The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

Ecky · 2011-11-19 03:55:00

Arch is great ... but sliced bread is better ;P

Although ... How is it possible for ANY OS to open amarok almost instantly! There must be voodoo at work

Gui's all over the place have their merit for some people, but I love the 'build it from the ground up' approach ... and you only have to do it once!

I have to put my tongue in my cheek there until I'm proved wrong

Rolling release is great, but as I'm proven to have the ability to break anything it's always only gonna be as good as my backup ... luckily I know how to make backups

That there is another argument against automated updates, I usually boot into whatever lightweight linux I have installed purely for maintenance/troubleshooting/other quick jobs, then run a script that rsync's the necessary folders to another machine, reboot into the 'main OS', then manually update (or fool with whatever I was plannin on experimenting with). Only ever needed the backup a few times, but when it's needed, it's beyond price, and I can virtually guarantee that if I'd let updates run automatically I would've needed them more often

I was almost thinkin The Arch Way before I got here ... more voodoo?

I'm still in the setting things up as I want them stage, but so far I'm definitely liking Arch

blackout23 · 2011-11-23 18:09:46

The first thing in noticed about Arch is that it feels super responsive, which must be due to i686 and x86_64 optimization.
Simple programs like the gnome-terminal or nautlius start significantly faster than on any other distro. On Ubuntu you can
see how the terminal gradually builds up over the course of a second. With Arch it just appears. It's almost like having it
installed on a SSD without having one.

im_ka · 2011-11-25 13:08:16

wow, i started this thread 6,5 years ago and it's still going strong

although my main system is windows 7 on my laptop (it has to be, due to work), i have arch with xfce running under vmware and use it daily. it's much more convenient the dual-booting.

Last edited by im_ka (2011-11-25 13:08:49)

blackout23 · 2011-11-26 16:31:07

im_ka wrote:

wow, i started this thread 6,5 years ago and it's still going strong
although my main system is windows 7 on my laptop (it has to be, due to work), i have arch with xfce running under vmware and use it daily. it's much more convenient the dual-booting.

What work specific programs do you need that are only available for windows? Just curious.

train_wreck · 2011-11-28 23:06:33

Just joining in the wash. I've been using Arch since ~2005 (or 2006? idk, it's been a while lol). Since I began, I've had this one server box that used to be my gaming machine till around '06 when I retired it to the basement. It's had the same basic installation on it since then, having survived RAM, HD and PSU failures over the years. I honestly can say that this is the best iteration of the Linux system that I've EVER used . Pacman is a programming feat in and of itself, and in fact am thinking about doing an end-of-year thesis on it for a college course next year. And the speed is absolutely stunning. I've got a literally 11-year-old IBM netvista desktop with a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 processor & 256MB of RAM. This thing was actually running WinXP at my job (!) when it was taken out of commision. Instantly I knew: Arch router box! I'm amazed at the robustness and power of iptables; I fully understand why practically every single home router/gateway box runs Linux.
I seriously appreciate all of the good folks who are/have been involved with the management and operations of this distro. You guys have essentially a full-time job on your hands, and I'm amazed how well things have gone. I am seriously considering making a donation to the distro this holiday; I've been freeloading long enough lol

hadrons123 · 2011-12-04 15:08:02

Arch is good.not the best.There is no such thing as the best for that matter,and there is no such distro as the best linux distro.some fits for some people and some doesnt.
lot of fanboyism around here.every distro has a thread like this.
sounds like somekind of therapy to have a constant positive feedback for the distro users by the distro users.

it just boils down to either you use arch or dont use arch linux... as simple as that.

let me quote some FreeBSD philosophy here...it fits every distribution.

Arch linux is better than (insert other system) ------>This is user opinion only.

(insert some other system) is better than Arch linux----->This is user opinion only.

