The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

ngoonee · 2012-08-24 07:37:32

Merging into The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread since that's what this is

lorenzo111 · 2012-08-24 21:01:09

I just got my hands on a labtop for testing new distributions. The first one I tried was Arch heard a lot of mixed reviews about it. The usual difficult installation but great package management. Im always up for a challenge, so I must admit the installation was not a drive by so to speak. I actually had to use the beginners manual (I couldn't believe I had to read something for a installtion go figure). After it is all said and done I have been using Arch about a month now and have no desire to try another distribution. This thing is silky smooth, Back to my topic I had grand plans of trying 1 distro every two weeks just to see how things have came with other distros. I primarily come from Mandrake---> Mandriva, Redhat / FC with a little Debian mixed in background.

I just wanted to salute the devs here, I have been in and out of Linux over 10 years and hands down this is the cat's meow. Whatever I don't know the Arch wiki has been there to guide me. You have a dedicated user who is about to wipe Fedora 17 off his main pc and say good bye!!!

jasonwryan · 2012-08-24 21:15:01

Welcome.

Merging with the Official Arch is Best thread.

lorenzo111 · 2012-08-25 03:56:01

Anyone thought of getting a ARCH tattoo?

duster · 2012-08-25 13:00:55

HA! Awsome.

fsckd · 2012-08-25 13:24:54

lorenzo111 wrote:

Anyone thought of getting a ARCH tattoo?

Forum search for tattoo. It has been done.

barretme · 2012-09-14 03:59:04

lorenzo111 wrote:

Anyone thought of getting a ARCH tattoo?

I don't think I'm that hardcore but I'd defiantly like some Arch merch. Stickers, t-shirts, etc.

kinleyd · 2012-09-21 08:37:38

Arch is the best! Thank you to all the good folks behind Arch Gnu/Linux.

I've come to Arch up this route: Windows XP > Ubuntu 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 > Arch.

I love the configurability of Arch; the great documentation and the amount I've learned about Linux while setting up my systems with Arch; that it always has the latest versions of everything including the kernel (yes, Ubuntu, it was a pain waiting for new versions or working with ppas), and I love being able to say goodbye to the pain of the boondoggle inflicted on us via Gnome 3 and Ubuntu Unity. Arch keeps it light, tight and really usable:

I've settled on OpenBox as my wm, and tint2 as my panel, nitrogen for backgrounds, slim for login, and pnmixer to get my audio control on the panel. A bit of tweaking was necessary, but the end result couldn't be more pleasingly minimalist and aesthetic for me. Arch made it easy to make that choice.

Thanks a ton, my friends!

Last edited by kinleyd (2012-09-22 18:54:03)

stevepa · 2012-10-17 15:28:59

I enjoy doing fresh installs (to VB) using the new media releases, comparing my results back to the Beginner's guide. So, now that the news says that new installs are pure systemd, that was even more compelling. Hope this post is appropriate to the forum.

After doing a basic install last night, the system booted so fast that I thought there was a problem! I bet it booted from grub to login in under 7 seconds! Wow! And this is on a SATA HDD.

After that success, I proceeded to install XFCE, which went off perfectly. (I do need to re-read the Guide about what it says about dbus in XFCE vs the new media, though)

Now, I have not installed any major software, like mysql or postgresql, to see how systemd might be affected.

But based on what I have seen with the new media and systemd, I am impressed, for what it is worth. :-)

Steve.

jasonwryan · 2012-10-17 16:33:16

Merging with the Unofficial Arch is the Best thread...

Calder · 2012-10-18 23:09:51

Hi Archies!

I considered posting at the end of "The Official Unofficial 'Arch is the Best' Thread" but didn't want this to get buried in a mountain similar praise before anyone got the chance to read it and get a small warm fuzzy feeling. That said, feel free to merge it into that thread (which I gather to be a pretty common practice) as soon as you want.

Anyway, I just finished setting my first Arch system, and wanted to drop by the forums and give a big thanks. I'd read about Arch before and been scared off by the 20 page Beginners Guide that stands in for a command line or (gasp!) graphical installer, but this time I decided to give it a go. And now that I'm typing this on a gorgeous, sleek, fast new Gnome 3 install, I completely understand the reasoning behind such an installation procedure.

