The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

my0pic · 2008-05-23 06:49:01

It dawned on me a couple of weekends ago that I was missing that vital masochistic streak to deal with another attempt at gentoo. More likely I was trying to bite off more than I could chew, but in my frustration I found Arch. I was hooked just a few paragraphs into its introduction and I knew I had to try it out. I'm still on that original install no thanks to the quality of the guides available and info in the forums. I've had no problems putting together my own system, the way I want it. It's stable, everything works, and I mean everything that I've thrown at it has worked It simply amazes me with its speed and frugal requirements of the systems resources. Only running a 2.4g P4 with 1g of ram and yet last night was able to watch dvb hdtv and compile firefox-spookyet 3.0rc1-2 from aur at the same time with no loss of frame rate on kaffeine. And spin compiz's cube, fire up Outlook from the vmware xp virtual machine running backgrounded...all at the same time with no hassles, no freezes. Simply amazing.
My intro to linux was with red hat 6.0 many years ago. I quickly scurried back to windows until Ubuntu came along. That's a good distro, especially as an intro to linux for people more familiar with windows. Tried many others to see what was out there but I reckon I'll settle down with Arch. It's the only one out there that seems to be able to handle this sadistic streak i've discovered!!

This is my first post on my first login as a new member. I am not and have never signed up on any other distro's forum.
I am home.

handy · 2008-05-23 11:16:48

Welcome MyOpic!

I'm sure you will enjoy your stay.

Being new to Arch, & coming from a Ubuntu Linux induction, I can easily relate to your post.

techprophet · 2008-05-23 14:11:07

I agree Arch is the best!!!

It runs faster than Ubuntu by far (at least 20seconds on bootup)

handy · 2008-05-24 00:36:52

techprophet wrote:

I agree Arch is the best!!!
It runs faster than Ubuntu by far (at least 20seconds on bootup)

Arch may suit some of us more than any other OS or Linux distro' that we have tried, BUT there are many people that would find Arch far from best & a most unsuitable computing environment.

It all comes down to the individual's needs, taste, available time, background knowledge, aspirations...

One mans feast is another's poison... It is wonderful to have so many fantastic distro's available & all for free too!

Redroar · 2008-05-24 02:21:38

Yeah...I know many people who would throw themselves off a building if they had to deal with Arch everyday.

And yet, I spent a couple of hours today learning how to manually set up iptables (well worth learning, by the way), and I only feel satisfaction. It's great when you are standing upon the conquered foe, and now stand as it's master.

Or maybe I'm just a control freak.

Regardless, I love Arch!

handy · 2008-05-24 03:01:33

It's nice when the foe is really your friend too...

Redroar · 2008-05-24 15:18:17

handy wrote:

It's nice when the foe is really your friend too...

Too true...

sniffles · 2008-06-12 17:05:44

Fedora rules!!!

JeremyTheWicked · 2008-06-12 17:53:35

I love my girlfriend. Arch comes second

SwimFr3ak · 2008-06-12 19:25:16

Fedora rules!!!

I smell a troll

But yea, Arch is awesome. I was an Ubuntu user and got sick of all the software that was installed that I would never use. I have also learned much more about how thing work in Linux and how to configure things and troubleshoot/fix problems on my own while using Arch than any other distro I have tried so far.

sniffles · 2008-06-12 19:42:22

SwimFr3ak wrote:

I smell a troll

Oups. I thought these were the fedora forums. uhm.. yeah.. Arch rules!!

BTW, what other distros have you tried? Just curious.

SwimFr3ak · 2008-06-12 20:21:02

I've tried, Fedora(7,8,9), Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo, and a couple BSDs. I also use CentOS 5 for servers, I prefer long releases for servers.

At work (I am a student assistant to the Unix admin at my college) I use RHEL 4 and 5 (Both 32bit and 64bit). As well as have some very limited experience with IBM AIX. <- They don't let me mess with these much as they run all our databases.

I really like Arch for my personal machines though as I am a perfectionist / minimalist and only like to have the bare minimum for what I need. I choose Arch over Gentoo for the time saved not waiting for things to compile. I also like Arch as you get to learn how things work under the hood and have to struggle at times to get things to work. I don't consider myself a Linux expert by any means, I still have a ton to learn, I have only been using linux for a few years. Most of that usage has been off and on until recently, but I think Arch has been great at keeping me focused on learning new things.

