The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

imatechguy · 2011-01-14 17:30:26

I've been meaning to say something here for some time and after nearly 10 months of using Arch exclusively I find I must finally post.

There's really not much about Arch I can say that hasn't already been said. The distro is fantastic, the documentation superb, the list of packages stellar and the forums contain adult conversations, questions and advice instead of a bunch of whining "help me" requests with "RTFM n00b" responses. There's also the added benefit that new forum threads don't disappear into page 5+ oblivion in less than 12 hours. But all of that is the part I think we all know and probably why most of us are using Arch.

Like probably many others here I grew up in the world of Windows unaware there were other viable options. After nearly 30 I finally learned different back in late 2005/early 2006. I spent a few years making half hearted attempts with the various 'buntu flavors but at the end of 2008 I finally got serious and began trying all of the "newb friendly" distros before finally deciding to dual boot Suse and Fedora. Which is when I finally went cold turkey and 100% moved to Linux in January of 2009. I learned a good deal and was for almost a year I was content with what I had. However this was uncharted territory for me because prior to this I'd never gone longer than about 2 months in a dual boot environment before reverting completely back to Windows.

During that first MS free year I would still review and test out a few of the "newb friendly" distros on occasion but it really took that year for the novelty of it all to wear off and me to realize I still felt like I was missing something. I wasn't really happy or truly satisfied with what I had and the turning point for me was when I realized I was just clicking through basically the same set of menus as the MS ones I'd given up. I still didn't know that much about the inner workings of my system, I wanted more, and began again to seriously look for other "newb friendly" distros to replace my Suse/Fedora install. I wanted to be happy with what I had, happy with what I was doing to maintain it and learn more in the process and to have something I was truly proud of.

That renewed search started in January of 2010. After reviewing a few "newb" distros I decided I wanted something a little more advanced that would stretch my abilities forcing me to really learn something in the process. I was working my way through the different "intermediate" distros and somehow, I don't remember exactly how, I stumbled onto Arch. I read the documentation, and after a few test installs eventually registered to make searching the forums easier. I ended up doing a "final" installation back in late March/early April of 2010 and have not looked back since. For the first time since being exposed to Linux I found I was really happy and even content with what I'd setup. I probably learned more in the first month or two of running Arch than I had in all the previous years since my first exposure to Linux combined.

While I still consider myself a "newb" to Linux and especially to Arch one recurring theme I'd like to comment on is about Arch being a "non-newb" distro; because I think Arch is being seriously misrepresented when that statement is made. Arch may not be the best choice for someone who is just starting to look for an MS replacement but it's not a bad one for anyone that really wants to learn how to do more than just click through some different menu options than they were in Windows. My son will be 4 in about a month and I look forward to the time when I sit down with him to build his first computer and hand over a then current Arch disk that he'll use to install his first Operating System.

Finally I'd just like to thank the Devs, the TU's and the community at large for making Arch what it is… simply the best.

mimor · 2011-01-16 02:23:10

I've been using Arch a couple of months as my all-round OS on my netbook.
The feeling I get using my laptop is awesome. (Perhaps bc I use AwesomeWM).
After I got from KDE to Gnome and this on various distro's, Arch was the next step.
Thanks to Arch I flipped the page and started to use tiling window managers.
Almost mentioned it to my mom.... but she wouldn't understand my happiness I guess.
So, great job!

kikinovak · 2011-01-19 08:53:36

I'm a long-time 100% GNU/Linux user, since the days of Slackware 7.1. First time I encountered Arch was back around 2005. I've been mainly using Slackware, Debian and CentOS for work, on production servers and on SOHO desktops for various clients. I used to come back to Arch sometimes, because I liked the overall architecture of this nifty little distribution. Over the years, I've always felt that Arch was almost what I needed. Then, last December, I decided to take the plunge and move everything, all my machines, over to Arch.

Right now there's seven machines in my office, all running Arch with KDE 4.5: crisp, clean and fast. As I'm writing these lines, the Arch installer is chugging away on my girlfriend's laptop (to replace the rotten Windows XP install). And I'm seriously considering moving my main production server from CentOS to Arch.