I'm a fairly soft-core Linux user and most of my experience up until now has been with Ubuntu until recent attempts to force a fresh install of Ubuntu to accept Gnome 3 as anything more than an unwanted step-child sent me distro-hopping. At the end of an Ubuntu install, sure you might have a working system. But it's a working system stuffed with a thousand unnecessary parts eagerly waiting to fix the aforementioned "working system" problem. And with most of them, you either don't know they're there until the shit hits the fan, or you can't do anything about it once it does, because (surprise!) they're required by a bajillion other things.

This Arch install left me with a totally different feeling. This time, I (sort of) understand what's going on in my OS, and even the stuff I don't totally understand is there because I bloody well put it there. It doesn't feel like I wasted 3 days installing an OS, it feels like I spent 3 days learning about one.

Pacman and the repos are beautiful. Pacman is fast and as simple as it can be without compromising reality to match human mental models. The repos have contained everything I've needed thus far and much much more. And the only dependencies for a package are actual dependencies. Coming from a world of apt-get, that's a welcome relief.

The Wiki is incredibly written. I'm not sure how Arch wound up with the entire good-expository-writer community of the Linux world, but... damn! None of this would have been remotely possible, let alone any part worthwhile or fulfilling, without it.

And finally, the attitude (warning, wishy-washy sentimentality lies ahead) is incredible. The strict policy of "no, we will not compromise elegance for ease of use" forces people to find the elegant solution rather than patching ugly ones. The mantra of "assume nothing" leads to an incredibly diverse package ecosystem which in turn encourages modularity and good design. The strict refusal to patch forces people to confront problems at their root and benefit everyone instead of fixing them only for a small slice of the open-source world. And as a side effect, you're actually treating the disease itself rather than duct-taping over the symptoms. Um... That metaphor worked.

TLDR: I guess what I wanted to say 7 paragraphs ago was, thanks!

-Calder

Last edited by Calder (2012-10-18 23:12:48)

jasonwryan · 2012-10-18 23:23:17

Welcome to the boards.

As you anticipated, this is being merged...

rallyemax · 2012-11-09 18:40:23

I have to jump on this little bandwagon and say that I completely agree! I've been running lightweight (relatively speaking) Debian distros for years on a series of underpowered netbooks, and while I continue to think that Debian is a great distribution, I've been completely wowed by Arch.

It all started by accident a couple of weeks ago. I was building an embedded project around the Raspberry Pi platform, and, somewhat dismayed by the long boot time of the Rasbian (Debian-based) distro, decided to try Arch Arm on it. The difference was quite incredible -- without any tinkering with either distribution, Raspbian took nearly 40 seconds to console login, and Arch took.......8.5 seconds! And I've shaved that down to 7 and change seconds by disabling networking (once the project is complete, I won't need networking).

I immediately set aside my RaspPi project, dug out an old Core 2 Duo box that I recently picked up for free from a friend's company (they were upgrading their systems and were going to throw out the Core 2 Duo and some Pentium 4 boxes...I'll find something to do with them!), and started playing around with Arch.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I've completely migrated my daily driver netbook to Arch.

There was a bit of a learning curve with systemd, but I've become a total systemd convert. Perhaps even a zealot. I drank the Koolaid and asked for seconds. I knew sysvinit inside and out, could get it to do just about anything I needed, but it was always so hacky -- even the official way of doing things was hacky, and my modifications doubly so.

But systemd is so damn elegant. All the pieces fit together in a logically coherent way, the thing is FAST (I think most of the boot time improvement versus Debian is due to systemd, with the balance being the result of being forced to build the system from scratch rather than opting for a pre-configured Debian image out of laziness). And because it's so elegant, and not hacky, I've actually taken the time to implement all my own tweaks in a systemd-compliant manner. I just didn't want to break the elegance.

Pacman is also much leaner than apt, and on a resource-constrained netbook, that's quite important. Apt (especially in conjunction with aptitude) certainly has some nice features, but the cost in terms of performance is not justified IMHO.

And you gotta love the AUR.

Anyway, thought I'd post some well deserved props. If any maintainers/developers happen to read this, thanks for doing a great job, and keep it up.