SanskritFritz · 2011-12-04 21:09:58

hadrons123, thank you for restroring the balance in our universe. But we are brainwashed, we honestly think, arch is teh best! Of course, tomorrow we might think differently, but who cares about tomorrow?

hadrons123 · 2011-12-05 00:37:12

every now and then we need to believe in something.if you dont honestly believe that arch is the best you wouldnt be using arch or not even talking here in this place.
Currently i use arch and i like it more than any other distro.
Its a subjective feeling and i understand that.

SanskritFritz · 2011-12-05 06:55:13

I should use more smileys im my posts sometimes

nomilieu · 2011-12-05 12:35:16

@hadrons

There might be no such thing as a best distro, but there are certainly quite a lot that aren't the best.
This thread is about why we think Arch is better than most of the other crap we tried (except Gentoo; I like Gentoo).

Carharttjimmy · 2011-12-07 16:22:14

I really like Arch because I was able to build everything from the ground up. I worked with Ubuntu and Fedora before and even worked with Fedora Core and even on a custom distro a friend of mine built.

The AUR and the official repositories are amazing as well as the IRC channel, when I needed help with something, they either referred me to the wiki or gave me what I needed if the wiki didn't cover it.

In Ubuntu and Fedora everything was given to me and auto-configured. In Arch, I had to do it all and I actually liked that as I like to meddle with configs.

Thats why I love Arch.

im_ka · 2011-12-12 10:59:13

blackout23 wrote:

im_ka wrote:
wow, i started this thread 6,5 years ago and it's still going strong
although my main system is windows 7 on my laptop (it has to be, due to work), i have arch with xfce running under vmware and use it daily. it's much more convenient the dual-booting.

What work specific programs do you need that are only available for windows? Just curious.

i initially got a laptop from the sysadmin with windows, saying that windows is the os to use. but recently, i looked at the policies we have and found out that there's no rule i wouldn't comply with using (arch) linux. so i've viped windows and turned the setup around, got windows running in a vm just in case.
also, using ms exchange services is not as smooth as with outlook, but running 99% arch is well worth it.

this time, i went with a minimal kde installation and i love it more than ever. i tried gnome 3 (been using gnome 2 for a long time), but it just doesn't feel right.

Svinto · 2012-01-15 22:59:20

I have for a long time struggled with which Linux distribution I should start with. I had been using Linux in school and in work but never installed it or used it on my own machines.
Some distros scared me (Slackware).
Others felt bloated (Ubuntu).
Some looked ok but didn't feel right (Mandriva, Redhat). They felt strange and I couldn't figure out how they worked.

In the end I choose to start with Gentoo, but I never got through the damned installation. I read the guides, there were so many instructions and my own kernel never compiled correctly.

August 2011 I found Arch. It was minimalistic but didn't feel hindered to not be able to do something. It uses binary packages but can also help with compiling from source.
The Arch Way, the ability to configure everything as I wanted it. The simplicity of the inner workings.

One month later I've played with udev settings, tried both apache and nginx with PHP, got remote access to a torrent client to work, set up my own Desktop Environment, migrated to GRUB2, set up multiple networks with netcfg, created virtual machines in QEMU and lots more.
I have so much fun and the possibilities seems endless.

Thank you so much for helping me in to the Linux world. Arch rocks!

Last edited by Svinto (2012-01-15 22:59:51)

/dev/zero · 2012-01-19 06:20:06

I little while back, I locked myself out of Ubuntu and asked for help on the Ubuntu forums. No answer.

Now, I'm having trouble setting up an encrypted FreeBSD with geli, I run into problems, so ask for help on the FreeBSD forums. Not a single answer after 12 hours.

When I ask similar questions on the Arch forums, it takes about 5 minutes to get the first response, and if the question is framed coherently, the problem can be solved in half a dozen posts.

Arch is best.

hadrons123 · 2012-01-19 06:27:35

But the mods are always there for english grammar corrections in FreeBSD forums!

Rather than grammar corrections it would be useful if they did some (tech) support replies to FreeBSD newbs to improve FreeBSD adoption.

Arch is way better than any forums I have seen!

/dev/zero · 2012-01-19 06:31:33

Lol, well, I'm a fan of the Queen's own English myself, so I was kind of looking forward to a forum where people would get reproached for being lazy ;-)

Still, if they don't want to encourage talent when it comes knocking at their door ...

