Arch Linux

sitquietly

Member

From: On the Wolf River

Registered: 2010-07-12

Posts: 219

Re: Arch Linux Labor & Dependability

@Korrode, Just curious .....then why use a rolling release distro if you are not rolling?

I've been using Arch to build a semi-stable distribution for the Atom processor with Nouveau video. Arch is great for this! I would call Arch a "meta distribution" before I would call it a "rolling-release distribution." It seems to be a lot like Linux From Scratch (once upon a time it was "from scratch") except that we have an amazing group of "devs" and "TUs" who keep that pure, relatively unpatched, "from scratch" linux almost perfectly up-to-date. The devs pull in THE linux software every day, compile it, test it extensively and "sign off" on it, eventually making the binary package and the PKGBUILD available as the born-again-every-day Archlinux distribution. OK, it rolls every day (almost every hour). But maybe that is just the symptom of a meta-distribution that pulls together almost all of the thousands of linux software projects and makes it available as a coherent, tested set from which we can draw to make any kind of stable or rolling system with any kind of gui and any set of office, creative, or scientific applications that we need.

e.g. I use Arch to build a great DE with xmonad as WM, rox as file manager, lxpanel and a custom set of scripts and dmenu as gui elements. Everything is compiled from source (yes, I can notice the difference in performance between the generic binaries and my "optimized for Atom" binaries --- my vlc and mplayer video playback is very smooth now, even while I'm compiling updates and downloading youtube videos at the same time). I also have KDE 4.6.x under evaluation and it is looking very useful (kwin has become great, "activities" with multiple workspaces for each activity seems to have a lot of potential for organizing workflow).

I don't know any other way (except Gentoo which almost killed me) of achieving my own system, up-to-date AND reliable AND most-of-the-hard-work-done-by-others, than by using Arch Linux, the meta-distribution

andr3as

Member

Registered: 2008-10-06

Posts: 53

Re: Arch Linux Labor & Dependability

Maybe I might sound like a heretic, but I actually love Arch because it is so low-maintenance for me: I update it every now and then, take care of the .install-notes and that's it basically. Bleeding-edge software with little extra effort ;-)

Especially on Ubuntu (had to use it once for some months), it seems like you basically have to reinstall twice every year if you don't want to end up with outdated software. I don't know about the other suggestions, though. I tried Zenwalk and some others in a VM sometime, but not long enough for maintenance to really matter... I used Debian like two years ago, that also seems a reasonable choice if you want a stable low-maintenance system, as opposed to a fully up-to-date one.