The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

cnshzj007 · 2008-03-29 17:24:00

I can not agree with you more.

whaler · 2008-03-29 17:56:18

Granular Linux is fantastic!

Archlinux is more fun, though. A big thank you to each and every one who contributed to this fine distro!

millerl · 2008-03-29 23:58:48

Been using linux as my main workstation os for about 7 years. Started with RedHat 7.3, 8 and on to Fedora. At that point I really wanted to see what else was out there. Tried Mandrake, SuSe, and Slackware which I stayed with few about a year. I just found Slack to be too hard to keep up to date without breaking things (I am still learning!). I made my way to Gentoo. There I stayed for about 4 years. I still love Gentoo, but Arch is stealing my heart.

And as ewl said:

ewl wrote:

Arch has the simplicity of slackware with the ease of use of debian...

And yet, with ABS and AUR, Arch also has all the power of Gentoo without the hassle!

I've already got Arch on my main workstation and my laptop. I think I'll make myself at home and stay a while. Thanks to all that have made Arch happen.

alkali1471 · 2008-04-02 19:46:19

using linux from december, and started with ubuntu. great distro to learn difference between \Program Files and /usr/share...
but... i have slow celeron with tiny ram, and i hate calculattors and calendars bundeled with os-s, arch is great! ive installed what i want (even calendar ), its easy to update, and it makes you think, ubuntu made me lazy and stupid. its much easyer to learn with arch, nice community and wiki!
ideal!

iphitus · 2008-04-10 08:53:26

File bugs, don't ignore them! That's how bugs perpetuate and last for ages. Or maybe a bug is lingering/unconfirmed and we need more info, you could provide that info. (Cue Uncle Sam?)

Example:
Problem: Bug in wireless driver
Suggestion: Use ndiswrapper

This is dumb. Yes, it's fine to use ndiswrapper as a temporary workaround. But if you don't file a bug, there's a real chance it won't get fixed for a long time.

It's irritating to hear people whinging "this software is so buggy, this bug hasnt been fixed for months". That's your fault because you did nothing about it, and you can only blame yourself. Open Source developers do not have the resources to test on all hardware/configurations.

Similarly, if you have a problem, keep trying the software. Don't tell people that X is buggy, when you last used it 9 months ago. Chances are, X improved a lot since then.

Or:
Problem: Oh crap, libjoe.so.1 not found!
Suggestion: Symlink libjoe.so.2 to libjoe.so.1

This one is also dumb. It's not even a valid workaround. It's stupidly simple to fix this one. Check you have the latest, if you do, file a bug. We rebuild and it'll work when your mirror syncs. In the meantime, there's /var/abs and you can rebuild. 95% of the packages in the repos will rebuild in ~5-10 minutes. Make a cup of coffee, go to the loo, whatever. If you can spare time for a forum post, you can spare time to rebuild it.

/end rant.

Last edited by iphitus (2009-06-09 09:47:00)

dolby · 2008-04-10 09:07:38

oh btw and not meaning to hijack this thread but the above is the most important reason not to use external patches in packages. all bugs/feature requests should be reported upstream.
also on a sidenote, most people just report bugs on the forum instead of the bug tracker. maybe a note about this somewhere would be nice. even though the bugs link is quite visible on top

iphitus · 2008-04-10 09:16:55

dolby wrote:

oh btw and not meaning to hijack this thread but the above is the most important reason not to use external patches in packages. all bugs/feature requests should be reported upstream.
also on a sidenote, most people just report bugs on the forum instead of the bug tracker. maybe a note about this somewhere would be nice. even though the bugs link is quite visible on top

That's inevitable, and often people don't realise it's a bug. It's the responses people give that are wrong, take the two examples above. Where people should have been told to file a bug, but instead they were given crap workarounds.

Last edited by iphitus (2008-04-10 09:17:54)

schivmeister · 2008-04-10 14:41:33

this happens a lot, everywhere. if our userbase can't be educated regarding this matter, there's no other solution.

Mikko777 · 2008-04-10 15:37:44

Ummm, I r stupid enough to assume all things broken are upstream bugs that arch devs wont fix.

Maybe someone could post some educative links of arch and linux internals that would help me file proper bugs.
(all the threads on this subject seem to die fast, when someone says read initscripts)

Guess its basically if program wont start file a bug, if it starts but crashes in use file a bug to programs bugtracker right?

Edit: Ah nevermind guess i can just read the LFS docs to see how stuff works.

Last edited by Mikko777 (2008-04-10 15:54:20)

grndrush · 2008-04-10 18:48:26

Thanks, iphitus. I'll get off my duff...

