Question about Arch vs Ubuntu

snorkel · 2009-02-11 02:22:39

Hi,
Just wondering if I would notice any difference running KDE on Arch VS Kubuntu?
Particularly on 64bit

Thanks,

Snorkel

Allan · 2009-02-11 02:51:23

I have.

(You question does not ask for specifics...)

emu · 2009-02-11 03:03:37

Probarly yes...

The biggest issure i can think of, on the top of my head is that arch kde is pretty vanilla.
Thats means whitout many of the extra programs that usaly is included in kubuntu.

Of course, you can install them manually via packman when ever (if ever) you need them.
I tryed out kde4.2 a few days ago, and it ran pretty smoothly on my system (not 64 btw).

If you want alot of the extra fluff and bling, you might want try kdemod.

aglarond · 2009-02-11 03:20:09

Not on 64-bit in particular, but in general, yes. Like emu said, Arch's install is pretty bare bones, especially if you use the kdemod repos (which I recommend). Ubuntu loads everything, plus, as far as I can tell, a few extras that the Ubuntu devs have added. A few extra processes start up at first.

That said, I just set up 4.2 on an old IBM T40 and Ubuntu and it runs great with the desktop effects off. I'm running it on my T42 with Arch and Compiz and it's flawless. The difference there isn't really the OS, though; it's the hardware, and it's different enough that I can't tell if the extra stuff the Ubuntu devs add slows things down or not. It does seem to eat up a little more memory, though.

-mS

afonic · 2009-02-11 14:05:07

Given the amazing speed of the KDE 4.x development I just love reading the release announcement for 4.2 and having it into extra repo the next day.

snorkel · 2009-02-15 20:08:21

Update on my question, I installed Arch64 bit and I have to say it is much faster than Kubuntu.
I used the kdemod repositories and I have pretty much what I had with Kubuntu except that everything is MUCH more snappy.
It of course was a little bit more work to instal, but not much more and I am very pleased with my system now.

toxygen · 2009-02-15 20:42:13

i was a happy user of kubuntu for about a year, when i got a new pc, tried kdemod3 (arch64), and now i'm a happy user of kdemod3.

Last edited by toxygen (2009-02-15 20:42:42)

Inxsible · 2009-02-15 21:57:47

snorkel wrote:

Update on my question, I installed Arch64 bit and I have to say it is much faster than Kubuntu.
I used the kdemod repositories and I have pretty much what I had with Kubuntu except that everything is MUCH more snappy.
It of course was a little bit more work to instal, but not much more and I am very pleased with my system now.

Once you use Arch....you can never leave !

We got you now !!!

Last edited by Inxsible (2009-02-15 21:58:05)

adamlau · 2009-02-15 23:42:31

Arch + KDE is also MUCH snappier than Ubuntu Minimal + KDE .

Ranguvar · 2009-02-16 00:11:50

afonic wrote:

Given the amazing speed of the KDE 4.x development I just love reading the release announcement for 4.2 and having it into extra repo the next day.

The day before, actually

Leigh · 2009-02-16 02:20:09

One difference is that Arch probably requires more maintenance than Ubuntu, although I never used Ubuntu, so I'm just guessing. If you go for months without updating your system you need to be prepared to chase down glitches due to the changes in upgraded packages. Not always, and usually not a problem if you upgrade the system every week or so and check the messages on the main Arch page and the forums. Arch stays on the ball with latest releases. It can get frustrating if you don't have time to keep up. A good example is the kernel. I think there's been a kernel update every week for the past month or so.

Just a heads up

adamlau · 2009-02-16 03:42:19

One for x86 today .

rexcoeus · 2009-02-16 17:58:06

I have a question about installing a package from a group of packages. I.E. installing kmix from the kdemultimedia group. How would I go about doing that?

Inxsible · 2009-02-16 18:01:10

rexcoeus wrote:

I have a question about installing a package from a group of packages. I.E. installing kmix from the kdemultimedia group. How would I go about doing that?

pacman -S kdemultimedia

When it asks for confirmation if you want to install the whole group, say n. Then it will proceed to ask you the same question for each package within the group. Say y to ones that you want to install.

mcmillan · 2009-02-16 18:17:12

Inxsible wrote:

rexcoeus wrote:
I have a question about installing a package from a group of packages. I.E. installing kmix from the kdemultimedia group. How would I go about doing that?
pacman -S kdemultimedia
When it asks for confirmation if you want to install the whole group, say n. Then it will proceed to ask you the same question for each package within the group. Say y to ones that you want to install.

