From a Gentooer's point of view...

shinlun · 2007-08-25 17:11:58

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-577784.html
Interesting read

Misfit138 · 2007-08-25 19:24:36

I felt compelled to register and post my opinion.

Last edited by Misfit138 (2007-08-26 13:24:05)

tardo · 2007-08-25 20:03:12

whatever you do, keep the discussion over there. If people can't realize that all linux distros are the same and differ only by their implementation (which is a fraction of what makes up linux), then they fail and should be shot.

Last edited by tardo (2007-08-25 20:03:25)

ari_dbx · 2007-08-25 21:20:48

Arch is good for me, because I was a windows user and I didn't even know what 'compile' means

now I know what compile is

and I also know many other things!

ezzetabi · 2007-08-26 13:12:08

I can't believe someone wrote that stuff... and I believe even less someone said `interesting read.'
If you do not like Arch use Gentoo and just shut up. If you do not like Gentoo use Arch and shut up.
If you do not like both use Ubuntu and shut even more up.

clarence · 2007-08-26 13:26:06

It's 2007, no one cares.

shining · 2007-08-26 13:38:34

ezzetabi wrote:

I can't believe someone wrote that stuff... and I believe even less someone said `interesting read.'
If you do not like Arch use Gentoo and just shut up. If you do not like Gentoo use Arch and shut up.
If you do not like both use Ubuntu and shut even more up.

...
shut up

voonte · 2007-08-26 14:08:23

I love how passionate people are about their choice of linux distribution.

shining · 2007-08-26 14:10:57

voonte wrote:

I love how passionate people are about their choice of linux distribution.

Actually, that thread on fgo surprised me. I thought it would be pure Arch bashing, but it isn't.
I don't see what's wrong with it, it's discussing the good / bad of both distributions (and more generally, of source vs binary distrib).
People don't always have to be stupid and close minded.

voonte · 2007-08-26 14:41:16

shining wrote:

Actually, that thread on fgo surprised me. I thought it would be pure Arch bashing, but it isn't.
I don't see what's wrong with it, it's discussing the good / bad of both distributions (and more generally, of source vs binary distrib).
People don't always have to be stupid and close minded.

You're right. My comment was more of a general kind. Those threads usually end up bad, however, this one seems to be heading in the right direction.

ezzetabi: I'm not sure why you used those harsch words, but I agree with shinlun, it was an interesting read. I'm not sure what you believe 'shutting up' will accomplish.

Cogar · 2007-08-26 15:19:19

I agree that the Arch-bashing was actually quite minimal. A couple of the posters seem to be somewhat inflamed regarding Arch, but the rest are fair and a few spent most of their time discussing how Gentoo could be better. I suppose that is the best way to look at it--a new view to see what can be improved.

--

PS: In that spirit of improvement, but going somewhat off-topic, the thing that suffers the most WRT Arch are the wireless-related articles in the Wiki. Wireless support--especially with WPA encryption or roaming support--is weak at best in Linux, and having documentation that is substandard compared to the distribution itself does not help. In a half-dozen articles, most do not really agree with one another and some parts are incomplete (they read more like personal notes rather than explanations). I consider myself reasonably good working with Linux although I am new with Arch, and so far Arch has completely foiled my attempts to set up wireless with WPA encryption on an old laptop. I admit it is probably due to my weaknesses in understanding the situation (coming from more hand-holding distributions), but after going through and trying to duplicate the procedures in ~ 6 Wiki articles over two weekends, I am still clueless.

Last edited by Cogar (2007-08-26 15:21:35)

Misfit138 · 2007-08-26 15:29:02

Cogar wrote:

I agree that the Arch-bashing was actually quite minimal. A couple of the posters seem to be somewhat inflamed regarding Arch, but the rest are fair and a few spent most of their time discussing how Gentoo could be better. I suppose that is the best way to look at it--a new view to see what can be improved.
--

PS: In that spirit of improvement, but going somewhat off-topic, the thing that suffers the most WRT Arch are the wireless-related articles in the Wiki. Wireless support--especially with WPA encryption or roaming support--is weak at best in Linux, and having documentation that is substandard compared to the distribution itself does not help. In a half-dozen articles, most do not really agree with one another and some parts are incomplete (they read more like personal notes rather than explanations). I consider myself reasonably good working with Linux although I am new with Arch, and so far Arch has completely foiled my attempts to set up wireless with WPA encryption on an old laptop. I admit it is probably due to my weaknesses in understanding the situation (coming from more hand-holding distributions), but after going through and trying to duplicate the procedures in ~ 6 Wiki articles over two weekends, I am still clueless.

If or when you figure it out, please add to the Wiki. The Arch Wiki is slowly improving, but needs constant support from its members.

derek_stnly1961 · 2007-08-26 15:35:28

good-better-best?

