Arch vs. Debian

Zepp · 2008-06-20 14:15:38

JawsThemeSwimming428 wrote:

Yes, I did post the same question on the Debian Forum, here's the link http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? … highlight= . Thanks for all of your responses. I think I am going to end up using both and see which is better for me. I will probably use Debian testing.

Wow, that Lavendem guy is an idiot. I'm glad to see the other debian users shot him down pretty quickly.

lucke · 2008-06-20 14:24:15

Let's turn it into an interboard flamewar \o/

sniffles · 2008-06-20 15:12:41

\o/ YEAA!!!

Edit: Um.. but let's pick on someone smaller than us instead, what do you think?

Last edited by sniffles (2008-06-20 15:13:14)

cautha · 2008-06-20 15:33:11

underpenguin wrote:

And to think I always go on about how the Signal-to-Noise ratio is so much higher than other linux forums. Shame on me.

What the uncouth Debian user doesn't know is that in order to get good support, you have to ask the right questions

Do you mean the Arch forums (fora)? In my first days here I confess I had trouble getting help, but I think that's because I'm impatient. (I would end up figuring things out before anyone answered me.) More recently, though, I've had success.

Harry

underpenguin · 2008-06-20 16:15:50

sniffles wrote:

\o/ YEAA!!!
Edit: Um.. but let's pick on someone smaller than us instead, what do you think?

NO! What would be the fun in that? I want to awaken in the middle of the night with a brick with a giant red swirl on it crashing through my window and have "APT RUELZ PAC DRUELZ" spray-painted on my car.

cautha wrote:

Do you mean the Arch forums (fora)? In my first days here I confess I had trouble getting help, but I think that's because I'm impatient. (I would end up figuring things out before anyone answered me.) More recently, though, I've had success.

It's forums, unless you want to go down the 'Virii/Boxen' road, which I do not.
I was referring to the Arch forums. Indeed, it may take longer to get a response (probably not, though), but when you do, its much more likely to contain useful information (not really referring to Debian forums, just other distros in general that I have tried).

Last edited by underpenguin (2008-06-20 16:19:27)

cautha · 2008-06-20 16:25:52

Actually, it is fora (although virii is incorrect, I'll give you that; it should be viri, but then it gets confused with the word for "man"). I took Latin for 4 years in high school

Harry

sniffles · 2008-06-20 16:39:09

cautha wrote:

(although virii is incorrect, I'll give you that; it should be vir

Apparently it should be "viruses" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus unless your intent is the "hacker jargon".

cautha · 2008-06-20 17:13:05

Wikipedia to the rescue!

schivmeister · 2008-06-20 17:16:03

Their occurrence can be variously attributed to hypercorrection formed by analogy to Latin plurals such as alumni or false analogy to Latin plurals such as radii; idiosyncratic use as jargon among a group, such as computer hackers; and deliberate word play, such as on BBSs (see, e.g.: leet).

I'm having a good laugh

Anyway, aptitude anyday in Debian(-based stuff). I've always used that instead of apt-get. Don't know how much it differs now but for the time I used Debian distros it felt better at a technical level.

On topic, I think Arch ~ Debian. HA. HA. HA. Just get rid of the -devel packages and add a ports-like system.

Last edited by schivmeister (2008-06-20 17:19:57)

Berticus · 2008-06-20 17:22:40

Since when did slackware have a DVD? Last time I checked they suggested using floppies, and was looking into releasing some CDs. No comments or suggestions about Gentoo?

Man, I haven't been to the Debian forums in a while. Just looked up my posts there. Man, I was quite the nub back then...

Misfit138 · 2008-06-20 17:25:38

Funny how fast a flame war can get started and subsequently reinforced by users who have tried distro X, become frustrated by its methodology for not being what they are used to, and finally resign themselves to hating or criticizing the very distro that they themselves were curious to try in the first place for not being distro Y- which they vehemently defend and honor.

Arch and Debian are both excellent, high-quality distros, of which there are but a handful. Besides Slackware and Gentoo, (which I do not particularly prefer, yet I must acknowledge their quality) Debian and Arch are among the highest quality GNU/Linux distros available.
Arch is largely what you make it, and its design approach and methodology have, and will remain, true to its own rather unique principles which appeal to its users and devs.
Personally, I recommend Debian for certain things, and to certain users, just as I recommend OpenBSD for others, and PCLinuxOS for still others.
For myself, I use Arch for all machines, because I have come to embrace its methodology and philosophy and it serves my purposes quite well.

