Arch Linux

KimTjik

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2007-08-22

Posts: 713

One more letter of appreciation and why

Unfortunately I didn't know about Arch until this summer. Today I finished the fourth installation of Arch and I won't stop.

I lack the historical perspective, so when I recently saw a developer stating that Arch breaking down and then fixing it was how it should be, I didn't understand a word of what he was talking about. Every system might because of our imperfection break down, but I've not seen a single sign of that being symptomatic for an Arch based system. I agree on one part of that statement though: fixing things is a lot easier in Arch!

I once ran into that "crc error" in August, but it was so easily fixed so I wouldn't even consider it as real problem, just a small bump on the road. Overall I'm so impressed by Arch, it's like I finally found something biologically natural for the strange creature I am. Hence my appreciation won't be limited to a boring letter.

Why I like Arch:

- I finally know what I'm doing and why. No need to learn and understand some cryptic GU-interface, which might have been logical to the ones who designed it. I can nearly count on one hand the text-files needed to get everything I want to work.

- Fixing issues is really simple. I recently managed to inflict a kernel panic, because I swapped the CPU in favor of a newer and faster one. Architecturally they are similar so I thought it would work, but it ended in a kernel panic. I know have several Linux systems installed which gave a good opportunity to compare how easy the process of chrooting and re-compiling the kernel would be, and the verdict: Arch by a great margin was the smoothest, much because of how well pacman works (I think it didn't take me more than 5 min from booting the CD to rebooting from hard-drive with a fully working kernel).

- Finally I get Xorg to work without errors. And thanks to the installation method and a well structured system, I even can get an ATI X800 GTO to work perfectly well with the infamous proprietary driver. That card has been giving me a hard time in the past (in my own system though I use nVidia), and especially since most other distributions lock you to install stuff that won't work, and then you get to work backwards removing and reinstalling stuff. With Arch I chose, not the "distribution", what I want.

- The forum is one of the best I've seen. Here's room for criticism, but mutual respect seem to smooth things down, and keep it fairly constructive. Nobody is prefect and it looks like the majority of members here are individuals understanding that communication is more than a brutal exchange of data.

I could go on, but I don't want to bore you. As a summary I can tell that Arch is at the moment my clear first choice when somebody asks me for help getting a Linux system. I have great confidence in this distribution, and when the time comes for these users to learn something beyond the desktop I believe Arch is a good choice.

My best wishes for a unsuccessful continuation of the Arch project,

Kimo Lee