I usually don't read posts like this but for some reason i did (smacks myself and asks when will i ever learn).
Everyone gets in a big argument about what is the best. There is a simple answer. Arch is better then Gentoo and Gentoo is better then Arch. The question is not what is best. The question is what is best for YOU.

When I go to a movie or the theatre I never read reviews, if it looks good to me then i go see it. sometimes its good and i win, sometimes its bad and i wasted my money. But I am not going to take the opinion of someone I have never and will never meet. It works the same with linux. I see a distro that looks interesting to me and i research it (usually by going to forums and reading the different problems people have and seeing what kinds of answers they get. Then i decide if I want to try it or not

Gentoo is a great distro....
Arch is a great distro....

since I am posting here guess what one is the best for ME.

Derek

shining · 2007-08-26 15:36:47

Cogar wrote:

PS: In that spirit of improvement, but going somewhat off-topic, the thing that suffers the most WRT Arch are the wireless-related articles in the Wiki. Wireless support--especially with WPA encryption or roaming support--is weak at best in Linux, and having documentation that is substandard compared to the distribution itself does not help. In a half-dozen articles, most do not really agree with one another and some parts are incomplete (they read more like personal notes rather than explanations). I consider myself reasonably good working with Linux although I am new with Arch, and so far Arch has completely foiled my attempts to set up wireless with WPA encryption on an old laptop. I admit it is probably due to my weaknesses in understanding the situation (coming from more hand-holding distributions), but after going through and trying to duplicate the procedures in ~ 6 Wiki articles over two weekends, I am still clueless.

is it a wireless problem (ie are the drivers working), or only a wpa one ?
I don't remember having to check any wiki articles or documentations, I just picked the sample default profile, put my key in there, and it worked.
Same with netcfg2.

Cogar · 2007-08-26 15:54:26

shining wrote:

is it a wireless problem (ie are the drivers working), or only a wpa one ?
I don't remember having to check any wiki articles or documentations, I just picked the sample default profile, put my key in there, and it worked.
Same with netcfg2.

Thanks for the quick reply. I installed all the necessary packages (I believe) such as wireless_tools, madwifi (my card uses an Atheros chip), and wpa_supplicant. I went through the various Wiki pages and followed them to the best of my ability. So far, nothing is working, which I suppose brings me to why I added what I did to my post in the first place: someone who understands both Arch and wireless, plus who has some natural ability to teach or train, needs to go over those articles and ask questions about each statement such as "is this in a logical order?", "is it complete and accurate?", and "does this require knowledge or configuration that is not directly cited on this page?" I do not expect someone to walk me through the process in a forum if complete Wiki articles cannot do so. My problem is that I do not know what I don't know and therefore have no idea where to start. Fortunately, everything else I want is working fine.

Leigh · 2007-08-26 16:43:10

Well, I found the gentoo thread very interesting, and a little amusing in a few spots. There were a few arch bashers, but most of the thread was rather constructive in comparing arch and gentoo. Anyway, I don't think there is a such thing as a linux distro that doesn't have it's problems/weaknesses. I can't really comment on gentoo too much even though I used it for a very short time before discovering arch. That was like 4 years ago, and I'm sure stuff has changed alot since then. I do think if I was a little more linux savy back then, I would have probably stayed with gentoo, but I knew just enough to tottally break stuff! Luckily, at least with me, arch proved to be a lot more durable, although I did manage to break it as well a few times in the beginning. I just can't seem to leave well enough alone. I always have to be fiddling with something! :sigh:

shinlun · 2007-08-26 17:06:40

@ezzetabi:
cool down, mate

"foo vs bar" will be definitely lasting forever and you can see this kind of posts here, there and everywhere; we can't do anything about it. As tardo said, the code base differences between distros are minimal; what set them apart are user configurations, package management, custom patches to applications, and the overall layout things, etc. Most of time I am tired of this kind of talk but I am still learning from some posts now and then. If you look into the thread, there are compliments and contructive criticisms and the posts mostly are not flaming or bashing type; while some posts show that there are things we should improve on, some make you proud of being a member of Arch community. Maybe the wrongest thing about the thread is the "topic"?

I choose to use Arch linux and in the same time get inspiration from other distros, including BSD. If the process is constructive, technical discussion and competition in general are good things to everyone.

Regards,
Shinlun

ezzetabi · 2007-08-27 09:00:53

I was exaggerating, of course
Just when I read something that sounded like `95% of what they say is false'... `How they dare to compare to gentoo' I understood it was not much a technical debate but a faith debate. tardo said it... the diff are actually minimal.

And the beauty of all it is the fact we can choice, isn't it?

Leigh · 2007-08-27 10:18:46

Well all the little things that sets all linux distro's apart are important things and can make the distro's seem very different form each other despite the things that they all have in common. Hopefully threads like the gentoo one can be used or seen in a positive way to change or enhance things to the better. To think that arch can't learn from gentoo or vise versa would be a true shame.