That is true about package groups in general, though rexcoeus picked a bad example. Arch's kde packages aren't split very much, so the kdemultimedia is all in one package. If you're interested in installing kde packages individually you should look into kdemod.

Inxsible · 2009-02-16 18:27:23

mcmillan wrote:

That is true about package groups in general, though rexcoeus picked a bad example. Arch's kde packages aren't split very much, so the kdemultimedia is all in one package. If you're interested in installing kde packages individually you should look into kdemod.

I never use KDE -- never have. So I don't know what groups exist. I just took the name that was mentioned and ran with it

ninjaprawn · 2009-02-16 19:19:09

Leigh wrote:

One difference is that Arch probably requires more maintenance than Ubuntu, although I never used Ubuntu, so I'm just guessing. If you go for months without updating your system you need to be prepared to chase down glitches due to the changes in upgraded packages. Not always, and usually not a problem if you upgrade the system every week or so and check the messages on the main Arch page and the forums. Arch stays on the ball with latest releases. It can get frustrating if you don't have time to keep up. A good example is the kernel. I think there's been a kernel update every week for the past month or so.
Just a heads up

i used kubuntu for a year, n even though it isnt rolling release, the upgrades would mess up tho os every now n then, about as frequently as with arch! the biggest difference is that with arch, its easier to fix or find a solution to the problem! with arch, you have had to config the whole system, so no wer everytin is, or if not 90% of users have had the same problem, n asked on the forum already! kubuntu, i never had a clue what had broken so had to reinstall afta blindly pokin round a system i didnt have a clue about!

arch is the best os i have ever tried! bin here 2 years nearly!

cerbie · 2009-02-16 19:54:07

snorkel wrote:

Update on my question, I installed Arch64 bit and I have to say it is much faster than Kubuntu.
I used the kdemod repositories and I have pretty much what I had with Kubuntu except that everything is MUCH more snappy.
It of course was a little bit more work to install, but not much more and I am very pleased with my system now.

I've been using Kubuntu for three days now (In a tragic chroot mishap, I FUBARed my arch kernels and installed LILO to the MBR, and had an unused JFS partition on the drive), and having tried the 64 (8GB RAM gives me an excuse , and it's going away as soon as I have free time to recover Arch), I find both to be deathly slow compared to Arch's, both standard and KDEmod. However, it also boots slower, shuts down slower, randomly thrashes the HDD, and has a crash-prone compiz (I've been trying to ween myself off of Openbox). OTOH, I have a graphical desktop within 15 minutes of inserting the DVD.

Last edited by cerbie (2009-02-16 20:14:06)

ninjaprawn · 2009-02-16 20:00:29

I've been trying to ween myself off of Openbox

try compiz fusion stand alone! works very nicely with the compiz-deskmenu, just a lil heavy for my puny 512 meg of ram n 1.8celeron! lol! i still run it now n then though!

Inxsible · 2009-02-16 20:02:18

ninjaprawn wrote:

try compiz fusion stand alone! works very nicely with the compiz-deskmenu, just a lil heavy for my puny 512 meg of ram n 1.8celeron! lol! i still run it now n then though!

I want to do that as well...but definitely on a newer machine. My current machine with 256MB RAM and nvidia GeForce 2 wiht 32 MB shared RAM is not something that can handle compiz

Maybe I will get rid of Fluxbox and put compiz-standalone on tty2

Last edited by Inxsible (2009-02-16 20:02:45)

Xiong Chiamiov · 2009-02-16 20:58:52

ninjaprawn wrote:

Leigh wrote:
One difference is that Arch probably requires more maintenance than Ubuntu, although I never used Ubuntu, so I'm just guessing. If you go for months without updating your system you need to be prepared to chase down glitches due to the changes in upgraded packages. Not always, and usually not a problem if you upgrade the system every week or so and check the messages on the main Arch page and the forums. Arch stays on the ball with latest releases. It can get frustrating if you don't have time to keep up. A good example is the kernel. I think there's been a kernel update every week for the past month or so.
Just a heads up
i used kubuntu for a year, n even though it isnt rolling release, the upgrades would mess up tho os every now n then, about as frequently as with arch! the biggest difference is that with arch, its easier to fix or find a solution to the problem! with arch, you have had to config the whole system, so no wer everytin is, or if not 90% of users have had the same problem, n asked on the forum already! kubuntu, i never had a clue what had broken so had to reinstall afta blindly pokin round a system i didnt have a clue about!

