The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

nirvanix · 2005-10-23 06:18:03

I too, dear friends of Arch, am a reformed distro slut. I've been out with Suse, RH, Mandrake, Mepis, Gentoo and a few other lesser-knowns. I was looking for a distro that gave me the kind of experience that Steve Jobs talks about in his "Gee whiz, I get it - computers are supposed to be enriching" speeches. I found it in Arch - that which I did not in the other distros. It's so cleanly laid out that I can actually understand what my computer is doing, and believe me I like that. The package upgrade process makes sense - no dependency hell or modified packages clobbering each other. With your tools I have built myself a system that interacts with me the way I want and expect it to and I can't think of a higher compliment to pay you. Thank you to all the devs/maintainers of Arch.

brutus · 2005-10-29 13:30:07

Of course it's the best distro!!
One of the best things is the wiki and the big packages collection (AUR).

I just wished it had an unique name.. I mean... now, it sounds like the whole distribution is built on that it is i686-optimized, but seriously, I can't feel any difference and I don't think any people can, and I think the best things about it is the nice community and as said before, the Wiki and AUR (and Pacman ).
Maybe it's just me that doesn't like the simple name but I always use the distroname as hostname on all of my computers, but I think "archlinux" sounds bad and "arch" can be so much other things, also when I tell about it to people I know.

Anyways, Arch is absolutely the best distro ever (and Ubuntu comes right after)

Nattydraddy · 2005-11-02 05:47:31

Yeah, the name. In german "Archlinux" sounds like "Arselinux". So for sure no Apple-fans will try it. No matter that Archlinux holds what Steve Jobs promise.

But if you´re a WYSIWYG man, you will be disapointed with computers. Something looks good and you say: "Hey that is it, what i wanted". But if you work with it, you´ll see that only the surface was polished, and the program code below wasn´t cared about.

And so the "bad" name of archlinux is a good one. It´s shows people that archlinux is not about looking nice, it is about working.

Like then you climb in the Himalaya. If you saw to much advertising you may try it in nike sport shoes. But if you read books instead of magazine, you will buy some clumsy looking shoes and these ones will you bring you up the hills.

clarence · 2005-11-02 08:04:49

ArchLinux is the chicken schnitzle. All killer no filler.

Though I may try Foresight linux sometime in the future just for kicks.....

Saturnus · 2005-11-21 19:55:35

I still consider me "new" to Linux, despite using it partial for several years. I've tried SuSE, Mandrake, Cobind, Ubuntu and some others. When I heard about Arch I thought this might be a good chance to learn Linux, and that's why I tried it.

The most shocking thing about Arch was how easy it was compared to what I thought. Once the system is set up, everything is so easy. Pacman is by far the best packagemanager I've tried. I fell completely in love with it. In addition Arch doesn't install all kinds of rubbish (unless you want to ;-) ).

sven · 2005-11-27 07:34:51

My first free OS was FreeBSD 4.9 on laptop in autumn, 2004 but I could not get it run properly with the hardware - tried things for about a month! I wanted an i686 optimized distro so my first Linux distro was Crux on laptop - but there was too much compiling and I did not feel there was much going on around it - no community or proper package management.

I found Arch in the middle of January this year. And I loved it immediately! I had fought furiously for several days with dependency hell in Crux to try to get Gnomemeeting to work (most of the time compiling stuff) - and in Arch it was only like 5 minutes with pacman Finally in the end of January I set up Arch on my desktop computer and server one as well.

moskvax · 2005-12-02 03:14:23

I got bored of arch so I left to sourcemage.

WHY DID I EVER LEAVE :cry:

Sourcemage is pretty good, but trying another distro for the first time in about a year makes me see why I loved Arch so much. Arch WORKED, although it worked so subtly I suppose I sadistically yearned for the harrowing experience of having to manually comment out broken portions of code in packages to get them to compile. I've spent two weeks on Sourcemage, and right now it's almost half working after having to manually debug multiple packages... but there's so much still broken. I must return to Archlinux. Binaries own :mrgreen:

Aer · 2005-12-03 18:43:09

I have just finished to install Arch Linux, and it's perfect !