I know there's been many times I found a solution to a problem I was having with arch on the gentoo forums that I couldn't find in the arch forums. Also many arch threads pointing to gentoo or ubuntu posts showing a fix or solution. We all might stand under a differen't flag, but we're all still linux users : )

erm67 · 2007-08-29 21:02:13

Threads in 'gentoo chat' and 'off the wall' often degenerate in virtual cat fights ....

I was a Gentoo user for 4 years (and still have a gentoo system) and switched recently to arch, the atmosphere there was simply no longer the same, and new problems on a daily basis made the mainteinance impossible. I wonder how such problems are (or will be) handled in arch, recently for example the new ABI incompatible libexpat 2.x went stable in Gentoo (after a long delay) and without warning the update removed the old version and told the user to revdep-rebuild their systems. This means scan all executables to find those linked to the old libexpat (and most modern sotware is) and recompile them, leaving scores of users with a crippled system recompiling most application, a daunting task on old systems.
Arch still uses libexpat 1.x how will it be updated in a 'rolling release' fashion without breaking most users systems?

I found about Arch on the gentoo forums since many switched to this fine distro from gentoo and this possibly has upset some there. The only thing I think is better in Gentoo is the USE system but is not that essential in building a system. I mean I may disable completely KDE or Gnome support in all my apps and get (maybe) smaller executables but usually it allows only to remove features from a package and most of the time users simply activate all USE flags defeating their purpose.

Since I switched to arch I have a lot more time to dedicate to actually use my computer (play games, program, whatever) while with Gentoo most of the time was used to recompile things.
The only trick I use is that I have a boot partition not default mounted and I copy manually there new kernel26 updates few days after pacman -Syu installs them, after checking the forums first:-)
The install script for new kernels should really move the old working kernel to vmlinux.old so that users can still boot the old one.

shining · 2007-08-29 21:54:14

erm67 wrote:

The only trick I use is that I have a boot partition not default mounted and I copy manually there new kernel26 updates few days after pacman -Syu installs them, after checking the forums first:-)
The install script for new kernels should really move the old working kernel to vmlinux.old so that users can still boot the old one.

Does that actually work ? Don't you need to also backup the kernel26.img initrd and the modules in /lib/modules/`uname -r` ?
I think that's also a bit problematic in Arch. A non booting kernel is not really cool.
A workaround might be to install another kernel branch like -ck or -mm or whatever, and keep using arch one (or vice versa).

erm67 · 2007-08-29 22:01:22

shining wrote:

Does that actually work ? Don't you need to also backup the kernel26.img initrd and the modules in /lib/modules/`uname -r` ?

Well now that I actually think about it, you are right, it doesn't work and it exposes me to potentially more problems :-) I should change that habit .....
I have also a grub entry for a self compiled vanilla kernel that I know to work anyway.

P.S. Thank you, I removed the noauto flag for /boot in my fstab.

Last edited by erm67 (2007-08-29 22:05:29)

Misfit138 · 2007-08-30 00:12:59

shining wrote:

erm67 wrote:
The only trick I use is that I have a boot partition not default mounted and I copy manually there new kernel26 updates few days after pacman -Syu installs them, after checking the forums first:-)
The install script for new kernels should really move the old working kernel to vmlinux.old so that users can still boot the old one.
Does that actually work ? Don't you need to also backup the kernel26.img initrd and the modules in /lib/modules/`uname -r` ?
I think that's also a bit problematic in Arch. A non booting kernel is not really cool.
A workaround might be to install another kernel branch like -ck or -mm or whatever, and keep using arch one (or vice versa).

When I used the -beyond kernel, it co-existed with the default -ARCH kernel very nicely and I had both entries in my grub menu.lst, in case one or the other broke. Now that -beyond patchset is gone, I have the default kernel as well as a custom compiled kernel entry in menu.lst. I suppose you could have as many kernels as you want, coexisting. For me, I simply recompile nvidia drivers against the new kernel using ABS. So then I have the default nvidia driver installed via pacman -S nvidia, and then another one compiled against the custom kernel. Works great.

Sigi · 2007-08-30 00:33:00

I found both of these threads (gentoo forum and this one) an interesting read. Nice "defense" from Misfit138 and James and cool to see reactions (wiki edit) instead of flamewars...

Shadin · 2007-09-01 14:53:43

Cheers to Misfit and others in that thread. I still don't understand the Gentoo userbase, it's like they know Linux, but at the same time are oblivious about it outside of Gentoo.

One thing that annoys me to no end from any distro or user is talks of speed. This distro is faster than that distro. Comments like these are laughed out or deleted from enthusiast sites. Post screenshots of benchmarks or shut it.

Arch Linux

#1 2007-08-25 17:11:58

From a Gentooer's point of view...

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