To Arch from BSD

Alccode · 2005-02-14 03:35:30

Hi everyone,

First of all I must commend these boards for being very friendly and professional; I really like the atmosphere. Now, the point of this post will be to describe a user's transition from 100% BSD to a BSD/Linux hybrid, and the resulting impressions.

I'm mostly a NetBSD user that has been eyeing Linux for some time. Although my workhorse laptop is safely running NetBSD and will most likely stay that way, my desktop has been somewhat dormant. One reason is that my Audiophile 2496 soundcard is not supported under any *BSD (except under 4Front's OSS, but that costs money). So there has been incentive for me to explore other Unices.

However, I've always been somewhat wary of most Linux distributions for several (perhaps unfounded) reasons. I use Debian machines at my university (when I have to) and a Fedora Core box at a student's club. In both cases I've been somewhat turned off to Linux due to bloat. I don't want a zillion utilities I'll mostly never use, or configuration via GUI utilities. My preference is for minimalistic yet effective strongly Unix-flavoured systems (i.e., CLI all the way).

When I found out about Arch (must have been on ./ or OSNews or something like that) a few months ago it instantly struck my fancy due to its style that is very reminiscent of BSD. E.g., no extra software installed other than the base system, text/CLI-based configuration (as God intended it), and a strong package management system (that has a sensible name!)

I was actually quite surprised at my reaction since I had never considered using Linux in the past. Debian seemed somewhat attractive at one point, but its outdated software turned me off. For example, one of my fav window managers, ratpoison, is present in the "testing" package distribution as version 1.2.1, which is laughably old (around two years!). On the other hand, Arch has very up-to-date packages.

Installing Arch was quite straightforward after I learned I had to configure /tmp manually after the install. When I started using pacman, I was very much blown away. It's so fast! In comparison, compiling something like firefox -- a way of installing software that isn't necessarily wrong, just different -- takes an hour or more on BSD. Having to cvsup the FreeBSD ports tree or cvs update the NetBSD pkgsrc tree for 5 minutes then wait 10 minutes for the INDEX file to be generated is snail's speed compared to how fast pacman synchronizes the package databases.

Installing X.org took no more than five minutes (most of which was spent downloading the package files). Firefox was up and running in less than a minute. And everything is nice and fast thanks to the i686 optimizations (thank you!).

So in the end, I'm really satisfied with Arch so far and am officially a Linux user, to boot!

cactus · 2005-02-14 04:52:01

glad to hear it.
welcome. 8)

z4ziggy · 2005-02-14 06:29:58

Alccode wrote:

... (as God intended it)...

didnt u mean Judd?

and welcome on board.

sarah31 · 2005-02-14 16:28:37

Cool beans. I don't often hear of BSD users switching to Linux. (I have heard of lots of former BSD users going back to BSD from Linux though)

Alccode · 2005-02-15 03:27:01

Thanks for the friendly replies! sarah31, I agree it's a little strange. But BSD users are devoted to technical excellence just like Linux users, and so if there is a particular tool that can do better at a task than what is currently being used, they will use that better tool. In my case Linux and, in particular Arch, is just better as a desktop workstation. The interesting part is that I never realized how good it was.

On the other hand, I still use NetBSD on my laptop for programming and application development since, using pkgsrc, I can have things like multiple versions of python installed (which I need). There are also a few more packages available that I require for my work, e.g. subversion-python bindings and the ClearSilver templating system, to name a few.

Nothing is perfect, though; for example, a good python IDE that I would like to use (Komodo) doesn't work on NetBSD, for reasons that I haven't gotten around to fixing yet (library mishaps). I like what someone said once (it was spoken in context of Apache Ant), "This is just another rusty tool to put in your belt." Every tool is rusty, you just have to find the least rusty ones and combine them as best you can. :twisted:

phrakture · 2005-02-15 15:59:28

hey, welcome...

we seem to be getting alot of these really long "i'm totally satisfied" posts lately... I'll take that as a good sign 8)

jak · 2005-02-16 00:31:38

Alccode wrote:

Nothing is perfect ... "This is just another rusty tool to put in your belt."

Yeah, I want to get xen installed so I can run NetBSD and 3 or 4 linux distributions all on one box at the same time.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-02-14 03:35:30

To Arch from BSD

#2 2005-02-14 04:52:01

Re: To Arch from BSD

#3 2005-02-14 06:29:58

Re: To Arch from BSD

#4 2005-02-14 16:28:37

Re: To Arch from BSD

#5 2005-02-15 03:27:01

Re: To Arch from BSD

#6 2005-02-15 15:59:28

Re: To Arch from BSD

#7 2005-02-16 00:31:38

Re: To Arch from BSD

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