No trouble, no problems everything is working perfectly, packages are up to date !

Congratulation for this good job !

judland · 2005-12-06 14:02:10

Here's another positive opinion on ArchLinux from another host of The Linux Link Tech Show

His blog entry is here.

Judd, I hope you can make it on to the show sometime.

hehejo_ · 2005-12-22 10:14:54

I have to join the hymn on ArchLinux.
I love it.

kasa · 2005-12-22 10:46:17

I've been using archlinux for about six months now, and I have to say that Arch is definitely my final choice... I won't ever go back to another distro!

I looooove Arch linux

B15HOP · 2005-12-28 16:20:46

Yes arch is good, but I still have a few gripes.

I don't believe EVERYthing should be pre compiled. Such as kernel and mplayer but yeah you get that.

thegnu · 2006-01-02 03:10:13

Arch is the only OS I've ever used that when it hurts to use, I know deep down it's my fault.

Windows makes me ill every moment. OS X 10.4 is pretty damn good, but every once in a while I get a sense of impending doom. FC3 is nice for about an hour. Debian has a pile of ick for an /etc/ folder.

Whenever I make a foray into the Alternate OS, I'm so relieved to come back to Arch. That would be a good slogan, actually:

"Arch Linux - Why use an alternate OS?"

metromini · 2006-01-03 02:40:17

In this linux world..

Arch is my religion
ArchWiki is my holybook
ArchForum is my church
all of u are my prophets

I don't need evangelizing others...
This religion is only for 'the chosen ones'

scottro · 2006-01-03 03:04:49

Yes, we're preaching to the choir here, but I pretty much agree with Eugenia's review on O/S news.

Every so often, especially when I'm updating my Japanese in *nix page, I go throught the distro-slut thing. The more distros I try, the better I like Arch.

Slack is nice, but pacman handles dependencies. Gentoo simply takes too long. Most of the RH and Deb offshoots have their own way of arranging things so that packages compiled from source either don't compile in the first place, or if they do, they don't work right.

The things that ~I~ want to just work usually just work (eg flash and java with a browser.)

The base install is nice and small (hrrm, that could be a song). I chuckle when I watch one of the Just Works(TM) distros installing tons of things I'll never use and then, if I try to compile a package from source (because their package is outdated or broken) I get
checking for C compiler.......not found
error [2]

These days, I'm mostly a FreeBSD-er, but at work, for example, when I need to quickly set up a file server or the like, I throw Arch on a box--quick installation and it doesn't have a bunch of things I don't want.

Also, for a distro that doesn't claim to Just Work, it Just Works(TM). Ironically enough, when I was last updoing my Japanese page, Arch and FreeBSD neither of which claim to be particularly newcomer friendly, were about the easiest to setup.
My ideal is something that installs about what you'd get with Linux From Scratch and you can then easily add to it.
That's Arch.

B15HOP · 2006-01-04 11:46:14

Yeah but some things such as media player should be compiled by the user. Anything that is top of the line performance nessicary pretty much should be compiled on the machine at use. Or very customizable.

sash · 2006-01-05 07:28:29

B15HOP wrote:

Yeah but some things such as media player should be compiled by the user. Anything that is top of the line performance nessicary pretty much should be compiled on the machine at use. Or very customizable.

Nothing is stopping you. Download tha PKGBUILD for the media player, modify the configure options to your liking, and then run makepkg to make a shiny new package.

o2bfishn · 2006-01-17 00:55:19

ok, might as well

i have strayed lately, looking for a distro my family can use, but none of them work like arch and none of them can be configured the way i can configure arch. i just love arch. have come back for good, a devoted archer for ever!