Having written (with all due modesty, extremely high-quality) software for a couple of decades, myself, I don't usually assume it's an Arch or Linux bug - I assume that, somehow, its ME. I tend to 'tinker' a lot, often simply for the knowledge - which by definition means I'm purposely playing with stuff I *don't* fully understand. I generally assume that I changed something whose purpose I apparently didn't understand; I NEVER blame either of the above parties, that's for sure (X IS better than it was a year ago!), although I DID cuss Bill Gates daily for a couple of decades or so.

I had a motherboard burn up on me about 6 or 8 months ago. I built a 'new' system around an older case and mobo, usually virtually every single other component from my old system (including even the P/S), which is why I blame the other mobo. My current mobo has a bit of an 'odd' on-board sound chip (lspci and the manual that came *in the same box, new* don't even agree WHAT chip it is; yes, I trust lspci more than I trust ASUS, for sure). I even have a couple of very nice, operational and very mainstream PCI sound cards which I've used successfully with Linux in the past, but the mobo doesn't seem to "hear" me when I disable when I disable the chip in BIOS (pun fully intended). I've done lots of reading (I can't avoid Wiki; I'm a Wiki *editor*), and tried a bunch of things, none successful.

In my case, I guess, I get mad at ME rather than the O/S (or distro), and haven't posted for fear of ending up looking stupid. Sound isn't really all that important to me, but with the fevered pitch of the election season here, it WOULD be bice to actually HEAR all the YouTube videos people send me.

But you're 100% correct; there may be someone else out there in the same boat for the same reason. I'd go post the cry for assistance this moment, but my life's been in a good deal of turmoil of late. I also (FINALLY) traded in KDE for Xfce4 a week ago (which of course uses ESD; I *never* have). I need a REALLY good nght's rest and an hour or so to bone up on ESD 1st. Hopefully this weekend, or early next week.

Thanks for the mini-rant; I sincerely need that!

Last edited by grndrush (2008-04-10 18:53:09)

freakcode · 2008-04-10 19:18:40

iphitus wrote:

I see this a lot. It pisses me off.
File bugs, don't ignore them! That's how bugs perpetuate and last for ages. Or maybe a bug is lingering/unconfirmed and we need more info, you could provide that info. (Cue Uncle Sam?)
...
It's irritating to hear people whinging "this software is so buggy, this bug hasnt been fixed for months". That's your fault because you did nothing about it, and you can only blame yourself. Open Source developers do not have the resources to test on all hardware/configurations.

I guess its because big part of the current userbase comes from proprietary software culture, where people don't have the habit of interacting with the developer, don't fill bug reports, and so on. I would say they even don't "feel" they can improve the software. All they do is download a shareware, if it sucks, they download another and another, or if they buy some software that crashes on their faces, they curse the manufacturer, but keep buying the same crapware because it's "widespread". Software is really a very different type of "product" - the only I know that is released not completly finished neither fail-proof.

grndrush · 2008-04-10 19:41:33

*Excellent* point, freakcode!

I hadn't even considered that angle, and I spent my entire IT career in the mainframe world (pre-shareware, of course). We simply figured out "workarounds" (great for keeping the mind sharp...). That was also, of course, the time when 'feature' became an alias for 'bug'.

Cyrusm · 2008-04-10 20:23:09

so here is my "arch is the best distro ever" story. It all started a year or so ago when I bought a really cheap computer from Fry's Electronics, because I was uber poor and didn't have the cash for a nice smokin machine. It, of course, came standard with Windows Vista. long story short, Vista doesn't run too well with a cheap Sempron processor and only 512 MB of Ram. I could have upgraded my hardware, but that costs money, and at the time I was living off of ramen noodles and hope. a freind of mine at work recommended Ubuntu, which I subsequently put on my machine and used for a few months, I think it was a great stepping stone into the linux world. what I didn't like about Ubuntu is it's a lot like windows in that you rarely if ever have to open the command line and everything is done FOR you, leaving you without much control or power over your computer, my machine, although running better, was still slow. and it was difficult to get the help I was looking for in the Ubuntu Forums because I would get 27 conflicting answers for every problem, not to mention the overwhelming number of trolls! It was actually a moderator on the Ubuntu forums that recommended Arch for me. Arch was definitely a learning experience! I love how simple it is, making it easy to learn and providing AMAZING amounts of power for the user! I love how small it is, combined with Fluxbox, it uses hardly any system resources, leaving processor power and memory free for what I want to do. and probably the best part about it is, due to the small and elite number of people using arch, it's easy to get high quality answers to all of my questions here on the forum. I just bought a laptop a couple days ago and of course arch was my first choice. now, with 2 computers running arch I have a million more possiblities and projects that I'm free to work on.

in summary. Arch is the best, ever. which I guess is the whole point of this thread.

dunc · 2008-04-10 20:32:23

I'm not a software developer, but I am a tinkerer, and I completely understand grndrush's reasoning. I always assume it's something I've done as well... and most of the time it is.