A huge pat on the shoulder for all the Arch developers. Thank you for a truly great Linux distribution. Oh, and did I mention it? The documentation on the Arch wiki is just outstanding.

2handband · 2011-01-22 20:30:50

kikinovak wrote:

I'm a long-time 100% GNU/Linux user, since the days of Slackware 7.1. First time I encountered Arch was back around 2005. I've been mainly using Slackware, Debian and CentOS for work, on production servers and on SOHO desktops for various clients. I used to come back to Arch sometimes, because I liked the overall architecture of this nifty little distribution. Over the years, I've always felt that Arch was almost what I needed. Then, last December, I decided to take the plunge and move everything, all my machines, over to Arch.
Right now there's seven machines in my office, all running Arch with KDE 4.5: crisp, clean and fast. As I'm writing these lines, the Arch installer is chugging away on my girlfriend's laptop (to replace the rotten Windows XP install). And I'm seriously considering moving my main production server from CentOS to Arch.
A huge pat on the shoulder for all the Arch developers. Thank you for a truly great Linux distribution. Oh, and did I mention it? The documentation on the Arch wiki is just outstanding.

Have you found Arch stable enough to use on a deployement server? I've been using it on the desktop for just a few days and am enjoying it thoroughly, but I'm extremely reluctant to put a rolling release on a server (or on my gf's laptop, for that matter). Those are staying with Slackware, at least for the moment. I haven't had any stability issues with Arch so far, but again it's only been a few days and no major upgrades.

purple12 · 2011-01-23 01:11:26

Two days ago, while SSH'd into my home Arch system from the office, I casually installed a common network monitoring utility and, in the process of this quick and simple procedure, managed to break every useful application on the box. You see, I'm one of those naive, provincial bumpkins who'd failed to grasp the real implications of the "rolling release" model and, having long since crossed the threshold beyond which any attempt at a full system upgrade would certainly bring my digital world crashing down around me, I had simply decided to remain in my comfortable, obsolete-but-functional world. Weeks became months; months dragged into years, until this week, when I made the fatal blunder (the sad thing is, is didn't even need ntop, because I already had iftop...grrr!). The upshot: I was forced to attempt an upgrade on an installation that hadn't seen so much as a minor patch in almost (gulp!) ...two years! With trembling thumbs, I slowly pecked out "sudo pacman -Syu" and waited for the end of everything.
Naturally, I was convinced that my ancient, bewhiskered Arch install would get irretrievably horked by a full upgrade, but to my utter astonishment, the damn thing updated just fine and, after fetching almost 2GB worth of binaries and miscellaneous config files, and after detecting only a single file conflict after checking over 680 to-be-updated packages, my system was back up, fully upgraded, and shiny-new in under an hour! Of course, the package upgrade process itself completely killed the session and rendered the machine unbootable as expected (the final death agonies of the X-server were actually kinda fun to watch...heh!), but thanks to some online help from my friend and arch-Archer, Alex M., a guy who knows this distro like most people know their feet, everything worked better than advertised, my world was saved, and the sheer robustness of the Arch distro has been proven beyond question.

Thanks Arch Devs!!!

btw: I also have to give props to the Linux software RAID implementation, as only one of the four disks currently hosting my three arrays is from the original set, the other three Seagate .5 T units having long since failed and been replaced.

cconner · 2011-02-05 05:43:04

Arch Linux and it's inherent principles have proven not only to work best for me, but have provided key insight undoubtedly seeded the foundation for my future projects. Thank God for upstream development!

"The path to simplicity often leads through a seemingly needless level of complexity" - M Zalewski

whatshisname · 2011-02-05 21:00:20

Been running Linux of one flavor or another on laptops for 3 or 4 years now. Always loved the responsiveness but never got the hibernate/suspend stuff to work.

Finally sat down a couple of nights ago, followed the Arch wiki on the topic and, for the first time ever, I've got my Dell laptop suspending and hibernating like a champ!