Jefg60 · 2006-01-17 16:55:48

Deciare wrote:

I had tried Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, and Frugalware before arriving at Arch. I left Windows behind without properly educating myself; throwing caution to the wind, the first thing I did with Linux is put Mandrake 8.0 on my primary (and only) desktop and erase my Windows 2000 partition in the process. I'd always been into using "advanced" and "beta" software on Windows, so how hard could Linux be? Oh boy, was I wrong.
I could live without my extensive collection of hand-coded mIRC scripts. I could live without a single graphical Control Panel that handled everything I might want to configure. I could get used to the fact that every program had its own quirky config file format. I could deal with the fact that not every program I wanted to use was packaged for my distro.
The problem that grated on my nerves was a suspicion that distro-specific graphical configurators were against me. They were elaborate frontends for some deep voodoo going on behind the scenes with a fragile web of Python scripts and stuff holding everything together. If I were to edit a config file by hand, I had no guarantee that my changes would stick; merely opening the wrong graphical configurator could screw it up. Similarly, when using a graphical configurator broke something, I had to go through lots of trouble to determine exactly what it changed, where, and how to make it work again.
The problem was made worse by the heaps of distro-specific patches that were applied to every binary package, introducing inconsistencies and incompatibility with stuff that I had to compile myself because there wasn't a package for it.
Wasn't there any Linux distro out there that let me see exactly what was going on at every stage of package installation and upgrades, where I could see exactly (and easily) what customisations were made to my packages, where I know for sure that I was in full control of every aspect of my system's config files without any unsolicited automatic stuff to mess it up?
Why, yes there was. Thank you so much, Arch developers, for restoring my faith in Linux.

My story is so similar to yours its scary. My previous distros were different to yours, and I didnt trash windows (until recently but even so that was an accident). I forced myself to not use windows because I wanted to learn linux. Apart from that, its the same story! (changing names of some apps here and there of course)

I have learnt more about linux in the 2 months since installing arch than I think I ever knew before in the 2 YEARS or thereabouts fiddling with other distros. With the others, I would get frustrated and just accept whatever it was as above my head in linux terms, or not worth learning because its probably different on other linuxes anyway. With arch, its a lot easier to understand, and when I struggle with something I am reassured that once I know it, I am more likely to have learnt a standard way that's applicable to some other distros, rather than a nonstandard way that's unique to my system.

Jefg60 · 2006-01-17 17:04:16

one other thing, i recently got paranoid about security and started searching for linux security tips. One of the pages I found on redhat's site basically said (in a nutshell) "remove all packages you dont use, and disable all services you dont use. Specifically red hat installs *this this and this* by default, but they are only optional really, so you should remove them if you dont use them". I thought, hang on a minute, arch did all that for me by only installing the bare minimum!

veek · 2006-03-10 18:56:36

I think people have sufficiently covered the reasons I like Arch, but I'm going to keep beating this horse until it's definitely dead .
I already made a long winded post in Arch Discussion, about my experience discovering Arch.

I have to say though, the pacman and ABS system is amazing. Especially after experiencing other package managers. Pacman and ABS give users a way to seamlessly integrate standard packages from the repos, modified versions of packages, packages compiled from source tarballs, and packages compiled from CVS or SVN. It's almost too good.

My experiences with compiling programs from source on other distros was a nightmare, so when I found out about ABS and PKGBUILDS it was a revalation.

The thing that scares me is I might have never tried Arch if it weren't for sheer luck. I mean it's not exactly at the top of the list at distrowatch. I googled something a while ago, maybe "package manager that doesn't suck," and came upon a review of Arch that piqued my interest. Actually I think I probably searched for something about a minimal Linux install because I was sick of the sea of packages installed by default on the popular distros. Thank God that article convinced me to try arch, otherwise I wouldn't be here today ~sniff~. (exit stage right)

user · 2006-03-29 18:49:00

arch, /usr/X11/lib<=>/usr/lib/xorg/<some symbolic links to nvidia shared/static libs>,
Linux arch 2.6.16.1 #2 SMP PREEMPT Fri Mar 31 02:00:45 XXX 2006 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux, garnome-daily version.