Misfit138 · 2008-06-20 17:27:05

Berticus wrote:

Since when did slackware have a DVD? Last time I checked they suggested using floppies, and was looking into releasing some CDs. No comments or suggestions about Gentoo?.

Floppies? Slack 11 was on DVD, and so is 12, and 12.1...

sniffles · 2008-06-20 17:44:04

Berticus wrote:

Since when did slackware have a DVD? Last time I checked they suggested using floppies, and was looking into releasing some CDs. No comments or suggestions about Gentoo?

Man have you been living under a rock? Slackware even ships with Linux 2.6 nowadays. SRSLY dude.. I don't know what's going on in your life right now but how can you not know this stuff ? You just have no excuse. Oh and BTW, this thread is supposed to be "arch vs debian" so..

Last edited by sniffles (2008-06-20 17:44:34)

Berticus · 2008-06-20 17:45:18

I haven't checked out Slackware since version 10.2... Was going to say that I didn't even know which version I used, only that it was before version 11. Then I realized Debian was the second distro I tried, and it was version 3.1 Sarge. In any event I read up on how to install Slackware since it's installation process was much different than Fedora Core and Debian. I had no clue about the inner workings of Linux, so I didn't know the significance of each software set. I don't think I even know what a kernel was back then! In any event, the place I read up on how to install Slackware said the conventional way was to use floppies, but newer releases have CD images now.

Hmm... quite interesting to see my knowledge grow as I migrate between distros posting on different forums.

I may just have to try installing Slackware, Gentoo and Debian on a spare hard drive when I move to arch.

josomebody · 2008-06-20 19:45:49

I used FreeBSD on my own machines back in college and our CS program was centered around a clunky old HP-UX mainframe, so I came to GNU/Linux with a background in low-level Unix stuff. Swore off of computers for a while then installed Ubuntu on my first eve laptop (and first ever box not made out of dumpster parts) about three years ago, after playing with Knoppix a lot and fooling around on free shell accounts. Got tired of Ubuntu after about six months and switch to Debian, and then finally upgraded my hardware a couple of weeks ago and decided to switch to Arch, which I'd had my eye on for a while but never had the space on my old machines and didn't wanna hose all my data (no dvd burner or anything else to make big backups til just recently). Here's my personal comparison of all these distros:

Ubuntu holds your hand WAY too much. It's a good learning tool for noobs, but not something looking back I would really wanna commit to. It's a good distro to get your feet wet, learn your way around the kernel and filesystem, and move on as soon as possible. Dist-upgrades are a nightmare and happen all too often. I've heard of a lot of Ubuntu users regularly doing clean installs when the new release comes out and not bothering with a dist-upgrade. If you miss a couple your system can get rather unuseable. And it just doesn't feel like the system completely belongs to you. The forums are occasionally good for help if there's something stupid I just can't work through due to a mental block or just not knowing how something works, but they're pretty low-level in general and not too many people seem to have a deep working knowledge of what they're doing, no offense to Ubuntuists. I found it really hard to do things my way without breaking my system.

Debian, same thing just less of it. What bugged me the most about it was the bloat (e.g., it installs every available xserver-xorg-video-* package by default, stuff like that wastes space and it's a pain to go through and uninstall all that unnecessary junk), and, yeah, the general complexity of the system makes it hard to make some big changes. Could never seem to get certain graphics cards working right and stuff like that. Overall, it felt freer than Ubuntu, but still way bloated.

I fell in love with Arch real quick. Maybe I just never learned enough about apt, but it seems like pacman is way more powerful, or at least all the options are right upfront to use after a quick perusal of the man page. All my hardware came up and worked real easy, other than using ndiswrapper for my wireless at the moment, not a big issue for me. The system is just really easy to figure out and manipulate, because there's not too much of it there to worry about. You can fool with one part without worrying about breaking another, and you can do a lot of low-level things that would break Ubuntu or Debian. And package building is a piece of cake. I was scared to even try building custom packages in the Deb-based distros. Just looked like a pain.

I'm gradually migrating my whole LAN to Arch now. I've got a lot of older hardware that could use a leaner system.

