Experiences from an new user

Lone_Wolf · 2005-12-02 19:33:29

I've been using these forums for a while now, but haven't introduced myself yet.
After reading the 'Has the arch philosophy changed? No.' thread i felt it could be useful if i listed some of my experiences as a new arch user.

I have been working with computers as hobby from 1982, switched to x86 pc's around 1991 and learned a lot about Dos and hardware.
For the past 8 years i have been helping people with windows systems, and tried suse linux a few times, but felt it wasn't mature enough yet.
3 years ago i followed an education for MCSA and since then have been working as 2nd/3rd line helpdesk employee for a company that almost exclusively uses M$.
The more i learned about M$, the more trouble i had in getting it to do what i wanted, not what THEY wanted.

Early this year i decided to give linux a try again and installed suse linux 9.3.
Although it worked, and i could do almost anything i needed (except some windows games), it had far too many packages that i didn't want.
Several things i wanted to used were not in their collection, or had older versions that didn't work good enough.
Switching to newer versions meant i had to figure out a lot of dependency errors and solve them.
their packet management tool, yast2 had a lot of drawbacks, unless you used only their packages.
Also it was very tough to switch to another WM/DE .
Suse had automated so much in their configuration that it was far from easy to change things, unless you settled for the options the provided tools had.
The main difference with M$ was that the documentation is freely available and the accompanying tools were a lot better than the M$ tools.

I started looking for another distro, found distrowatch and read many of the articles about different distros.

Arch drew my attention, i quickly found the wiki and could see a lot of topics were covered in it.

I kept suse and windows in a multi-boot system, installed arch about 10 times over the next 3 weeks, asked a few questions on the forum, experimented for about a month with LVM and Raid, then made a final setup plan using FTP-install.
Now arch is the only OS installed on that pc, for M$ i use VMware, and i don't miss suse.

I estimate i have used AL approx 3 months now, and have learned more about linux in those 2months, than in the about 2 years (spread over 6 years or so) of using Suse.

Sofar i have stayed out of testing, but have used the AUR and even tried some modifications on an existing pkgbuild.

Soon i will be setting up a LAMP server on my former windows DC to gain experience setting up forums and wiki, and after that i probably will try to get my laptop runnning with arch.

I am very pleased with AL's speed and flexibility and have found the community to be helpful (although a bit slow sometimes).

phrakture · 2005-12-02 19:42:57

I should state that the aforementioned thread brings up the point that (paraphrasing) you learn alot with arch, but after a while, you learn that things could be simpler.

I'm not saying I agree with it, and I find this thread here to be in nice contrast with that one.

My experiences are similar to your own, and while I understand what Dusty was saying, I still have yet to find a "simpler" distro which is akin to arch. Sure, automated stuff would be really nice, *if* you could override it, which is usually not the case.

Arch is a middle ground - between Slackware and (Suse/Fedora/Ubuntu). Some things are automated, but not such an extent that they become problems. Things which are automated can always be overridden.

That's what I like about arch. It generally works like one of the auto-distros, only you need a little more knowledge, and a little more time.

Lone_Wolf wrote:

I am very pleased with AL's speed and flexibility and have found the community to be helpful (although a bit slow sometimes).

What? Slow how?

Lone_Wolf · 2005-12-04 18:46:09

sometimes you have to wait 1 or 2 days for a reply.

This is not a big problem, but i'm moderator at an RPG-site where you often can't find your thread a day after it was started, because it's so busy.
This forum is a bit different.

Snowman · 2005-12-04 20:47:08

Lone_Wolf wrote:

sometimes you have to wait 1 or 2 days for a reply.
This is not a big problem, but i'm moderator at an RPG-site where you often can't find your thread a day after it was started, because it's so busy.
This forum is a bit different.

IMHO, a few days isn't slow. You need to take into account that there's not a lot of traffic in the Arch forums (compared to Gentoo, let's say, which has a few hundreds users logged in all the time). And not everyone reads the forums on a daily basis. If the question is a difficult/technical one, you can expect to wait a few days to get the answer.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-12-02 19:33:29

Experiences from an new user

#2 2005-12-02 19:42:57

Re: Experiences from an new user

#3 2005-12-04 18:46:09

Re: Experiences from an new user

#4 2005-12-04 20:47:08

Re: Experiences from an new user

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