. But still lacks some things like automatic update, support for more administrative/system tools, etc.

The moment Arch forces automatic updates on me is the moment I switch to Rubix.

sarah31 · 2005-07-22 02:22:00

Autoupdating is a silly thing.

cactus · 2005-07-22 02:40:42

I would like an option for pacman, something like

pacman -Syu --check

That would only check to see if there were any updates, but not actually do any updating. Then I could setup a daily cron to email me when an update is needed, along with the names of the packages that are available for potential updates.

darkcoder · 2005-07-22 07:09:08

deficite wrote:

The moment Arch forces automatic updates on me is the moment I switch to Rubix.

I do not mean force, it can be an option as anything else is on Arch right now. I know that is easy to add a cron job to perform a pacman -Syu --noconfirm, but an applet like the one found on Fedora/Mandrake/Ubuntu which allows for easy (and non forced) update would be nice.

Again, what is easier:
1. open a console (if one is not open)
2. change to an administrative account like root
3. type pacman -Syu
4. answer Y.
Note: all steps on all your computers

Or:
1. Perform a system update (pacman -Syu --noconfirm) on a user selected time like for example: Saturday 12am, without any user intervention.

deficite · 2005-07-22 19:13:27

Exactly, I was just stating the fact that the moment it forces them on me I'm leaving. I don't see any problems with supporting the feature for those who want to use it, but I also think that wasting time on programming things that should and could be done with cron is useless. Also, please don't even say the word "applet" when we are talking about Arch Linux and pacman. If you want an uber n00b way of updating, go ahead. I remember days of using that up2date crap on RH and it hosing my system because the program crashed while it was updating some RPMs. This isn't windows, if you want an uber-n00b app you can code it and nobody will complain. I think doing things in a standard way (cron) is cleaner and simpler, much to the philosophy of Arch.

Now I might sound like I am trying to flame you or something like that, but I'm not mad or anything and I have nothing against you.

apeiro · 2005-07-23 18:51:41

cactus wrote:

I would like an option for pacman, something like
pacman -Syu --check
That would only check to see if there were any updates, but not actually do any updating. Then I could setup a daily cron to email me when an update is needed, along with the names of the packages that are available for potential updates.

Here's a hackish script that just gathers the names from a -Sup.

#!/bin/sh

pacman -Sy &>/dev/null
list=
for i in `pacman -Sup 2>/dev/null| grep '//'`; do
        # rip out the url
        fn=${i##*/}
        # lose the version/release/extension
        pn=${fn%-*-*}
        # add to the list
        list="$list $pn"
done

echo "Packages available for upgrade:"
for i in $list; do echo $i; done

Machiavelli · 2005-08-30 22:42:54

There is in my opinion almost no competition for Arch Linux in the Linux world. I've tried RPM-based distros like Fedora Core, debian clones like Ubuntu, MEPIS and Xandros; Gentoo as well as Vida Linux... plus Vector Linux and some other crap. Some of it was good, some of it was bad, and some of it was OK.

If it's wrong to say that Arch is ultimate, at least I can be honest when I say it's optimal.

Why? pacman, makepkg, abs.

ammiellodebar · 2005-09-05 23:36:34

I went distro hopping for a few years too, not finding something I really liked until I found .6 Arch (which actually worked with my NIC, .5 didn't). I'm irritated at the moment becuase Firefox and some random app will crash on me and i upgraded kernel and my NIC didnt work so I had to downgrade to 2.6.8.1 and now my sound isnt working.....

But it's a great distro, and I like the support, and If you could help me with my problem not getting ca0106 working or fixing rtl8150 in 2.6.12.2 then please go to Kernel/Hardware support and help me!!

nagoola · 2005-09-06 08:40:03

I guess everybody did some distro-hopping before coming to Arch. I guess Arch is just not known enough to be the distro you try out as your first. But once you find it you will love it - cause it is easy though still having something to play with (no wierd GUI-Tools).
I personally thought that I will stop hopping once I found Gentoo, but they started deviding the config-files into pieces and putting them into wierd places. (Apache, Samba etc.).
I like that Arch pretty much sticks to the default config.
It is also really important to be able to compile software from source and not mess up the package-database - no matter which one that is - cause when building a server you will almost always want something compiled into something that isnt there by default. Arch solved that problem in a great way.

Okay, just tried to explain WHY I think Arch is great - Didnt want to bore you guys :-)

Deciare · 2005-10-10 01:23:42

I had tried Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, and Frugalware before arriving at Arch. I left Windows behind without properly educating myself; throwing caution to the wind, the first thing I did with Linux is put Mandrake 8.0 on my primary (and only) desktop and erase my Windows 2000 partition in the process. I'd always been into using "advanced" and "beta" software on Windows, so how hard could Linux be? Oh boy, was I wrong.

I could live without my extensive collection of hand-coded mIRC scripts. I could live without a single graphical Control Panel that handled everything I might want to configure. I could get used to the fact that every program had its own quirky config file format. I could deal with the fact that not every program I wanted to use was packaged for my distro.

The problem that grated on my nerves was a suspicion that distro-specific graphical configurators were against me. They were elaborate frontends for some deep voodoo going on behind the scenes with a fragile web of Python scripts and stuff holding everything together. If I were to edit a config file by hand, I had no guarantee that my changes would stick; merely opening the wrong graphical configurator could screw it up. Similarly, when using a graphical configurator broke something, I had to go through lots of trouble to determine exactly what it changed, where, and how to make it work again.

The problem was made worse by the heaps of distro-specific patches that were applied to every binary package, introducing inconsistencies and incompatibility with stuff that I had to compile myself because there wasn't a package for it.

Wasn't there any Linux distro out there that let me see exactly what was going on at every stage of package installation and upgrades, where I could see exactly (and easily) what customisations were made to my packages, where I know for sure that I was in full control of every aspect of my system's config files without any unsolicited automatic stuff to mess it up?

Why, yes there was. Thank you so much, Arch developers, for restoring my faith in Linux.

Benedict_White · 2005-10-12 00:29:51

Look, i can't be bothered to read the whole thread, but I just wanted to say:

I do computers for money, (I.E. for a living).

If I can't get it to work, my kids starve. It is as simple as that, OK?

Now I have tried a few distros, and Linux is not my preferred platform, NetWare is (for servers) however, I can fix tings faster in Linux, and I can do what I want in Arch.

If Judd died tomorrow, or their was a big bustup or whatever, I have a stable well built system which can be built upon. Easy to understand, remarkably good at being a server and a desktop.

What more could you ask for?

The only comment I would make is that thsi could only have happened if it was guided by someone who was very young, or very old.

Arch Linux

#26 2005-07-06 05:33:41

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#27 2005-07-06 05:45:26

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#28 2005-07-06 08:26:00

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#31 2005-07-06 17:15:00

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#32 2005-07-07 05:05:44

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#33 2005-07-11 01:45:02

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#34 2005-07-12 11:59:14

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#35 2005-07-12 13:00:45

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#36 2005-07-12 13:53:29

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#37 2005-07-21 19:23:24

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#38 2005-07-21 23:50:04

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#39 2005-07-22 01:04:59

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#40 2005-07-22 02:19:53

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#41 2005-07-22 02:22:00

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#42 2005-07-22 02:40:42

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#43 2005-07-22 07:09:08

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#44 2005-07-22 19:13:27

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#45 2005-07-23 18:51:41

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#46 2005-08-30 22:42:54

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#47 2005-09-05 23:36:34

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#48 2005-09-06 08:40:03

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#49 2005-10-10 01:23:42

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#50 2005-10-12 00:29:51

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

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