Last edited by SwimFr3ak (2008-06-12 20:52:25)

new2arch · 2008-06-26 08:30:52

Arch rules. Sounds almost like a cliché huh.
Some highlights:

- While the Arch installation can be pretty intriguing for a Linux noob that previously only has used GUI based distros (me! -> PcLinuxOS, Fedora, Zenwalk, Centos and others) the wiki is doing a wonderful job as an alternate, although text based, but very thorough "hold-your-hand-thru-the-installation" manual.
And the user is encouraged to install only the packages he/she wants! No five ftp software or default and IMHO bloated KDE or hundreds of drivers that you don't use!

-The rolling system and package management! I can't praise enough about this wonderful feature. While I definitely enjoyed and loved using Fedora, its short end of support schedule made my heart ache. Fedora 7 worked beautifully on my machine, it had bleeding edge software, SELinux, a firewall that actually didn't go nuts after every reboot and great 3D drivers in their repos and much more.
But the security updates delivery will cease eventually, and you have really no choice than either upgrading to the newest release or wipe / and install from scratch.
And upgrading to newer release could break a lot or so I've read, and in addition to that, the recent Fedora9 doesn't support 3D graphics since it comes with a pre-release X-server. (I hope this pre-release doesn't enter the Arch repos until next year or so!).

Archlinux's solution is much more elegant and so far, doing a 'pacman -Syu' hasn't given me any head aches, other than merging couple of *.pacnew files.

- Also, in my opinion it's generally easier to download and install stuff using pacman compared to yum/yumex. Depending on which package + dependencies you want to install, it can get quite complicated in Fedora.
I remember I had a hard time enabling Enlightenment in F7 and it was pretty time consuming. For example, Enlightenment in F9 requires this:

http://optics.csufresno.edu/~kriehn/fed … ation.html

...while in Arch: 'pacman -S e17-cvs e17-extra-cvs'. Beautiful. The package maintainers are doing a wonderful job.

- The Arch community is also great! (The Fedora and Zenwalk communities are also very helpful and friendly so it may sound like I prefer community X over community Y, but that wasn't my intention).

- Arch is FAST. Zenwalk is probably on par with Arch. Fedora (and centos) was pretty slow and a memory hog due to 20-30 services that were active after the installation. Disabling services was easy but nevertheless, I prefer enabling only those services that I want to use rather than the opposite approach. In Arch I have 6 services running, and the memory consumption in the Gnome desktop is 145 mb. In Fedora it was around 300 mb if my memory serves me well.

Last edited by new2arch (2008-06-26 08:33:29)

handy · 2008-06-26 10:29:38

@ new2arch: Welcome to the community! We like it here too, though even with a great deal of enthusiasm for Arch the particularly valuable quality of the Arch user group that I have noticed is that it is multi-partisan. Open mindedness which usually means a lack of chauvinism is prevalent here.

Being a member here is like being a part of the political party you wished you could vote for.

blueskycatastrophe · 2008-06-26 11:14:26

To each his own. You want user friendlyness? Go ubuntu or some sort distro. You want something else? Take something else. For me, I just wanted a base install as a host system for an LFS project on an eeePC. Arch is perfect for that sort of thing and I'll probably put it on my fortcoming eeeBox (a simple and cheap pc which isn not yet available in the Netherlands) too, just because I like it.

Why do I like it? I installed it, had no problems that I could not solve myself, trashed my system (by doing something that I really shouldn't have), reinstalled it. Both installs took me in the neighbourhood of 30-45 minutes, inclusive of the time needed to configure the system. great! I can trash my system and reinstall without much of a hassle....

Of course, this is not my first distro but it is really not harder than my first linux system was. But that was in the pre 1.0 era.

