Is Arch really becoming unstable?

miggols99 · 2008-03-31 14:24:20

I've been having a look around the forums and I've been seeing threads saying "Don't use Arch if you don't want to keep maintaining it"...is Arch becoming what I didn't want it to become? When I switched to Arch, people on the Ubuntu forums were saying "Arch is really easy to maintain. When you've set it up, you won't need to do much more". I hope it isn't, because if I leave Arch, I'll have to drop my website (or convert it to another distro) and leave Shaman behind (I helped with some of it's artwork).

Also I wish there was something like "Archbuntu" because, to be honest, setting up Arch is getting a bit annoying. I posted this on my blog, and I said my dream distro would

* Rolling release
* Uses KDE4 (or lets you choose)
* Lets me choose what programs to install
* No extra apps I don't need/want
* Uses the pacman package manager
* A good frontend to pacman - otherwise known as Shaman
* Works well out of the box
* No need to use the CLI

Which basically means I would love an easy Arch Linux...I couldn't make a distro like that because I have no idea how to do it, and it would take hours and hours to upload an ISO...

wonder · 2008-03-31 14:39:23

and where archlinux is unstable? you spoke about changes that YOU want to make to archlinux to became another distro but you forgot about "unstable" that's the name of you thread. But that "changes" define archlinux.
archlinux is rolling release, you can use kde4, lets user to choose what to install, no extra apps , use pacman . in my oppinion archlinux works well out of the box and if i don't want to use CLI i use WINDOWS. linux is no linux without cli

tomk · 2008-03-31 14:40:02

Please search the forum, and read the many threads with topics like the one you have chosen. A comprehensive browse through the wiki would also be educational, particularly any pages detailing the design, principles, and philosophy of Arch.

My €0.02: Arch is bleeding-edge, and not designed to be particularly stable. It works well for users who

- know what they're doing
- are prepared to get their hands dirty when problems arise
- "get" the Arch way of doing things

I'm not going to tell you which distro to use, but it's worth noting that the last two requirements on your "dream distro" list are not Arch-compatible, and never will be. I would hope also that you didn't choose Arch solely on the basis of comments on another distro's forum.

bangkok_manouel · 2008-03-31 14:40:15

use debian testing or frugalware. why use something you find annoying when you have choice?
ubuntuization is not on the roadmap.

Misfit138 · 2008-03-31 14:52:50

miggols99 wrote:

* Rolling release
* Uses KDE4 (or lets you choose)
* Lets me choose what programs to install
* No extra apps I don't need/want
* Uses the pacman package manager
* A good frontend to pacman - otherwise known as Shaman
* Works well out of the box
* No need to use the CLI
Which basically means I would love an easy Arch Linux...I couldn't make a distro like that because I have no idea how to do it, and it would take hours and hours to upload an ISO...

Shaman and pacman are Arch tools. Your dream distro doesn't exist, unfortunately, because you have listed too many mutually exclusive requirements. There are hundreds of distros, try out some and stick with the one that suits you the best.

Dusty · 2008-03-31 15:03:11

The only two requirements that Arch doesn't satisfy are "Works well out of the box" and "no need to use CLI". The former can probably be accomplished using faunos or archie, they have good hardware detection and configuration options. The later isn't really supported anywhere that I know of. There have been a few gui tools to do Arch configuration created but they're too inefficient for Archers to take to them.

I think there is room for a distro such as you suggest. It would entail creating a nicer install CD (probably hijacking some liveISO scripts and rewriting the installer), and writing some nice configuration tools for CLIphobes. From there it would be necessary to have a couple custom repositories providing highly patched software (borrowing patches from ubuntu might be a start), and maybe a buffer repo that contains Arch packages that have been a little more tested for robustness and/or have been patched for update errors. This wouldn't be so much a new distro as a customization of the current Arch Core "meta distribution", which is what Arch is all about. The primary reason it doesn't exist is that most Archers aren't interested in such tools.

I'm sure if one was created the Arch devs would be happy to link to it as an example of how the Arch core can be customized for a specific set of users. Most Arch users customize that core for their own personal use, but there's no reason a customization couldn't target a larger audience.

