[HN Gopher] Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
___________________________________________________________________
Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
Author : mxschumacher
Score : 232 points
Date : 2022-11-24 09:47 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| kreig wrote:
| Using Arch Linux since 2009 as my main desktop OS, and after 3
| complete PC ugprades, I never had to reinstall it.
|
| It has been working pretty well for me, except for a couple of
| issues that I ran over these years (e.g. the transition to
| systemd in 2012/2013, or no pacman -Syu for several weeks).
| pongo1231 wrote:
| Arch has served me well over the years on almost every piece of
| hardware I owned and is still my goto for a "traditional" FHS
| distro. The documentation is top notch, it's fairly unopinionated
| and I love the simplistic nature of it (everything in the repos
| is just unpatched upstream software, for the most part at least).
|
| Recently made the jump to NixOS though and been really happy with
| the additional features it offers.
| dvratil wrote:
| What I miss mentioned here is AUR and the fact that almost any
| software that you can think of is packaged there. You read about
| some cool software (like git-bug I learned about today here on
| HN), you do `yay -S cool-software` and it's there. On Ubuntu or
| Debian? Not so much...
| coletonodonnell wrote:
| The AUR is the main thing I miss after moving from Arch to
| Gentoo, the scope of the applications on the AUR is crazy, and
| for the most part in my experience it's usually up to date and
| reliable. In my opinion, the AUR alone is enough reason to
| install Arch or an Arch-Based Distro.
| trabant00 wrote:
| While some may see it as a learning tool I have used Arch on my
| workstations for 14 years. The last time I remember having to
| manually fix things was when it migrated to systemd. I am a linux
| sysadmin so I might be biased but I think people overestimate the
| effort required to get exactly what you want and nothing more out
| of an Arch setup.
| jasperry wrote:
| A more recent update that required some work was switching to
| PipeWire for audio. But it was mainly about knowing which
| packages to remove and replace, and now audio works without a
| hitch for me, better than PulseAudio ever did.
| autophagian wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. I started my linux use with everything-
| bundled distros like Ubuntu but I really appreciated Arch for
| giving me a better sense of how things tend to hang together.
| Made me much more comfortable transitioning into sysadmin/sre
| stuff.
| omnicognate wrote:
| I use it on all my personal linux boxes at home: laptop,
| router, nas, a nuc, a couple of rpis and a bunch of VMs. Main
| thing I love is that I've never found myself in the position of
| just giving up and starting again on any of them. I've switched
| a few of those over to arch when I reached that point with what
| I was running on them before. Most distros effectively force
| you to do that eventually.
|
| I upgrade them when I get round to touching them for some
| reason so sometimes months will go by. I've never encountered a
| problem after upgrade that I couldn't quickly resolve with a
| brief bit of tinkering, and I'd take that over starting from
| scratch or leaving things mouldering away on outdated software
| any day.
| Lapsa wrote:
| BTW I Use Arch
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Interesting to see the documentation emphasized here. I don't use
| Arch, but I often see the arch wiki in google results for linux
| stuff I look up. Makes me wonder why wikis aren't used more for
| documentation.
| massysett wrote:
| Wikis take a lot of maintenance by a determined core of
| contributors, or else the pages deteriorate into a pile of
| incoherent edits. Occasionally I see this even on the Arch
| wiki. Main text says "do this." That's followed by some text
| saying "I tried this and it didn't work." That's followed by a
| text box saying "that method is deprecated."
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| But that's still better then just having the main text saying
| "do this" where "this" is wrong. And that's often the case
| for non-wiki documentation.
| massysett wrote:
| True, but where docs have a dedicated, core maintenance
| crew, they can maintain the docs in a good state with less
| effort. With a wiki, the problem is that drive-by editors
| can degrade a good product, requiring constant work by the
| core contributors to revert bad edits.
|
| My main point was as a response to the original question,
| which was: why aren't more docs in wiki form? I think one
| reason for that is that good docs require dedicated
| contributors, and I think a wiki does little to nothing to
| reduce their burden.
|
| The myth of the wiki is that by erecting it, drive-by
| contributors will build a great product. I don't think any
| quality wiki was built that way.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| I'm a deb-based user but I constantly refer to the Arch wiki to
| understand best practices and solve problems. No other distro
| has this level of self-serve documentation that's actually
| updated and easy to understand.