Yep. Arch.

hadrons123 · 2012-01-19 06:46:57

English is not the primary language for at least 70% of the world population.We(people who don't speak English primarily) try to convey the message to some extent.We are not lazy.We don't know English very well, and its a fact.But grammar correction 'all' the time is annoying ! I 'm not blaming the Mods, they are just doing some volunteer work.Its the principle i 'm against.
One of the lessons learnt while trying FreeBSD:
Lot of times for all the elitism about FreeBSD and documentation it is known for in the media, its not really true!

/dev/zero · 2012-01-19 07:04:54

hadrons123 wrote:

We are not lazy. We don't know English very well, and its a fact.

Yep, sorry, I didn't mean any offence.

It's just that many people who do have English as their first language, even people with technical backgrounds, still manage to mangle things like basic spelling.

Anyone who doesn't have English as their first language, and still tries to post in forums where English is default, they get my utmost respect.

/dev/zero · 2012-01-21 22:33:10

After still getting no response from the FreeBSD crowd, I've turned my desktop into an Arch install with an encrypted LVM spread across my three hard drives and just successfully booted into it for the first time.

Fun times ahead!

quan2m · 2012-01-27 02:00:06

Like many of the people who have posted before me, I was a distro nomad... Wandering the bleak desert of OS finding a temporary OaSis but eventually finding something that spoiled the water, or drove me again to the road.

SlackWare: My first, my true love, even when it came on floppies. I remember when I found out (after running it for a couple of years) that you could buy a copy at Fry's Electronics. It was like the world knew me. That was before I discovered good package management (Debian). I had already been destroyed by bad package management (Redhat). So I tried slapt... and that did alright, but the system was still too out of date for my objectives.

Debian: Holy crap is it stable. And slow. And out-of-date.

Gentoo: Wicked cool concept for package management, but build times are inconvenient, and nearly intolerable when the package you need won't build. The software repos are shrinking and the support has always been up and down... sometimes intolerably down.

Sabayon: Again, awesome ideas, and the installation is a breeze. Wide array of ways to build the box, but again the support of the community was sometimes hostile. It's not as if we install a distro to be a pain in the arse, it's because we're looking for a home.

Ubuntu: Like Debian, only unstable... and slightly more up to date. To be fair, they have the general installation going well for them, but they seem to have copied Windows ability to make a complete abomination of an upgrade. Also, I registered a bug with a wireless driver that got 1 automated question, and 1 person to ask for one more piece of info. After that... nothing, considering that the bug was serious in that it could generate several MB a minute of log files...

This brings me to Arch: I want and/or need some up-to-the-minute applications. This means compiling and/or running with a rolling distro. Arch does both, in a coherent easy to manage way. PKGBUILDS are genious. They are easy to understand and write, even for someone who doesn't spend a lot of time at that task. Arch has managed the first kernel upgrade where either my video (NVidia) or my wireless (Broadcom) didn't crap out afterwards, requiring hours of hunting around and tweaking. In fact, when I first installed Arch, I thought that there must be more magic behind the network installation, so I spent hours looking for the rituals and incantations. Finally, I went to the IRC channel and asked. Like a student I was answered with a question of "Why didn't you do X?", so I did what the person mentioned... and Bacchus descended on a cloud drawn by flying dolphins ridden by cavorting nymphs... and my wifi just worked.

korgan1983 · 2012-02-07 09:31:54

First I want to thank you all for that great distro, wiki and community!

I tried a lot of distros and package managers.

First touch on Arch I get with a try in a virtualbox (UNIX Administration with a Windows is a pain!) 2009 and it run great! Installation was fast and simple together with the wiki and after a few houres I got a complete desktop. Starting to loving it! Collegues used differenct distris and we tried different of applications to work with the unix systems. What should I say? The pacman and the repositories are great and the best: IT SIMPLY WORKS! Out of the box!