Dusty

dyscoria · 2008-03-31 15:11:08

Dusty wrote:

The primary reason it doesn't exist is that most Archers aren't interested in such tools

If enough people share your thoughts and have the motivation to create such tools, miggols, you might be in luck

Cerebral · 2008-03-31 15:25:42

Arch? Unstable? Bah, Arch is stable as a rock - I've never had any issuSegmentation Fault
[travis@cerebral ~]$

Last edited by Cerebral (2008-03-31 15:26:17)

finferflu · 2008-03-31 15:29:00

Cerebral wrote:

Arch? Unstable? Bah, Arch is stable as a rock - I've never had any issuSegmentation Fault
[travis@cerebral ~]$

LOL!

miggols99 · 2008-03-31 16:04:18

When I said choose which applications to install, I would want something like this

Unfortunately, I haven't the slightest idea about programming...

Misfit138 · 2008-03-31 16:30:10

What you are suggesting doesn't sound very KISS, so it is unlikely to be embraced by most Archers. Have you tried SUSE or Sidux?

miggols99 · 2008-03-31 16:43:04

I don't like openSUSE because it has horrible font rendering..and it uses su by default. I'm sure I could fix this...I searched around for a solution for the ugly fonts but it seemed they were targeted to only 32bit users, and I use 64bit...

Sidux...hmm haven't tried that in a while...

Last edited by miggols99 (2008-03-31 16:45:17)

ibendiben · 2008-03-31 16:49:39

Did you try FaunOS? It's an installable archlive system. I would bet you like it!
http://www.faunos.com/

finferflu · 2008-03-31 17:06:47

miggols99 wrote:

When I said choose which applications to install, I would want something like this
http://xs225.xs.to/xs225/08141/mockup549.png.xs.jpg
Unfortunately, I haven't the slightest idea about programming...

Reminds me of the Ubuntu's Synaptics Package Manager. Considering it's only a fronted to Apt, somebody might actually end up adapting it to Pacman, who knows...
I'm not really sure it's possible though...

Perhaps you should try a more interactive shell, like Fish (or zsh, even though it's a bit harder to configure), for example. You might enjoy the CLI in the end...

Susu · 2008-03-31 17:08:16

miggols99 wrote:

When I said choose which applications to install, I would want something like this
http://xs225.xs.to/xs225/08141/mockup549.png.xs.jpg
Unfortunately, I haven't the slightest idea about programming...

What's so hard about typing "pacman -S kde" or "pacman -S kdemod(-complete)" or "pacman -S xfce4"?

miggols99 · 2008-03-31 17:35:35

Well having a GUI would be so much better because I would be able to see the description of apps, with Pacman, I am confronted with confusing names. Let's pick on Eye of Gnome. The Pacman package is called "eog". How exactly am I supposed to know what it is? I would have to do

pacman -Ss eog

to get

extra/eog 2.20.4-1 (gnome-extra)
    Eye of Gnome: An image viewing and cataloging program

If I had a GUI, I could just click on Gnome, then scroll down to "e" (Pacman orders packages in repo order) then tick the box. Which one sounds easier? I search for burn and it comes up with:

kde/k3b 1.0.4-20080331                                                          
    Feature-rich and easy to handle CD burning application
extra/dvd+rw-tools 7.1-1
    dvd burning tools
extra/graveman 0.3.12.5-4
    A CD-burning frontend for mkisofs, cdrecord and friends
extra/k3b 1.0.4-1
    Feature-rich and easy to handle CD burning application
extra/nautilus-cd-burner 2.20.0-1 (gnome-extra)
    Adds cd burner functionality to nautilus
community/bashburn 2.1.2-3
    BashBurn is the new name for the cd burning shell script Magma
community/brasero 0.7.1-2
    A disc burning application for Gnome
community/gnomebaker 0.6.2-1
    GnomeBaker is a full featured CD/DVD burning application for Gnome
community/hacburn 0.3.5-3
    HacBurn is a script written in perl to aid in writing CDs. It is a graphical
    interface (using gtk+) to cdrtools, mpg321 and ogg123.
community/libburn 0.4.2-1
    Library for reading, mastering and writing optical discs
community/nrg2iso 0.4-5
    Utility for converting CD or DVD image generated by Nero Burning Rom to ISO
    format
community/xfburn-svn 26453-1 (xfce4-svn)
    CDROM and DVD burning program for XFCE4
testing/k3b 1.0.4-2
    Feature-rich and easy to handle CD burning application
testing/nautilus-cd-burner 2.22.0-1 (gnome-extra)
    Adds cd burner functionality to nautilus

How am I supposed to find the best burner with that? I'll have to experiment with each one until I find a good one...