Thanks, Arch! What a team we have here.

litemotiv · 2011-02-05 21:06:35

whatshisname's thread merged.

sm222 · 2011-02-10 23:09:59

After fooling around with Ubuntu and various other distros for around 3-4 years now I decided I wanted something more customizable and something where I only got what i want and nothing more. I did a lot of research on arch and with some help from the best documentation around I installed arch and installed GNOME over top, granted i screwed things up a few times before I got it right but when I did get it I felt as if I built something that fitted my needs exactly.

I don't plan to step away from arch anytime soon and I would just like to thank the community for being so helpful on the forums as well.

willjudd · 2011-03-06 04:38:41

Hi guys.

I wrote up some of my early experiences with Arch, having only switched to it in the last week after a few years of Ubuntu. Please let me know what you think, and what you think the greatest strength of Arch is!

http://williamjudd.com/2011/03/03/linux … ness-arch/

Thanks,
Will

jcw122 · 2011-03-11 04:29:45

Finished installing ArchLinux yesterday...my very first Linux installation. It's been my very first of what I'll call a "real" distro (previously only experience with Ubuntu...Ubuntu is a joke compared to this!). I LOVE IT SO FAR! It really fascinates me what an experience Linux really is. I mean I love Windows, and I've got great memories from when I build my first rig in 2004...but finally dual booting Windows 7 and ArchLinux on my laptop is a true accomplishment for me! I'm proud to say I am finally a Linux user, and even more happy to be an Arch user, I love the design philosophy!

Last edited by jcw122 (2011-03-11 04:30:47)

timm · 2011-03-12 18:40:12

I have a machine I play with that is currently my backup server; I decided it was time to learn a new language, so I tried installing FreeBSD on it. Found that much of my Arch knowledge transferred, and got the machine up with few problems. However, I wanted to note that the Arch forums are way more helpful in resolving problems than the FreeBSD forums. Answers tend to be more complete here, and newbie questions more tolerated.

The other thing I found is that pacman is a tremendous tool. I knew that already to some extent, but when trying to get the FreeBSD system up to date, or when there's a dependency problem, I keep finding myself complaining about how (relatively) difficult it is without pacman.

So just a pat on the back to everyone here!

hauzer · 2011-03-15 21:32:59

Pacman should be the future of many distros.

darkbeanies · 2011-03-16 20:45:48

I like the way it's called "Arch" Linux. Like, it makes it sound like some sort of hardcore supervillain with 30 inch biceps and an even bigger...package list. Also, it makes me sound like a real uber-geek when I tell people which OS I use, even though any success I have with my computer is usually due to pure luck or copyin' and pastin' bash commands into that terminal-thingie.

mencargo · 2011-04-01 16:36:11

ArchLinux is Linux, how it's supposed to be.
When I saw the page about "The Canterbury Distribution", April's 1rst, I thought...
Well, it certainly would be awesome if many Linux communities combined efforts for the same distro, and then I thought... all I ask is that it keeps pacman and rolling state release.
xD

Olson · 2011-04-04 04:27:42

darkbeanies wrote:

I like the way it's called "Arch" Linux. Like, it makes it sound like some sort of hardcore supervillain with 30 inch biceps and an even bigger...package list. Also, it makes me sound like a real uber-geek when I tell people which OS I use, even though any success I have with my computer is usually due to pure luck or copyin' and pastin' bash commands into that terminal-thingie.

Hahaha I felt this way too, even before I used Arch. The simplicity of the name and the beautiful design of the website here did a lot to turn me on to using it.

xs · 2011-04-06 00:28:51

I'm running a arch-base/kde-base. pacman/AUR is absoluetely awesome. I've tried a lot of other distro's (ubuntu, mint, fedora etc) and they just didn't do it for me so I went back to Windows. I felt that if I'm going to switch to linux completely I should really build my own system from the ground up and make it how I want it. ie: Learn by going through the ropes instead of reading bug reports like you do on most other distro's to fix things/solve problems etc. Arch's wiki is brilliant. I think I've finally found a safe and happy home. I will not be going back to using windows anytime soon.

