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Arch Linux: First Impressions


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I think the point is arch doesnt encourage complete noobies who dont want to RTFM to use arch.

 

I think thats perfectly valid ....if they wanted a user friendly noobie distro in the first place then they could stick with Mandrake or others.

 

On another thread someone (bvc?) pointed out people do new distro's becuase they see a way to do something better and for arch or gentoo this means cleaner.

 

They dont want pointless GUI clutter etc substituting for a man page...

They dont want complete noobie windows converts requesting unneeded GUI tool clutter and moaning they have to edit the fstasb themselves.

 

I dont think Im going to try arch for speed... if I try it its becuase

as time has gone on i have come to the realization that the less someone knows their system and their OS the more it will cost them in time and money. the more hand holding we do the more people will demand it. the more we make things point and click the more we compromise the security of our systems .... some things in *nix are just not meant to be done without considerable risks.

 

(except of course Id spell realisation with an s)

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Tyme is right. Were getting way off-topic.

 

Anyways I heard Arch and Gentoo are the fastest. And if your suggesting I should try Arch next, I probably will on my free box (mohaa game server). Maybe even speed it up a bit OOOoOOo.

 

I don't see the point in learning debian or slackware when gentoo and arch are faster.

 

So far I'm having trouble seeing Gentoo's advantage over Arch (too many really good comments).

hmm.... Neither Arch or Gentoo should be (much) faster than Slack or Debian. The reason you can't see the advantage over Gentoo is because there isn't one! To me their is, but that's just me.

 

Linux distros are made to serve a purpose or with a certain objective in mind. So you basically find the distro that best matches what you want from an OS (which is Gentoo for me). Or make your own :cheesy:

 

You can't call one distro generally better than another. They'll be better for certain users... there's no standard benchmark for what makes one better than the other.

 

So, if you want speed, stability and a great package manager for a distro that is easy to install and where you'll get to 'play' a whole lot - then Arch is that.

 

Gentoo is my distro of choice because; it has a great community that answer questions quickly and are pretty friendly. I love portage and the concept of compiling packages for my exact architecture. It's stable and fast and I can always have the latest development kernel stock running on my machine. But that's just me...

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sorry i didn't mean fior my posts to sidetrack to much inot a discussion odf helping or not helping people. to close that conversation i do help noobs but at the same time i try to get them as self reliant as possible as quickly as possible. if that means pulling off an apparent elitist attitude ( i prefer curt) then so be it. some people need to be scared straight. i know i got several kick before i got going.

 

arch or gentoo? try both. the advantages are varying both ways but ultimately it is what you prefer. i did not like gentoo as it was very buggy at the time used it. there was a period for awhile too where the zealots were incredibly annoying and i slagged the distro alot for that. it was not a pretty scene and i still have an arch user periodically liabeling my name indirectly every so often (well actually they take aim at me by tainting new users to using the forum or my advice and all my friends there in the process). fortunately i don't care because he ends out being the bigger ass in the end because all he does is gripe gripe gripe. he even was on the dev team until he quit because he could not hack it. at that point he went on his rampage.

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Hmm I tried arch and it just wasn't right for me. It way too complicated and I couldn't get anything to work unless I spend an hour reading a tutorial for every step and sub-step.

 

That kinda distro is just not for me. Fedora and Mandrake do seem to be doing nicely.

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Guest msimplay

can't compare gentoo to any other distribution because its the only one you build specifically to your needs using portage and of course any rpm or deb package will be faster installing then building from source ie portage , but if you want that then thats your decision because packages don't have the advantage that building from source does

the configuration for example and the processor specific optimisations etc etc etc

Portage is the only tool that does this

 

I've used varios Distributions in the past but when i tried gentoo for the first time i knew that i couldn't go back to using package based distributions simply because otherwise i can't use portage

 

also because there are auto installs in package based ones u lose a lot of options for example choosing which desktop you want to use

most distros will install gnome as well as kde but in Gentoo you can disable the use of gnome and gtk with the USE variables.

 

In short Gentoo is unlike any other distribution of linux and really can't be fairly judged against other Linux distributions that share common things like rpms or deb packages

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One of the reasons that I switched from gentoo to arch is simply because I couldn't see any advantage in gentoo over arch anymore - whereas arch has the advantage of quicker installs and IMHO better stability.