JeremyTheWicked · 2008-06-20 20:32:39

I've used Debian a few years ago, then Ubuntu, then Arch. My impressions are similar to josomebody. Don't even get me started on Ubuntu's dist-upgrades (I'm one of the people who ended up making clean installs).

With regards to Debian (and other Debian-based distros) the really nice thing is the tools for autoconfiguration of packages - if you don't like to tweak things. If you prefer control, Arch is way better and simpler. After a while I found the tools that Debian provides it's greatest weakness. Like josomebody stated, it's easier to fiddle with things in Arch without breaking the system than it is in Debian - I find the whole dpkg, dselect, apt etc. overcomplicated - I had to go and fix things more than once when dpkg configuration failed etc. Annoying. In Arch I have to configure things manually anyway - which can look like a nuisance at the beginning but I learned to appreciate it after a while (at least I know what's on my system and why).

One story that may help you decide: in Gnome, I spent two days looking for a graphical menu editor like the one included e.g. in Ubuntu (I wanted to add some apps and in Arch you can only "untick" already existant menu entries) before I realized there is something there called xdg which is a CLI system for menu manipulation. I had to read a little but now I know the way menus are set up in Linux (xdg is the underlying layer used by Gnome, KDE and others) and can install new menu items in no time. The moral of the story: if this sounds ridiculous, don't use Arch. If it sounds interesting to you: Arch is the way to go.

Last edited by JeremyTheWicked (2008-06-20 20:37:40)

RedShift · 2008-06-20 21:56:57

I always found debian to be a big mess. Take a look at the initscripts, they are inconsistent like hell. And the output is just dumped on the screen, sometimes with newlines, sometimes without newlines. All of which makes it hard to debug. And love what they did (NOT) with the pure-ftpd package, you wouldn't believe how fscked the configuration is. And best of all, I couldn't find the documentation of their specific way of configuration!

And I especially hate it when you install software and automatically starts, and it automatically starts on boot too. All without being asked.

And those annoying blue screens asking you to configure package x. It won't just leave you alone for just one freaking minute.

People talk about debian like it's the greatest thing. No more debian for me. Ever.

Last edited by RedShift (2008-06-20 22:00:04)

Zepp · 2008-06-20 22:00:44

Berticus wrote:

No comments or suggestions about Gentoo?

Gentoo is awesome. I run it on my desktop and really use it the most. I like these forums though so I stick around and help out occasionally. I still have a headless machine running arch but it doesn't get much use.

sniffles · 2008-06-20 22:23:37

josomebody, JeremyTheWicked, RedShift == weaklings It takes a -real- man to overcome the complexity of Debian hehehehe. (just joking don't get your knickers in a twist). Debian is great, sorry, that's the truth.

Zepp: I -knew- your avatar looks familiar! Is Ha1f still using those fantastic avatars ? [ P.S.: Exherbo FTW ! ]

Last edited by sniffles (2008-06-20 22:25:19)

JeremyTheWicked · 2008-06-20 22:55:16

@sniffles - I'm a real weakling but how could I compare to the greatest KJ on this board ;P But seriously now: don't you get any validation in real life that you look for it on the Arch forum? Poor you

I forgot to mention what I really hate about Debian: it's their fascist approach to free software. Try and run Debian as a desktop system without any unofficial repos like marillat. Forget about mp3 etc. Also: this whole quarrel with Mozilla about brands - would it really be that much of a fuss for Debian developers to get the permit from Mozilla? Don't think so. But it wouldn't be FREE anymore, duh. (I'd understand it if they were to lazy to do it - I can't stand how they get political about it).

Berticus · 2008-06-20 22:59:37

Zepp, I'm heading in the other direction. Going from Gentoo to arch. Maybe it's just my setup, but being in 64-bit with Gentoo hasn't been the greatest experience. I had to remove the whole haskell branch out of my profile since nothing could compile when I tried updating. There were a few other nuisances, but I don't remember them at the current moment. I tried keeping track of all of them in a text file in /root, but I got lazy with that, so now I've got some stuff that doesn't work anymore.

Oh yeah, and I recognized you the other day there. Saw your avatar and username and was like, "I know that name from somewhere...."

Edited
Oh, as for Debian and Slackware, from what I remember, they weren't that bad. Debian was just slow on the updates, and I didn't check out the testing repo.