| ilyt wrote:
| In before that was Gentoo wiki, no matter what problem the
| Gentoo wiki was likely and good search result.
|
| ... till they had a failure and discovered none of their
| backups was working.
|
| Check your backups kids.
| Macha wrote:
| Other distros have wikis but tend to focus more on
| documentation the distro specific details. Since Arch packages
| have very minimal modifications from upstream, this means much
| of the content from the ArchWiki is applicable across distros.
| But then once you have one wiki covering the generic advice,
| there's less motivation for others to duplicate that effort
| anyway.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I use gentoo, and still have arch wiki in bookmarks as go-to
| place to look for docs
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| In fairness, the Gentoo wiki is my second favorite wiki
| that's largely applicable to all Linux distros:)
| ddevault wrote:
| Small? No. Simple? No. Great documentation? Yes.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Small is relative. Small compared to most Linux distros, macOS
| and Windows. You also have to remember most installers have a
| lot of packages that may never be used in the user installs. If
| you're installing KDE then don't expect it to be tiny but using
| Sway you'll get a pretty minimal but fully functional WM
| without the bloat unless you pull in a package that has a large
| dependency graph.
| archi42 wrote:
| Care to elaborate in a sentence or two? I mean, I have a decent
| idea who you are, so I think you have some authority on things
| Linux - but I'm curious regarding your reasoning :)
|
| I think especially the metrics for "simple" are very use(r)
| dependent. Simple for you or me means something entirely
| different than e.g. my Grandma (who has no computer).
| Personally I run four Linux machines, so they're customized
| anyway and "simple" for me means "I understand everything
| that's installed, because I installed and configured it".
| Someone running 4000 machines would probably have a slightly
| different opinion on what's "simple".
|
| Small, well, it's not an embedded Linux with a small libc and
| -Os for sure. But I never felt Arch bloated.
| ddevault wrote:
| The simplest system uses the fewest moving parts to
| accomplish the goal. Some of Arch's ideas, like PKGBUILDs,
| are pretty simple. But ultimately Arch is just another
| typical mainstream Linux distribution with glibc, GNU
| coreutils, systemd, PAM, etc. These tools are all severely
| bloated and over-complex, and many simpler alternatives exist
| which solve the same problems with much less.
|
| As for "small", well, it varies, but Arch systems tend to
| bloat more with time as the system does not provide much for
| auditing and cleaning up your system, so the older an arch
| install gets, the more garbage it accumulates. Arch also
| tends to turn on as many options as possible for each of the
| things it packages, so many packages have a lot of optional
| dependencies made mandatory. This is not a unique problem to
| Arch; only Gentoo (and maybe Nix and friends) solve this one,
| and they have many other problems to contend with.
|
| All of this is not to say that Arch is necessarily a poor
| choice. It's just not simple, nor small.
| anthk wrote:
| >Great documentation? Yes.
|
| Compared to BSD's, mediocre and subject to dramatic changes by
| nature.
| lproven wrote:
| I disagree, actually. (For clarity, I wrote this article, 9
| months ago.)
|
| This year I have done short reviews of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and
| NetBSD. IMHO the docs for Arch are more helpful than any of
| theirs.
| anthk wrote:
| How short? help #in the terminal.
| man afterboot
|
| Also, the OpenBSD FAQ.
| nijave wrote:
| Subjective, but I also find Arch documentation to be
| "better" because it more frequently answers my question in
| less time.
|
| You could say *BSD documentation is more "comprehensive"
| but I usually find myself wading through an ocean to find
| what I'm looking for. On top of that, every time you try to
| look elsewhere, you just see RTFM. I can respect the
| sentiment, but having different variations of the same
| documentation can help understanding imo
| ddevault wrote:
| Well, great documentation with the caveat that good upstream
| documentation is always preferable to the Arch wiki.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Main virtue of Arch. They don't patch. Upstream
| documentation will apply as is.
|
| I think Arch generally got its philosophy right. It's
| pretty much the minimal set of tools to get an easy to
| update binary distribution. They don't touch what they
| don't have to.
| megous wrote:
| Core of the distribution is the package manager/building tools.