Freakcode makes a good point, too. Coming from the post-Commodore Amiga world, which had its fair share of open-source and amateur projects, I'm not completely unused to interacting with developers, but it was all pretty small scale stuff. A big project there would be lucky to have 50 members on its open devs/users mailing list. It felt like everyone knew everyone else, in a sense. Linux can be daunting in that respect. It can be scary to hold your hand up and say, "Um... this doesn't work".

But iphitus is perfectly right, though. Perfect bug reporting is something to which we should all aspire, even if we don't all quite reach it.

Ink-Jet · 2008-04-10 21:01:59

Should you report what you think is a a bug to the program's respective tracker if you're not sure it's a bug?

To be honest, most of this developer feedback stuff is a bit beyond me.

synthead · 2008-04-10 21:13:38

Great points guys. I'm going to see if I can remember some bugs I encountered and try to reproduce them. If I can, I'll make bug reports.

Kind of an interesting thought though isn't it? "I'll see if I can find any bugs." Compare that one to other OSes!

toofishes · 2008-04-11 01:29:36

This one is almost worth stickying.

ConnorBehan · 2008-04-11 04:38:09

iphitus wrote:

Example:
Problem: Bug in wireless driver
Suggestion: Use ndiswrapper
...
Or:
Problem: Oh crap, libjoe.so.1 not found!
Suggestion: Symlink libjoe.so.2 to libjoe.so.1

Right, if stupid workarounds like ndiswrapper only get posted on forums such as these, there's a good chance the wireless developers won't find out about the bug any time soon. What I would do is report the bug upstream, and then at the end of that post, say something like "until this bug gets fixed ndiswrapper will work."

A problem that I've had to deal with for a year now has been the buggy 3D support for ATI Rage 128 cards. This is a known bug that I saw on the x.org DRI site, I've discussed it in #xorg, these forums and the Linux thinkpad mailing list so I don't know what more I can do. The workaround I use now is, if my computer freezes upon killing X, I shut it down remotely with ssh.

peets · 2008-04-11 04:46:07

cyrusm, it's nice to have you one the forums! By the way, where I shop, buying "regular" noodles (e.g. spaghetti) is a lot cheaper by the gram than buying packs of Ramen. I live on spaghetti and a job; I just can't cook.

catwell · 2008-04-11 06:46:28

This is so true. Free software works because of the "Many Eyes" thing, and to me this doesn't only mean that the code is read by several people but that the users also take part in the dev process. Which means filing bug reports on the right bugtracker (most of the time it's upstream).

Yet sometimes I'm not sure how Arch devs manage these bug reports. For example, take this one. I had filed it, and the package dev answered it and said that another dev should take care of it because he couldn't, but nobody did that, even if I said why it didn't work afterwards and it was just a matter of recompiling the package. That's probably devs don't read bug reports that have a low severity and are already assigned to someone else, which seems logical, but not in such cases. I don't know how they could do yet.

Anyway, on the whole finding bug reports is important, even for the AUR, by leaving comments about the packages. Although the package maintainers are not devs, they care too.

zodmaner · 2008-04-11 09:49:43

Another case that clearly shows a confusion most people have between a fix and a work around is this bug: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9537#comment26768 (Thunar won't eject CD).

Basically, one user propose a 'fix' (which in reality is a work around, and an ugly one at that) by install pmount/ivman and use them to mouth/eject CD instate of Thunar even though there is a proper fix available (a patch for exo pacakge).

Imagine what would happen if most user start installing pmount/ivman instate of filing a bug report or applying a patch.

Last edited by zodmaner (2008-04-11 09:59:05)

ibendiben · 2008-04-11 11:13:42

How about adding a feature (hehe, I know one should keep it simple, but read on) to every forum topic enabling you to "send to bug tracker" which then ask you to follow the steps normally asked when adding a "new task" on flyspray...

So topics like, wireless not getting ip at boot, which turn out to be a arch-software problem could be send to the bugtracker easier:
>[Send to bug tracker];
>Give a descriptive summery;
>Then choose:
----Task type
----Category
----Status
----Operating System
----Severity
----Priority
----Reported Version
----Due in Version
>Then add, additional info on how to reproduce, which could often just be a link to the topic, but more kindly a destillation of usefull information.

I could suppose this makes some difference... just because it's in the users eye, and some clicks (+subscription/login) closer.

Misfit138 · 2008-04-11 13:21:32

Cyrusm is the author of some of my favorite posts. I remember when he first announced he would be installing Arch; it was a lot of fun to follow his progress.

peets · 2008-04-11 16:33:01

yeah!

STiAT · 2008-04-14 10:43:25

Also, if you need updated version of packages, and have fixes or similar to them, it's often easier to either file a bug or contact a dev.

I've done so several times, and the things got fixed within a few weeks, using workarounds till then (most likely compiling my own patched pkg).

Arch Linux

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