After one year using Arch I started to get it running on my private MacBook 5.2, but had some issues with defekt DVD and other Layer8 Problems, so dropped this but started to migrate my private server to Arch and it is running till now stable! with rolling release! I love it

2011 I give arch a second try on my MacBook and no it works fine. Migrated all from OS X (that os is a pain!) to Arch and the system is running till now without problems! Lovly kind of power and accu runtime and that with gnome 3, lvm and lux

I just want to thank you all and want come to the end WHY Arch is the best distri (for me):

Great KISS philosophy
good tested packages
stable and up to date rolling release
on of the best communities I have ever seen (read)
one of the best wikis, you can find solutions to nearly the most problems

Thanks for building such a Environment! As others already said: I have found a home!

Axalon · 2012-02-08 07:04:16

I've really grown to like Arch over the last two weeks, which rather surprised me. I liked the idea of a bleeding edge distro (even though I realize that latest does not always equate to the greatest, I just like staying up to date anyway) but I was also worried that it might be a bit too unstable. So far though it's been pretty stable, it probably helps that I'm not using the testing repos. I do get random lock ups though that require a restart through a terminal, though I think that may have something to do with Gnome and/or Cinnamon.

Also, I am a fan of vanilla packages and BSD-style configs. Of course the Wiki is fantastic, I've only needed to ask for help once so far. I greatly enjoy the AUR, the amount of packages is staggering and PKGBUILDs are great.

tantaemolis · 2012-02-19 00:07:58

I don't know about any other distribution, but I can definitely say that Arch is better than Ubuntu! My wife's laptop, which actually belonged to me back when I was in graduate school a few years ago, is pretty low-specs; it was dying under Ubuntu, but is now lean and mean and working great with a basic Arch install and LXDE. All it took was a few hours of research and trial-and-error using the excellent ArchWiki.

Anyways, I figured it was worth reporting whenever a nerd can use his skills to impress his significant-other.

ipeters61 · 2012-02-22 02:09:46

I have posted in the welcome thread, however I now realize where I can post my love of this distribution.

I am 17 years old. I started messing around with Linux when I was 9 or 10 and installed Fedora Core 2 on my first laptop (Dell Latitude C600, Pentium III 750 MHz, 256 MB RAM). It was nice to play with, but I honestly had no idea what I was doing. I actually had the full GNOME and KDE packages installed! This really did create a mess, however the system behaved beautifully still. At this point, I sort of fell in love with Linux.

Over the past 8 years, I've messed with Fedora, SUSE, Debian, CentOS, and Ubuntu, to name a few (I will admit that I still to this day dual boot with Windows on my main computer/laptop, for compatibility reasons). I remember on the Neowin forums when I noticed that many users of Linux on the site were using Arch. I first read about Arch about a year ago, and I found it daunting, so I strayed away from it.

Up until I started using Arch, I loved Debian. However, Debian seems to have an issue with my current laptop's wireless card (Intel WiFi 5100). At this point, I figured I should give Arch a try. I downloaded Arch, copied it to my flash drive and gave it a chance. The Arch Installation Framework was pretty self-explanatory, so I never had any troubles with it. When I got into the installed operating system, I went to log in and noticed that not even startx would get me to a GUI! (I did install Xfce in the Arch Installation Framework) After doing nothing more than reading through the wiki, I had a fully operational system within an hour. I went to reboot, and still to this day, my start up time is only 10 seconds!

I will admit I use Debian for some other systems, where I simply do not want to start from the ground up. However, I've been running it on my laptop for over a month now and I love it.

skualito · 2012-02-22 18:20:27

After quite a long pause, more than a year, I'm back using Archlinux. And I still think it's the best distro. I've been given an eeepc 1000HE, and Arch runs at lightning speed on it. I tried a few other distros, and find arch to be the more robust. I've been trying among others puppy linux, ubuntu, archbang, and slitaz.
That's it, I wanted to share my satisfaction, keep up the good work, arch devs!

Arch Linux

#601 2011-11-19 03:55:00

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#602 2011-11-23 18:09:46

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