| Compared to the babylon of eg. Debian packaging tools, where
| you'll have trouble figuring out basics like automatically
| installing build dependencies if you don't already have the
| target package built (lol, wtf? :)), Arch Linux's
| makepkg/PKGBUILD ecosystem is uniform, fully featured, and
| fairly simple.
|
| There may be simpler packaging solutions, like Slackware's or
| whatever postmarketOS uses, but those are limited, and you'll
| have trouble figuring out how to do things like selecting files
| you don't want the package manager to ever overwrite, or
| preventing installation/updates of specific packages, or other
| things you might need that go slightly beyond basic
| installation/updates.
| Ptchd wrote:
| Just discovered pikaur, an AUR helper/package manager for Arch...
| it's great.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I don't think I'm ever going to actually use Arch, but I do have
| to admit the documentation is amazing and they have basically
| become the maintainers of Linux documentation in general.
| oxplot wrote:
| Meanwhile my personal installation is 8 years old. It was
| initially installed on a desktop on btrfs and has since moved
| between three laptops and across to ext4 and now xfs. 150K lines
| in pacman log file. I love it.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| I appreciate the straightforward install and wide availability
| available of packages, but in practice always using the latest
| packages system wide can be annoying.
|
| For example right now the latest gdb is broken on both my
| machines, and since i'm not as keen to participate in
| troubleshooting new software I think I'll be moving to a more
| stable distro pretty soon
|
| https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=274056
| pantalaimon wrote:
| It's possible to downgrade packages though
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/downgrading_packages
| [deleted]
| pndy wrote:
| > Liam Proven Tue 15 Mar 2022 // 10:25 UTC
| lproven wrote:
| Yep, that's me. Surprised but happy to see this resurface now.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| What I really like about Arch is how minimal & fast it can be
| without resorting to 'exotic' software or libraries.
|
| I recently installed Archlinux32 on an old Pentium II machine
| just for the fun of it and was pleasantly surprised that it still
| feels reasonably responsive (I didn't get X11 to work yet though
| as the GPU driver for that machine apparently never reached
| mainline or was removed in the meantime).
|
| Everything is managed by systemd/networkd the way it's authors
| intended. No custom scripts or other cruft or bloat. No 'helpful'
| background services to update man pages or the package database.
|
| It's also refreshing how fast pacman is compared to apt.
| anthk wrote:
| Arch is not minimal. Debian netinstall does the same.
|
| Alpine is. If you think Arch is fast, try Alpine x86.
|
| On X.Org, VESA works everywhere.
| kadotus wrote:
| Can you elaborate? In what way is Alpine more minimal than
| Arch? (I really just don't know)
|
| Also are you suggesting that Debian netinstall is not
| minimal?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Arch is minimal in the sense that the default system
| consists of very little. If you install nothing but the
| base metapackage, you won't get a usable system out of it
| at all. The purpose of Arch is to fill out a complete,
| working system by making your own choices. If you follow
| the installation guide, then you start out with base,
| linux, and linux-firmware. Base is a metapackages that
| consists of archlinux-keyring, bash, bzip2, coreutils,
| file, filesystem, findutils, gawk, gcc-libs, gettext,
| glibc, grep, gzip, iproute2, iputils, licenses, pacman,
| pciutils, procps-ng, psmisc, sed, shadow, systemd, systemd-
| sysvcompat, tar, util-linux, xz.
|
| To get a fully-working system, you'd also need a
| bootloader, but Arch doesn't prescribe what that has to be.
| Alpine is mostly going to give you these same thing in
| terms of available CLI utilities, but rather than being
| based on GNU libc and GNU coreutils, it's based on musl and
| busybox. The init system is OpenRC rather than systemd. And
| it has a default bootloader, which is syslinux.
|
| This makes Alpine more "minimal" in the sense of a minimal
| installation taking up less disk space, because musl,
| busybox, and OpenRC are smaller in the literal sense of the
| binary files consume less disk space than glibc, GNU
| coreutils, and systemd. Busybox also comes with ash (I
| think actually dash) as the default shell, which smaller
| than bash.
|
| I have no idea if the apk package manager is smaller than
| pacman. They're both smaller than what you'd get out of a
| Debian or Redhat descended system.