Personally, I spend about the same amount of time fixing things in Arch as I did in Kubuntu. There's a major difference, though, because in Arch, it's almost always *my* fault, while in Kubuntu, it was almost always *not*. Fixes in Kubuntu also never got things to work /quite/ right, and broke something else later on down the road.

R00KIE · 2009-02-16 21:28:24

Xiong Chiamiov wrote:

Personally, I spend about the same amount of time fixing things in Arch as I did in Kubuntu. There's a major difference, though, because in Arch, it's almost always *my* fault, while in Kubuntu, it was almost always *not*. Fixes in Kubuntu also never got things to work /quite/ right, and broke something else later on down the road.

Sounds about right, I used to have ubuntu and while it didn't exactly break, the end of support and consequent lack of updated libs / delay in getting updates killed it for me.
Plus something would slowly but surely eat all the ram and start using swap and make my notebook crawl to halt ... never figured out the problem because eventually I found Arch

ssl6 · 2009-02-17 00:49:30

i used kubuntu before, one of the first distros i used, i cant really say anything too bad about it, since it got my feet wet. but dive into arch was something i wasnt quite prepared for. but i learned alot more from arch than i ever could have with kubuntu/ubuntu, i find with (k)ubuntu, every time a problem arises, i was going on the forum, asking for help, someone gives you a command, copy/paste and problem solved......but what did that command do?

with arch, well, as mentioned, you configure the system yourself, which is what really got me learning, im getting used to knowing where to look for troubleshooting my problems, i know where alot of my config files are, and i've learned what some of those main config files affect and dont affect, i never would have learned that much about my system with ubuntu, EVER.

and yeah, every once in a while theres package upgrades that break things, xorg fairly recently, and bluetooth the other day. i've grown used to checking the package upgrade forum here before doing certain upgrades as ill notice which ones are problematic, and i can read through and get an idea of what to look for, with xorg, i rolled back the update until i had time to troubleshoot, and when i did upgrade and crash it again, i went straight to my log file, since i know where it is now, and turned out all i had to do was comment out a line in xorg.conf. with the recent bluetooth update, i noticed some complaints in the forum, did the update, noticed the message during the install that the old configs were moved. i checked the old ones against the new templates, they matched up, simply restored my config, i havent had any other problems, but i do sometimes ask a few dumb questions here, im still a windows user at heart, and i did buy a book for reference, i try to find my answers more and more on my own, its the dumb things that get me, i have a habbit of assuming things are more complicated than they are i guess

otherwise, as far as speed, i would say either can be faster, kubuntu definitely installs alot more out of the box, if you want to take the time to slim it down?.......or....you can run arch, which starts small, and you build up what you need, you can probably manage to bulk it up worse than ubuntu.....i dont see that happening though. so arch is quite likely to feel alot faster on teh same hardware since it so much lighter. personally i think arch is the better pick. i think what got me to make that dive into arch was when i looked through the repo's and saw newer versions of all the programs i used......little did i know i had to install my own desktop environment, learned that one pretty quick though

Leigh · 2009-02-17 10:11:17

Well, obviously I was wrong. Been using Arch for the past five years, and I think I've just become like Archified. I just know that if I wait too long to update my system, like a month or two, the chances are greater I'll have problems to fix due to being behind two or three versions of something. I'm not complaining though. I do remember my Debian days before Ubuntu came out. I was just suggesting not to let your system go too long before updating.

I guess I'm not understanding very well, but if Ubuntu isn't a rolling release, wouldn't you have long stretches of stability, once everything is set up and running, before a new release comes out?

cerbie · 2009-02-17 10:23:47

ninjaprawn wrote:

I've been trying to ween myself off of Openbox
try compiz fusion stand alone! works very nicely with the compiz-deskmenu, just a lil heavy for my puny 512 meg of ram n 1.8celeron! lol! i still run it now n then though!

I have been, since the 180x nvidia drivers went stable, and it is quite speedy on my C2D/7300GT. Also, internal features of newer K-apps (like dolphin) have reduced my desire for having XFCE's panel+menu resident. It's more a matter of getting used to intricacies, and setting it up better for efficient use, rather than as a cool demo (alt+right-drag doesn't resize by default, as one example). But, on (K)Ubuntu 8.10, I seem to end up with borderless windows after an hour or so, where Compiz won't come back w/o restarting X. KDE takes forever to load, and runs slow, but it works.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-02-11 02:22:39

Question about Arch vs Ubuntu

#2 2009-02-11 02:51:23

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