Arch Linux

skeevy420

Member

Registered: 2017-03-13

Posts: 35

Re: A rant from an old user

I like how Archlinux always has up to date versions of software, with some other distros you're stuck with 2 year old versions of things from the package manager

That is the reason I switched from Debian to Arch back in the mid 2000's.

For me, I had always been a Dos/Windows user from 4 years old until I was around 14 or 15 and Windows XP was released.  At the time, XP didn't run worth a damn on my hardware, the UI was awful, and it felt like a really big downgrade from Win2K (probably my favorite Windows OS ever).  So I started looking into alternative OS's and eventually settled on Debian.

After a couple of years of jumping between Debian Stable, Testing, Sid, Ubuntu, and Mint, I knew something had to change.  Ubuntu and Mint were ruled out because I really dislike 6 month upgrade cycles and had a few broke systems because of them, Sid and Stable were ruled out because Sid breaks at weird times and Stable is stale.  I tried sticking with Debian Testing, but it has weird breaks and starts to get out of date/stale too.

With a few years of Linux under my belt, I had some ideas about what I was looking for -- software that tries to stay up to date, a rolling release model, easy ways to compile software for my system, configurations that don't get overwritten without my approval, and good documentation.  I only found two distros (at the time) that suited my needs -- Arch and Gentoo.  I tried Gentoo, but three days worth of compiling and no X....I said "screw this" and gave Arch a try.  Since that day, I haven't used a distribution that wasn't Arch-based on any of my personal computers.  I've used Arch, ArchBang, Manjaro, and Antergos, but I always go back to just Arch.  About three or four years back, I installed Ubuntu for Android rom development....I think I made it to three days before going back to Arch....XFCE was two years old,

I was pissed that I didn't give Arch a try earlier, especially since I had been using the Arch Wiki for what seemed like years before actually using Arch Linux.

(Rant)
About the only issue that I have with Arch Linux is the state of AMD's proprietary driver....I mean, AMD supports freakin SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Cent....but not US....you'd think AMD would support Arch because we're the go-to distro for gaming with AMD cards.  Ever game on Linux with an AMD card on a non-Arch system?  It sucks because we have all the fixes and new stuff first, we're in-between Suse and Cent on Distrowatch, have the highest Linux Distro Folding@Home team, yet we have to use a driver pieced together from Debian's release...My R7 260X with AMDGPU performs just as well as Catalyst used to preform and I can only imagine what Pro might do (don't want to risk breaking my system by downgrading Xorg or I'd give the AUR version a try).