|
| Personally, I think it's a bit misleading to call either of
| these more minimal than the other. The functionality,
| feature set, list of available utilities is pretty much the
| same. Alpine is just giving you smaller files, though note
| that using a musl-based system presents a lot of difficulty
| because a fair amount of software Linux users expect and
| are familiar with isn't really POSIX-compliant and only
| works with GNU C.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Is apk a classic package manager in that it installs
| packages to the file system or does it use overlays?
|
| The line
|
| > Alpine Linux is designed to run from RAM
|
| in the wiki almost makes it sound like OpenWRTs opkg
| where the root fs is readonly.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Alpine can do both, actually; a "sys" install does a
| traditional root filesystem, but Alpine also can run... I
| think a ro root with a single rw overlay with all added
| packages(?)
| gnull wrote:
| Alpine base rootfs is just a few megabytes, while Arch is
| like 100-200MB. I usually encounter Alpine in Docker
| containers when people want to wrap just one specific
| service and have save space on things that are not
| essential for it (it would be wasteful to ship your 20MB
| app in a 200MB Arch/Debian container).
|
| I didn't know Alpine was useful as a working machine
| though.
| cwaffles wrote:
| Arch latest docker image is 135MB[0], whereas Debian
| stable-slim is 30MB[1]
|
| [0]https://hub.docker.com/_/archlinux/tags
|
| [1]https://hub.docker.com/layers/library/debian/stable-
| slim/ima...
| yakubin wrote:
| A Debian Slim Docker image is 20MiB, and in my experience
| by the time you install all the dependencies of your app
| in an Alpine image, it's bigger than the equivalent based
| on Debian Slim.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > A Debian Slim Docker image is 20MiB, and in my
| experience by the time you install all the dependencies
| of your app in an Alpine image, it's bigger than the
| equivalent based on Debian Slim.
|
| This is true, also while Alpine is an excellent base
| image, some people have run into troubles with
| musl/busybox and prefer to use Debian/Ubuntu or whatever
| else they're familiar with as their container base.
|
| Then again, I kind of went in the opposite direction and
| use Ubuntu as the base for all of my container images and
| install software "the normal way": for example, getting
| OpenJDK through apt as I would on a server with Ansible,
| or for my local dev machine, without any of the fanciful
| optimizations or clever hacks to keep the file sizes
| down.
|
| The downside of this is that my base images are multiple
| hundreds of MB in size (even after cleaning apt cache in
| the same step as doing the install, to avoid adding that
| to the layers), but on the bright side that hardly
| matters because I use the same base images for all of my
| containers so only the changes for that particular image
| need to be transferred through the network and like
| 40-80% of the layers remain consistent:
| https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-
| base-fo...
|
| It's not "optimal" from a size perspective, but it's
| delightfully simple and approachable.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Debian is not minimal at all, it emphasizes compatibility
| over all else.
|
| There are many custom scripts to wrap around systemd so you
| can still use old style commands. Apt is pretty slow (and
| again packages come with custom scripts) and stuff like
| apt-xapian-index will just gobble up all your CPU if you
| are on a slow system.
|
| Debian has many scripts to automate things for a nice
| experience, but it's certainly not minimal.
| ilyt wrote:
| I think "vanilla" is perfect term for it. _Most_ of the
| software is just vanilla compile + whatever it is needed
| to play nicely with rest of the system.
|
| _Most_ defaults are sensible and close to what app
| itself provides, again with exceptions to play nicely
| with rest of the system.
|
| _Most_ packages also come with bunch of recommended ones
| that extend functionality which means a bit extra space
| used, but just APT::Install-Recommends
| "0";
|
| fixes that (I'd recommend that for servers but not for
| desktops unless you're seriously space constrained).
|
| And most important thing is that upgrade works. I
| installed my desktop in ~2008 and just upgraded across
| the ages, the install older than every single component
| in my machine.
|
| > There are many custom scripts to wrap around systemd so
| you can still use old style commands.
|
| That's just not breaking old stuff, minimal doesn't
| really need to mean "just breaks your old scripts that
| worked fine up until now".
|
| And it's kinda required for transitionary period, some
| packages still use /etc/init.d/* to start for example and
| AFAIK Debian still haven't said "systemd is the only way
| forward" which means many packages provide both
| /etc/init.d/* for SysV boot and /lib/systemd/system/* for
| Systemd boot.