Last edited by miggols99 (2008-03-31 17:36:32)

Susu · 2008-03-31 17:54:38

miggols99 wrote:

How am I supposed to find the best burner with that? I'll have to experiment with each one until I find a good one...

How are you supposed to find the best burner with your GUI method?

F · 2008-03-31 17:59:56

>>* Rolling release
>>* Uses KDE4 (or lets you choose)
>>* Lets me choose what programs to install
>>* No extra apps I don't need/want
>>* Uses the pacman package manager
>>* A good frontend to pacman - otherwise known as Shaman
>>* Works well out of the box
>>* No need to use the CLI

...

>>* A good frontend to pacman - otherwise known as Shaman
>>* Works well out of the box
>>* No need to use the CLI

...

>>* No need to use the CLI

...

>>* No need to use the CLI

Last edited by F (2008-03-31 18:00:27)

Cerebral · 2008-03-31 18:06:01

miggols99 wrote:

I would have to do

pacman -Ss eog

to get

extra/eog 2.20.4-1 (gnome-extra)
    Eye of Gnome: An image viewing and cataloging program

What's wrong with just searching "eye of gnome"? Works fine.

$ pacman -Ss "eye of gnome"
extra/eog 2.20.4-1 (gnome-extra)
    Eye of Gnome: An image viewing and cataloging program

miggols99 · 2008-03-31 18:10:24

Susu wrote:

miggols99 wrote:
How am I supposed to find the best burner with that? I'll have to experiment with each one until I find a good one...
How are you supposed to find the best burner with your GUI method?

Hmm well I guess there will be a search function in it, but it will be ordered alphabetically, and will say if it works better in Gnome or KDE. It could also have a link to the application's website in the description box. If there was a GUI like this, I wouldn't have to search for screenshots for each and every burner.

Cerebral · 2008-03-31 18:14:20

pacman -Si gives you a link to the website.

miggols99 · 2008-03-31 18:16:10

Ah yes but this only works if you specify the actual name of the package...

Susu · 2008-03-31 18:24:51

Well, I didn't know much about shaman, but...why don't you use it? Or...if you like Ubuntu better, use Ubuntu? You like so many other users want a little bit of this and a little bit of that...that's why so many distributions exist. Distrowatch is full of them. Go and find you a matching one. I don't mean to offend you, but if you're not contented with Arch, finding a new distro might be more useful for you than complaining about Arch.

Besides...in the past 5 years I haven't found a distro easier to maintain than Arch...but that's just my two cents.

finferflu · 2008-03-31 18:31:55

So, you could find a package name that interests you, then run pacman -Si <package name>. If you don't like repetitive operations, I think this is easily accomplished with a simple bash script (that shows you both the package description and the website link).
I'm sorry I can't provide you with one, but I'm busy writing my dissertation right now, and I shouldn't even be posting here, by the way :\

back to study

dolby · 2008-03-31 18:34:40

that poor guy seems lost

Arch Linux

#1 2008-03-31 14:24:20

Is Arch really becoming unstable?

#2 2008-03-31 14:39:23

Re: Is Arch really becoming unstable?

#3 2008-03-31 14:40:02

Re: Is Arch really becoming unstable?

#4 2008-03-31 14:40:15

Re: Is Arch really becoming unstable?

#5 2008-03-31 14:52:50

Re: Is Arch really becoming unstable?

#6 2008-03-31 15:03:11

Re: Is Arch really becoming unstable?

#7 2008-03-31 15:11:08

Re: Is Arch really becoming unstable?

#8 2008-03-31 15:25:42

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#9 2008-03-31 15:29:00

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#10 2008-03-31 16:04:18

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#11 2008-03-31 16:30:10

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#12 2008-03-31 16:43:04

Re: Is Arch really becoming unstable?

#13 2008-03-31 16:49:39

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#14 2008-03-31 17:06:47

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#15 2008-03-31 17:08:16

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#16 2008-03-31 17:35:35

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#17 2008-03-31 17:54:38

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#18 2008-03-31 17:59:56

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#19 2008-03-31 18:06:01

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#20 2008-03-31 18:10:24

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#23 2008-03-31 18:24:51

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#24 2008-03-31 18:31:55

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#25 2008-03-31 18:34:40

Re: Is Arch really becoming unstable?

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