I remember reading from one of the documentations after sarge 3.1 was released one of the biggest reasons for the slow down was because of the infamous XFree86. I also had a problem with the printer, but that's probably fixed by now since back then I was told to file a bug report. The thing that screwed up my debian installation was when I tried to access /home on debian through FC3, and I didn't have permissions. As I mentioned, I was a nub, so I chmod 777 on /home/Berticus, and that seemed to have totally killed it.

I wasn't in slackware too long, but I was annoyed how it didn't power down when you shut down. Plus I had no clue how to configure LILO, only had experience with GRUB. Had absolutely no clue that you had to use the lilo command to update the lilo configurations. The only way that I got into Slackware was by easing into it through Zenwalk, which I thought was an absolutely beautiful distro. Fastest install I had ever encountered - less than 10 minutes, and it's what really got me into the minimalist paradigm.

Last edited by Berticus (2008-06-20 23:07:28)

Zepp · 2008-06-20 23:28:12

sniffles wrote:

josomebody, JeremyTheWicked, RedShift == weaklings It takes a -real- man to overcome the complexity of Debian hehehehe. (just joking don't get your knickers in a twist). Debian is great, sorry, that's the truth.
Zepp: I -knew- your avatar looks familiar! Is Ha1f still using those fantastic avatars ? [ P.S.: Exherbo FTW ! ]

He got his avatar setting ability taken away for awhile because of nsfw avatars he refused to remove so no .

Berticus wrote:

Zepp, I'm heading in the other direction. Going from Gentoo to arch. Maybe it's just my setup, but being in 64-bit with Gentoo hasn't been the greatest experience. I had to remove the whole haskell branch out of my profile since nothing could compile when I tried updating. There were a few other nuisances, but I don't remember them at the current moment. I tried keeping track of all of them in a text file in /root, but I got lazy with that, so now I've got some stuff that doesn't work anymore.
Oh yeah, and I recognized you the other day there. Saw your avatar and username and was like, "I know that name from somewhere...."

I didn't go from arch -> gentoo, I have been using Gentoo solidly for over 5 years now . I started playing with arch awhile back on some of my other machines. I like it... but I still really like gentoo so I keep it for my desktop, at least for now. I don't have any problems with x64 on gentoo so far, though I haven't really played with the haskell packages much beyond installing xmonad. Anyway they are both excellent distros and I think arch is my favourite binary distro. Arch is the only other distro I have kept on any of my machines for over a year .

Last edited by Zepp (2008-06-20 23:29:30)

AdrianTM · 2008-06-21 03:30:06

sniffles wrote:

julian67: Hehe, salutations to the Debian forums Maybe we can get together over a beer and gossip about the openSUSE forums or something

Anytime.

I got a huge kick out of reading some replies.

Happy to oblige, I'm a bit miffed that my quote was not considered the best

Last edited by AdrianTM (2008-06-21 03:34:53)

Cucscspr · 2008-06-22 09:41:08

JeremyTheWicked wrote:

One story that may help you decide: in Gnome, I spent two days looking for a graphical menu editor like the one included e.g. in Ubuntu (I wanted to add some apps and in Arch you can only "untick" already existant menu entries) before I realized there is something there called xdg which is a CLI system for menu manipulation. I had to read a little but now I know the way menus are set up in Linux (xdg is the underlying layer used by Gnome, KDE and others) and can install new menu items in no time. The moral of the story: if this sounds ridiculous, don't use Arch. If it sounds interesting to you: Arch is the way to go.

That's an easy decision m8. Just install AlaCarte, comes in both i686 and x86_64.

___________________________
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ? Oh great, now my lp1 is on fire!"
___________________________
"I would rather spend 10 hours reading someone else's source code than 10 minutes listening to Musak waiting for technical support which isn't."

RedShift · 2008-06-24 08:40:00

sniffles wrote:

josomebody, JeremyTheWicked, RedShift == weaklings It takes a -real- man to overcome the complexity of Debian hehehehe. (just joking don't get your knickers in a twist). Debian is great, sorry, that's the truth.
Zepp: I -knew- your avatar looks familiar! Is Ha1f still using those fantastic avatars ? [ P.S.: Exherbo FTW ! ]

Yeah that's some real solid reasoning you got there. NOT. If you're going to troll then at least say WHY Debian is so great and why it's the truth. What's next, you're going to drive your bombcar right in the middle of this forum?

Arch Linux

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Re: Arch vs. Debian

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Re: Arch vs. Debian

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