(Sent from my new perch at the bleeding edge of Linux.)

mamamia88 · 2012-11-09 22:27:04

rallyemax wrote:

I have to jump on this little bandwagon and say that I completely agree! I've been running lightweight (relatively speaking) Debian distros for years on a series of underpowered netbooks, and while I continue to think that Debian is a great distribution, I've been completely wowed by Arch.
It all started by accident a couple of weeks ago. I was building an embedded project around the Raspberry Pi platform, and, somewhat dismayed by the long boot time of the Rasbian (Debian-based) distro, decided to try Arch Arm on it. The difference was quite incredible -- without any tinkering with either distribution, Raspbian took nearly 40 seconds to console login, and Arch took.......8.5 seconds! And I've shaved that down to 7 and change seconds by disabling networking (once the project is complete, I won't need networking).
I immediately set aside my RaspPi project, dug out an old Core 2 Duo box that I recently picked up for free from a friend's company (they were upgrading their systems and were going to throw out the Core 2 Duo and some Pentium 4 boxes...I'll find something to do with them!), and started playing around with Arch.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I've completely migrated my daily driver netbook to Arch.
There was a bit of a learning curve with systemd, but I've become a total systemd convert. Perhaps even a zealot. I drank the Koolaid and asked for seconds. I knew sysvinit inside and out, could get it to do just about anything I needed, but it was always so hacky -- even the official way of doing things was hacky, and my modifications doubly so.
But systemd is so damn elegant. All the pieces fit together in a logically coherent way, the thing is FAST (I think most of the boot time improvement versus Debian is due to systemd, with the balance being the result of being forced to build the system from scratch rather than opting for a pre-configured Debian image out of laziness). And because it's so elegant, and not hacky, I've actually taken the time to implement all my own tweaks in a systemd-compliant manner. I just didn't want to break the elegance.
Pacman is also much leaner than apt, and on a resource-constrained netbook, that's quite important. Apt (especially in conjunction with aptitude) certainly has some nice features, but the cost in terms of performance is not justified IMHO.
And you gotta love the AUR.
Anyway, thought I'd post some well deserved props. If any maintainers/developers happen to read this, thanks for doing a great job, and keep it up.
(Sent from my new perch at the bleeding edge of Linux.)

gotta agree on pretty much everything. just upgraded my netbook to an ssd and now it's even faster. Arch+Xfce+ssd=pure awesome. Thanks to everyone who made this distro happen.

rallyemax · 2012-11-10 21:26:33

mamamia88 wrote:

gotta agree on pretty much everything. just upgraded my netbook to an ssd and now it's even faster. Arch+Xfce+ssd=pure awesome. Thanks to everyone who made this distro happen.

Now I'm jealous.

Yeah, Xfce rocks. It still amazes me how lightweight it is for a full desktop environment, the next step in terms of weight is pretty much a modular X environment with custom components. Xfce makes even a bloated one-size-fits-all Debian install boot and run relatively snappily on a lil' netbook. With a lean install of either Debian or Arch, it's just butter. A fast butter.

I'd love to try an SSD, but I don't want to give up the storage space (I travel a bit, usually backpacking or on a motorbike, and it's nice to have room for my entire music library and a few movies without needing an external drive) or pay the price for a large one. Ideally I'd run some sort of small PCIE SSD for the root filesystem and use the internal HD for data storage, but my netbook has only 2 internal PCIE slots and they're both in use (WIFI and a soldered-on nVidia GPU that I never use...).

mamamia88 · 2012-11-11 00:13:11

rallyemax wrote:

mamamia88 wrote:
gotta agree on pretty much everything. just upgraded my netbook to an ssd and now it's even faster. Arch+Xfce+ssd=pure awesome. Thanks to everyone who made this distro happen.
Now I'm jealous.
Yeah, Xfce rocks. It still amazes me how lightweight it is for a full desktop environment, the next step in terms of weight is pretty much a modular X environment with custom components. Xfce makes even a bloated one-size-fits-all Debian install boot and run relatively snappily on a lil' netbook. With a lean install of either Debian or Arch, it's just butter. A fast butter.
I'd love to try an SSD, but I don't want to give up the storage space (I travel a bit, usually backpacking or on a motorbike, and it's nice to have room for my entire music library and a few movies without needing an external drive) or pay the price for a large one. Ideally I'd run some sort of small PCIE SSD for the root filesystem and use the internal HD for data storage, but my netbook has only 2 internal PCIE slots and they're both in use (WIFI and a soldered-on nVidia GPU that I never use...).