Want reiser4, glibc 2.4, gcc 4.1, I like this distro!!

Ibex · 2006-04-16 14:14:11

As most Arch users, I like Arch very much .

I used Windows, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu and Mandrake before, but since I tried Arch, I'll keep Arch.

It's fast as hell, I have the system like I want it, and it is easy to use (if reading the wiki etc).

Like metromini said:

metromini wrote:

In this linux world..
Arch is my religion
ArchWiki is my holybook
ArchForum is my church
all of u are my prophets
I don't need evangelizing others...
This religion is only for 'the chosen ones'

profoX · 2006-04-16 18:12:02

Metromini said it !

----
From a review I did on LinuxQuestions.org:
----

Pros: The fastest! / i686 optimized / Pacman package manager / Pkgbuilds / Simple configuration files / Ease of use
Cons: you can't be afraid of the commandline or config files / tricky installation

Arch Linux is the best Linux distribution for me!

I am a Linux user since about 1 year and I tried alot of (big and small) linux distributions before, but Arch is #1 !

The installation is a bit tricky. The installer tells you wrong stuff too (mounting /dev/hda7 to /mnt/boot ? lol).
Just ignore it. The installation itself is very fast.

I like how the configuration is done in a few simple text files.

Arch also has a very fast init using simple scripts. I get my PC running, including GDM, in 15 seconds (Pentium M 2 Ghz)

Pacman, the package manager, is very good. It resolves your dependancies and installing stuff with Pacman is very easy and fast. Pacman is as good as Apt-get, if not better.

Another great thing for when you want to build something are the pkgbuilds. You get a pkgbuild and tell "makepkg" and all necessary stuff/dependancies get downloaded and compiled. You can then install them using "Pacman -U package-name-and-version.pkg.tar.gz"

For me personally, Arch has no cons at all.

The archck (now called beyond) kernels that you can download also have alot of patches in them, so Arch just got even better than it already was for me (I need a kernel with support for different DSDT tables to get my ACPI properly working)

I still think Arch beats all the other distro's hands-down.

Arch #1 !

Also: Thumbs up for the whole Arch community!
Everyone I spoke to is very, very friendly.
The developers are very friendly and helpful too.
The IRC channel #archlinux is really nice to be at!
The friendliest and coolest community I know of

cmp · 2006-04-30 09:32:50

well i'm back to arch. I used debian in the mean time, but after some time I ended up with package conflicts and couldn't install certain programms anymore and it was of course a pain in the ass to install codecs, mplayer and other non-free stuff.

Arch Linux

#51 2005-10-23 06:18:03

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#52 2005-10-29 13:30:07

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#53 2005-11-02 05:47:31

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#54 2005-11-02 08:04:49

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#55 2005-11-21 19:55:35

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#56 2005-11-27 07:34:51

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#57 2005-12-02 03:14:23

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#58 2005-12-03 18:43:09

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#59 2005-12-06 14:02:10

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#60 2005-12-22 10:14:54

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#61 2005-12-22 10:46:17

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#62 2005-12-28 16:20:46

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#63 2006-01-02 03:10:13

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#64 2006-01-03 02:40:17

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#65 2006-01-03 03:04:49

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#66 2006-01-04 11:46:14

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#67 2006-01-05 07:28:29

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#68 2006-01-17 00:55:19

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#69 2006-01-17 16:55:48

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#70 2006-01-17 17:04:16

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#71 2006-03-10 18:56:36

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#72 2006-03-29 18:49:00

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#73 2006-04-16 14:14:11

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#74 2006-04-16 18:12:02

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#75 2006-04-30 09:32:50

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

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