Last edited by xs (2011-04-06 00:29:40)

cotti · 2011-04-12 12:33:56

Saturday I went to a GNOME Launch Party. There were all kinds of Linux users - Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, there were even a GNOME dev and a Debian dev too!

They asked everyone which distro were they on, and so they discovered my Arch. I found their curiousity quite funny, emerged a lot of talk about it - they praise specially pacman and the gorgeous documentation in the wiki.

"Debian still have a long way to go on this", another guy said.

So, pacman, docs guys, and Arch team as a whole, you've got ~15 more approvals from various corners of the Linux "ecosystem"!

ki3rk3gaard · 2011-04-13 01:16:09

Arch is Kewl Beanz . I learned more on Arch than any other distro .I believe (although others will surely disagree ) that this is a great distro even for newbies because it facilitates true growth . If I get stuck theres always the wiki's I mean Arch has the best documentation I've seen .The people are cool and not snooty like they were at Fedora(even though arch has a steeper learning curve) so I feel at home.

Last edited by ki3rk3gaard (2011-04-13 01:19:30)

ki3rk3gaard · 2011-04-13 01:22:06

Oh yeah and in my subjective opinion Arch blue is better than Fedora hue.

nixfag · 2011-04-20 12:04:04

Arch looks like gentoo but binary

nomorewindows · 2011-04-23 16:48:56

My recent endeavour into the distro picking mania is to find something I can use besides Windows. I was looking for something that would support my proprietary wireless cards--you know the ones that only work on Windows. First it was Ubunslow which works for a little while until it gets too slow. Then somehow or another I stumbled onto Arch Linux. It is the swiss army knife of all things Linux. I can actually get down to business with this distro, and do things that Linux was intended to do. It brings back the whole intention of tinkering with the computer that Linus had intended. No more playing a Microsoft video game to get the operating system to behave. The total benefit of Linux is that many hardwares can be matched for a particular purpose, so that Linux becomes machine independent.

Before that, it was the typical Mandrake...this is what you had if you didn't have a high-speed connection, which wasn't around back then. If you have the high-speed, Arch Linux is awesome. I've tried the *BSDs, but am not entirely impressed with them. They seem to be dated somewhat. They are slim if they will work for what you are doing.

I like the PXE booting feature, I actually have a machine that is working entirely with PXE/NFS running Arch. This is a way to really get using a real operating system, without a live CD. No more re-mastering unless necessary. Of course, the installation CD works wonders also. The most up-to-date upon installation and the hereafter.

skjald · 2011-04-26 08:03:15

Hiya!

Last edited by skjald (2011-05-13 20:32:35)

jasonwryan · 2011-04-26 08:17:02

Welcome to the boards!

Moving to the "Official Arch is Best Thread"

skjald · 2011-04-26 08:19:35

jasonwryan wrote:

Welcome to the boards!
Moving to the "Official Arch is Best Thread"

Thanks! You're right, this is a better place for it!

Last edited by skjald (2011-04-26 08:20:50)

Arch Linux

#526 2011-01-14 17:30:26

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#527 2011-01-16 02:23:10

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#528 2011-01-19 08:53:36

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#529 2011-01-22 20:30:50

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#530 2011-01-23 01:11:26

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#531 2011-02-05 05:43:04

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#532 2011-02-05 21:00:20

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#533 2011-02-05 21:06:35

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#534 2011-02-10 23:09:59

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#535 2011-03-06 04:38:41

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#536 2011-03-11 04:29:45

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#537 2011-03-12 18:40:12

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#538 2011-03-15 21:32:59

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#539 2011-03-16 20:45:48

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#540 2011-04-01 16:36:11

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#541 2011-04-04 04:27:42

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#542 2011-04-06 00:28:51

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#543 2011-04-12 12:33:56

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#544 2011-04-13 01:16:09

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#545 2011-04-13 01:22:06

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#546 2011-04-20 12:04:04

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#547 2011-04-23 16:48:56

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#548 2011-04-26 08:03:15

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#549 2011-04-26 08:17:02

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

#550 2011-04-26 08:19:35

Re: The Official Unofficial 'Arch is Best' Thread

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