Arch Linux

RobF

Member

Registered: 2006-10-10

Posts: 157

Arch is simply PHENOMENAL!

I've been using Arch since Oct. 06, and I have to confess that I didn't treat it properly, particularly wrt frequent full system upgrades.  I installed the base system of v.0.7.2 from the Gimmick install CD, did an -Syu right after that, then installed the xorg and kde metapackages and continued building the system from there.  In mid-December 06 I did an -Syu which failed: the KDE Desktop was a mess and the system froze all the time and was simply unusable.  I restored the previous install from my partimage backup image and continued using this increasingly outdated system for another 6 1/2 months, installing dozens of additional packages.  This install was working quite well for a long time but recently it was beginning to misbehave increasingly.

By this time I had also realized that this was not the right way to run Arch and that I had to do something about it: either do a full system upgrade or wipe the slate clean and to a fresh install of Arch-Duke 2007.05.  I had little hope that my system would survive an -Syu without massive breakage, and I was already resigning myself to the idea that I would have to start from scratch, wipe out the old install, do a fresh install and then spend weeks recreating my custom configs and settings and reinstalling and customizing dozens and dozens of apps by hand.

But I gave the -Syu a try.  This involved upgrading 412 packages of 1050 MB total and took 4 hrs. over a broadband connection.

When I rebooted the upgraded install, rather than being confronted with a gutted corpse that should be buried quickly, I found a beautiful, smoothly running, rejuvenated system that seemed to be running faster than ever.  And such fantastic performance from a bulky system the / partition of which alone takes up 6.25 GB!

That was several days ago.  More than a dozen serious annoyances that plagued the old system have vanished, everything seems to be working perfectly, and of the half dozen problems I stumbled upon right after the upgrade, I've already solved 4 or 5.  THIS IS SIMPLY PHENOMENAL!

After 8 months of use, I had already thoroughly appreciated how well crafted, tightly engineered and ultra-stable Arch is but for it to survive my neglect and mistreatment so spectacularly really took my breath away.  To me Arch is the crown jewel of Linux distros, there is just nothing that comes close it (excepting perhaps Debian and Slackware).

Kudos to the developers, package maintainers, bug reporters and all users who contribute to the forums and the IRC channel!  Thank you for your fantastic work!

Robert

Last edited by RobF (2007-07-04 14:45:40)

cry0x

Member

Registered: 2007-04-11

Posts: 91

Re: Arch is simply PHENOMENAL!

Slackware and Debian have always been regarded as the best Linux distros, and for good reason. The first day I used Arch I didn't think that it was merely among the ranks of those two superdistros, but had surpassed it. In my opinion, Arch is the best from both distros put together.

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Who is this doin' this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin'?

rbrownclown

Member

Registered: 2006-12-29

Posts: 125

Re: Arch is simply PHENOMENAL!

Arch is the only stable bleeding edge distro I've ever used.  I only have one complaint.  Apt-get is much more mature then Pacman.  Though, I prefer Pacman to apt-get.

jb

Member

From: Florida

Registered: 2006-06-22

Posts: 466

Re: Arch is simply PHENOMENAL!

Funny you mention that; the other day, I found an Arch install on a computer at work the other day that hadn't been touched in 10 months.  So I ran pacman -Syu, rebooted, and it worked perfectly fine with no extra intervention... although I did check before rebooting that grub was set to use initcpio; I couldn't remember when that switch happened.

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