So, is Arch best? Probably not, but for me it is. Oh, and I love pacman (which was the reason I chose arch rather than something like feather or DSL).

handy · 2008-06-26 15:54:00

@ blueskycatastrophe: Try tupac http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/TuPac you may find it better than pacman & yaourt, as it is an enhancement of pacman that slides into yaourt when it needs to.

blueskycatastrophe · 2008-06-26 17:33:49

Thanks handy, I'll be sure to check it out.

brynjolf · 2008-06-26 18:13:03

Archlinux and me works becaause of two reasons, first is pacman, second is the AUR. Getdeb/strange oneclickinstalls/etc are all ok but nowhere as simple as AUR.

The reason I love pacman is that its so sparse with its output, it just outputs all I need to know, not forcing me to read an essay everytime, not thousand annoying messages like Aptitude (try installing an already installed package, it could have just stated -already installed-).

andreaorru · 2008-07-03 11:02:22

Me too. I think that pacman, AUR (with yaourt) and ABS are what make Arch the best!

mingus · 2008-07-05 01:25:14

Hello,

I'm yet another escapee from the tentacles of the Ubuntupus. I had too many issues with 8.04: frequent HD thrashing, random freezing, overall slowness, etc. I gave Zenwalk a brief spin, but it couldn't even detect my hardwired NIC. Somewhere, sometime, thereafter, I read an article/review about Arch that piqued my curiosity; so, after being plagued by much self-doubt, I decided, what the hell, I'll give it a try.

With the well-written beginner's guide and the comprehensive wiki at my disposal, I got Arch up and running on the first try. Wow, what a lean & mean OS! Boots up & shuts down a lot quicker than Ubuntu. And I love the way I have total control over what does or does not get installed or what starts up at boot time. And pacman is simply sweet, so sweet. I'm running Gnome, BTW.

I must say, even though I'm still an ignorant newbie, I have learned more about Linux in the 2 weeks I've been using Arch than I did in the 12+ months I used Ubuntu. Kudos to the developers and all those who contribute to the wiki. Now, if I can only figure out how to tweak /etc/rc.conf so that Arch does my weekly laundry...

Oh, FWIW, I'm running a 3-year old Dell Dimension 5100, 3.4GHz w/ HT, Intel 945G Chipset, 2Gb DDR-2 RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS, Seagate 160Mb HD

Last edited by mingus (2008-07-05 01:27:13)

lord darkpat · 2008-07-19 12:20:31

I wouldn't say arch is the best, as I have quite a few problems. For me, it's Gentoo - the hassles. But, it's on it's way of taking debian off my list....

neptuneK · 2008-08-16 07:42:29

I haven't bothered to switch to another distro , after installing Arch. Great work guys !

im_ka · 2008-08-20 07:50:55

wow, i started this thread and it became _the_ appreciation thread

i've been absent from the community, been upgrading arch on my old laptop for 3 years.
now i'm setting up arch on my new laptop and started contributing to the wiki. it's time to reactivate myself.

still loving arch...

cemeth · 2008-08-21 01:19:08

On servers I'd still stick to the tried-and-true Debian stable.
But on the desktop, Arch really is the best. On the desktop you want simplicity, speed, easy customizability, a system that doesn't get into your way, and up to date software.
Arch offers all that with a minimum of hassle. It's also good that it's very easy to install some proprietary things like the Nvidia driver or video codecs... if you need it, it should be easily installable. Some distros make that really hard, e.g. Debian, where you need to find third-party repositories or manually dl and install the driver from nvidia.com... with Arch it's just as easy as installing everything else.
The only thing you need is a bit of familiarity with Linux basics and the command line, which can be painful for newcomers. But one doesn't stay a newcomer for long. Oh, and you should already know some of the good Linux apps... because Arch doesn't automatically install some popular programs like Ubuntu does. Which is of course better if you already know your way around... less clutter to deal with.

genisis300 · 2008-08-22 12:20:08

Sorry if i've misread this topic,
am i right in thinking that the bug tracker for arch is for Arch problems only say a problem with pacman, init scripts etc,
Do all of the userbase know how to tell the difference between an Arch bug and a software bug like thunar not ejecting Cd's?

Arch Linux

#251 2008-05-23 06:49:01

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#252 2008-05-23 11:16:48

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#253 2008-05-23 14:11:07

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#258 2008-06-12 17:05:44

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#259 2008-06-12 17:53:35

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#260 2008-06-12 19:25:16

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#273 2008-08-20 07:50:55

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