Arch Linux

Toth

Member

Registered: 2002-12-04

Posts: 82

Just here to say thanks

and best wishes to the development team.

I was a Slackware user for the past several months...the first distribution that stayed on my PC for more than two weeks before I wanted to try something different.  Arch combines everything that I loved about Slackware with everything I loved about Gentoo with everything I loved about Debian   The init scripts are simple, yet elegant. The package management system is simple yet robust, and the ABS is great for custom builds and for using software not available in Arch's repositories.

It's not perfect, of course, but it's the closest thing that I have yet to find when it comes to distros.

My only complaints were that Mozilla was compiled with --enable-xft but not --disable-freetype2...disabling freetype2 forces Mozilla to use only your xft configuration and thus fonts look better and follow the settings in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and Vim was not compiled for GTK2. ABS made fixing those things on my system a breeze though.

Keep up the good work, and good luck with this distribution!

kritoke

Member

From: Texas, USA

Registered: 2003-08-01

Posts: 211

Website

Re: Just here to say thanks

Hehe.  You described Arch Linux how I generally do.  The best of debian, slackware, and gentoo.  Slackware is one of the few distros ever to stay on my system long and Arch Linux really has just made me all giddy and I love it to bits, heh. It is a wonder why more people don't use it.

Kritoke

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http://counter.li.org/ Registered Linux User #318963 kritoke@jabber.org

drivingmsjuki

Member

From: Massachusetts

Registered: 2003-08-10

Posts: 21

Re: Just here to say thanks

Lack of adversing perhaps? << attempt at humor

I'm a newbie to Arch after *years* of using other linuxes. RedHat usually got the longest stays (sometimes as much as 40 days) and I have a shoebox full of linux cd's downloaded and played with over the years.

Arch has all the good stuff I liked from Gentoo and Knoppix, the speed of Slackware derivatives (Peanut, Vector, etc), and the simplicity of being able to update your system with just one command. It makes the old way look really obsolete - downloading packages manually, installing them manually, checking for dependencies manually, getting the stuff to satisfy the dependencies, etc.

So, yeah, please keep up the good work!

s

contrasutra

Member

From: New Jersey

Registered: 2003-07-26

Posts: 507

Re: Just here to say thanks

Try upgrading to the new GCC that just came out.

Being able to do that is impressive enough. As a former Slackware user, I let out a nice big gasp.

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"Contrary to popular belief, penguins are not the salvation of modern technology.  Neither do they throw parties for the urban proletariat."

scottro

Member

From: NYC

Registered: 2002-10-11

Posts: 466

Website

Re: Just here to say thanks

y'know that was what really brought me over to Arch--I had left Linux almost completely for FreeBSD, and then begun playing with Gentoo which brought me back to Linux. But the gcc upgrade from 2.95 to 3.x was a blip--one of the developers did some scripts, but the whole thing was quite iffy and most of us (it seems to me that this was back when the user base was still small) tarred up /home and reinstalled.

With Arch, typed pacman -Sy gcc and in two minutes it was done.

As someone posted in another thread somewhere, despite the claims of source based distros about how much better they work being individually tweaked, I've found Arch to be as fast or faster than most.  (There was an interesting comparison recently, twixt Gentoo, Deb and Mandrake--where they found, to their surprise, that MD was almost as fast as the others.)