you could get a very large flash drive and put it on your keychain as a possibility. but i get where you're coming from. i got my 80gb drive for $60 and am getting $18 back from a rebate so it was kinda a no brainer for me since my old mechanical drive was starting to make weird noises and i was getting worried. have a few external drives lying around so storage ain't a big deal for me

nomorewindows · 2012-11-11 00:26:21

rallyemax wrote:

mamamia88 wrote:
gotta agree on pretty much everything. just upgraded my netbook to an ssd and now it's even faster. Arch+Xfce+ssd=pure awesome. Thanks to everyone who made this distro happen.
Now I'm jealous.
Yeah, Xfce rocks. It still amazes me how lightweight it is for a full desktop environment, the next step in terms of weight is pretty much a modular X environment with custom components. Xfce makes even a bloated one-size-fits-all Debian install boot and run relatively snappily on a lil' netbook. With a lean install of either Debian or Arch, it's just butter. A fast butter.
I'd love to try an SSD, but I don't want to give up the storage space (I travel a bit, usually backpacking or on a motorbike, and it's nice to have room for my entire music library and a few movies without needing an external drive) or pay the price for a large one. Ideally I'd run some sort of small PCIE SSD for the root filesystem and use the internal HD for data storage, but my netbook has only 2 internal PCIE slots and they're both in use (WIFI and a soldered-on nVidia GPU that I never use...).

You could put that cuda to good use running folding at home or seti at home.

tancrackers · 2012-11-12 01:58:44

I moved from Ubuntu to Opensuse to Arch. I was surprised that Arch is so stable, runs so smoothly, AND has up-to-date packages.
This is by far my favorite distro now, especially since it's rolling. All of the DEs and programs seem so much smoother and faster on arch then other dristos. KDE on arch is quick and solid for me here, but on kubuntu it was awful. Even libreoffice seems to load almost instantly. Thanks Arch developers! Hopefully after I get my CS degree, I can contribute!

train_wreck · 2012-11-15 02:52:10

i would actually like to just say thank you to all of the fine peeps that take the time to keep the package repositories stocked. i have been using arch for over 6 years and have consistently been amazed at the level of updated-ness that Arch has had in respect of software available. due to the standards adherence of arch itself, all of the packages that i've had to manually compile and install myself have gone completely smooth, but to be honest it's extremely rare that something isn't found in some repo or another. as a primarily Windows-oriented sysadmin who dabbles somehwat with Linux, Arch has been by far the most logical kind of distro i've used up to this point.

so props to these folks.

kcholakov · 2012-11-23 08:33:06

Ok, I installed it. Now I have to wеar my ArchLinux t-shirt again :-).
Anyway systemd looks good. The system boots and shutdowns like hell...I mean super fast. I do not know if it is because of systemd or not.
Here is a simple How-To I wrote (http://kchol.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/i … static-ip/), which I will re-test during the weekend on my other PC and put corrections if needed. So keep in mind that I maybe missed something.

Cheers.

jasonwryan · 2012-11-23 08:39:31

Merging with the Official Unofficial Arch is Best thread...

mDuo13 · 2012-11-25 20:15:42

It's amazing to me, but I've been using Arch for over 2 years already. I've been really pleased the whole time I've been using it -- never have I encountered a problem that just wasn't solvable*, unlike when I was using Linux Mint or Windows before that. Sure, I've dealt with my share of breakages (oh fglrx upgrades, I won't miss you) but it was obvious when something was wrong and the forums and wiki here made it obvious how to fix. I think the brilliant part of Arch is that it gives you the tools and knowledge to diagnose and fix your problems, rather than handing you an install CD and telling you to reformat and try again.

*OK, I'm excluding my office's messed up VPN, which probably could work, but which I haven't yet put in the time to figure out. I at least got it to run in VirtualBox (Windows guest), which is kind of convenient in its own way.

But recently, between upgrading to systemd and installing a fresh copy of Arch on an old PC, I was refreshed at how much I appreciate Arch Linux. So thanks, everyone who works on the distribution, everyone who contributes to the wiki, and everyone who posts helpful topics and answers here. Without you, I might just hate my computer.

skiwi · 2012-11-28 01:33:10

I think I am falling in love.
Debian has been my soulmate for many years but I received a new laptop tonight and figured... why not try something new while noone is around. I've been with gentoo for some time but she keeps going on and on about compiling this, compiling that... Who can really handle that in the long run? I always cherished Debian's stability and its well maintained repository but secretely I wondered what all those new toys would be able to do. Now I know better. I always silently flamed Ubuntu lovers for their bloated default distributions, But now I know better.
Thank you.

graysky · 2012-11-28 01:36:29

Love? Dunno about that... not completely convinced there is such a thing. Religious... now that is probably a more accurate descriptor.

Last edited by graysky (2012-11-28 01:37:05)

ngoonee · 2012-11-28 02:43:14

Merging with The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread in "Arch Discussion" sub-forum.

Arch Linux

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