 

I find arch generally runs faster than gentoo, so I can't see a reason to bother compiling for my system. I also find that if I don;t like the way a package has been compiled (i.e. what has been enabled and what has not etc...) then I can easily use abs to recompile just those one or two packages (just one in my case) - so the advantage of gentoo's USE flags is diminished.

 

Also, I began to find little annoying things in gentoo and it began to seem more and more unstable to me, which arch does not so much.

 

I'm not saying everyone should use arch over gentoo - everyone will have their own preferences. But gentoo compile approach is not necessarily better...

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Hmm I tried arch and it just wasn't right for me. It way too complicated and I couldn't get anything to work unless I spend an hour reading a tutorial for every step and sub-step.

 

That kinda distro is just not for me. Fedora and Mandrake do seem to be doing nicely.

 

hm... just in case you want to install a speedy distro (fastest out-of-the-box distro) that also installs itself in five minutes, i recommend yoper, which is built from scratch and optimized for i686. :D

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Hmm I tried arch and it just wasn't right for me. It way too complicated and I couldn't get anything to work unless I spend an hour reading a tutorial for every step and sub-step.

 

That kinda distro is just not for me. Fedora and Mandrake do seem to be doing nicely.

 

hm... just in case you want to install a speedy distro (fastest out-of-the-box distro) that also installs itself in five minutes, i recommend yoper, which is built from scratch and optimized for i686. :D

Just for the record, Arch installs in a couple of minutes as well. Not with AS many packages though.

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packages don't have the advantage that building from source does

the configuration for example and the processor specific optimisations etc etc etc

Portage is the only tool that does this

I use both arch and gentoo on a regular basis. I see no improvement in speed of arch over gentoo.

 

most distros will install gnome as well as kde but in Gentoo you can disable the use of gnome and gtk with the USE variables.
in my case i don't use KDE/QT, and all I have to do to avoid that is not install any apps based on KDE/QT.

 

In short Gentoo is unlike any other distribution of linux and really can't be fairly judged against other Linux distributions that share common things like rpms or deb packages

it can too be compared. it's still a linux distribution, you still end up with the same stuff installed. it doesn't matter how they get installed. besides, it's good to compare the advantages of a compile-it-yourself distro to a package based distro.

 

If you're really concerned about optimizations, go get LFS.

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fedora suits my needs anymore. yum handles deps as good as gentoo/arch/debian. In some respects I think there Q/A over packages is a lot better.

 

Anyone who says that gentoo/arch doesn't ever suffer from dep hell is either lieing or hasn't used it long enough 8) All distros suffer at some point of time in there package systems. None of them are prefect, but there still better that winblows <--- had to sneak that in! ;-)

 

I still use gentoo on a couple boxs and i was on a couple arch box's last weekend and they are nice distros but like i said anymore fc handles all i need. Software installs are fast/ distro itself is fast, quality of packages is awesome. Like phunni said with arch, if the build a package w/out w/ options i want/don't I'll just edit the spec file and rebuild the rpm.

 

Blah blah and some more blah blah's 8)

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OK, tried it out too--flattened my Mandrake box yesterday and installed Arch Linux. Great stuff! The "other" fstab / devfs format needs some getting used to, but is logical and easy to understand. And pacman plain rocks.

 

Thanks for all the info in this thread, helped me lots. :)

 

93,

-Sascha.rb

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I have to say that Arch is very good and not that hard. I am using mandrake, yoper and Arch installs for different people. Yoper is easier to install, but you don't get the up-to-date stuff in their repository (such as firefox 0.9.1, win32-codecs, j2re) like you do in Arch. The Arch forum is very helpful with a good spread of experience in the posters.

 

I have to disagree about FC2. It is really a pain to get mp3 and some video codecs to work in kde. It is not fedora's fault (licencing stuff), but it certainly makes it non-newbie friendly. Mandrake is much nicer just because of the mp3 stuff. The 10.1 alpha was not as smooth as FC3test1 though. The mandrake cooker snapshots are true alphas/betas.

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  • 2 months later...

I installed Arch and Loved it and I'm still using it, makes everything on my laptop run great, the only thing that I'm kinda really mad about is my video card not working for sh*** . When I first installed Arch I got about 3500 frames now I'm only getting about 1800. Which does not allow me to play any games. That's the thing that it's the most irratating and I'm kinda disappointed that this section of the board doesn't really offer that much ArchLinux help.

 

-Luis

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