|
| > and stuff like apt-xapian-index will just gobble up all
| your CPU if you are on a slow system
|
| How is tool that's not even in standard install relevant
| to anything?
| blahgeek wrote:
| I think it's more appropriate to say Arch is "simple" instead
| of "minimal". It does not sacrifice features. It does things
| in the simpliest way.
| zokula wrote:
| [deleted]
| bradrn wrote:
| > The installation process, and the documentation behind it, lead
| to the third virtue: a complete installation tends to be very
| small and simple, because you only install the bits you need. If
| you don't know what bits you need, the documentation will help
| you to work it out, and the result is something that is both
| fairly minimal and that, with luck, you understand. You know
| what's in there because you installed it.
|
| I feel this gets to the core of why I like Arch so much. I'm a
| Linux novice, so for a long time I ran Ubuntu VMs when I needed
| to do stuff on Linux (this being before WSL). It worked well
| enough, but I never really felt that I properly knew what I was
| doing.
|
| Then I tried installing Arch in a VM... and it took me several
| days and several attempts, but when I finally got it working I
| felt, for the first time ever, like I actually _understood_ the
| system I was using. Now I have a webserver running Arch, and only
| a week or two ago installed Arch on an old PC to see if I could
| get a desktop working.
|
| Of course, Arch is not easy, especially for a non-expert such as
| myself. Sometimes I have no idea how to solve a problem, or even
| what kind of software I need in the first place. For this reason,
| I'm planning to install Debian instead on the new laptop I've
| ordered (to replace my ~10 year old machine running Windows), in
| the hopes that it might have more stuff working out of the box.
| Still, I'd say that trying out Arch has immeasurably improved my
| knowledge, not just of Linux but of the underlying concepts
| behind modern computing.
|
| (Oh, and the documentation's amazing too!)
| jvinet wrote:
| > Still, I'd say that trying out Arch has immeasurably improved
| my knowledge, not just of Linux but of the underlying concepts
| behind modern computing.
|
| I love hearing that, because it was a goal of Arch from the
| very beginning: to stop fearing the commandline.
|
| And I was the first alpha tester, in that I wanted to learn
| more about how the sausage was actually made, so to speak. I
| was comfortable using things like Linuxconf at the time, but
| its beginner-friendly veneer meant that I didn't really know
| what to do if it _wasn't_ there.
|
| After tinkering with Crux and PLD for a bit, I wanted to go
| deeper and start from nothing. So I loaded up the LFS[1] docs
| and just started typing in the shell stanzas to start building
| my compilation toolchain. In an effort to DRY as much as
| possible, the work also got placed into shell scripts, which
| eventually became PKGBUILD modules.
|
| I started having way too much fun with it, so I put up the
| world's ugliest webpage[2] to share my triumphs, and a couple
| people found it, somehow. That begat the immediate need for
| documentation, which eventually brought Arch into the
| forefront. I can't recall who spearheaded the Arch wiki, but we
| owe them a great debt, because it has become a valuable
| resource for Linux users, and not only the Arch users.
|
| Arch is my happiest accident.
|
| ps: btw, I run Arch (is this still a meme?)
|
| [1] https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
|
| [2]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20020328043401/http://www.archli...
| sodaplayer wrote:
| Thanks for starting it! I dabbled with Ubuntu, Debian and
| SUSE in highschool and would occasionally see things from the
| Arch Wiki when troubleshooting problems. Learned about its
| philosophy when at a highschool computing competition and my
| team captain was raving about one of our opponents using
| Arch.
|
| Started a CS degree the following year, and I decided I
| wanted to take Linux more seriously, so I wiped Windows off
| my laptop and threw Arch on it to force myself to learn, and
| it's been my daily driver now for the last decade!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| You can install Debian the same way you installed Arch (manual,
| CLI) via debootstrap. It's not really advertised, Debian really
| wants folks to use their installer.
|
| I built a tool that does this, you can look through the code
| and see how I do it--it's just bash spaghetti. Download a
| Debian live ISO (or use my tool to create an Arch-like minimal
| live USB) and you can install it however you want.
|
| https://github.com/candiddev/forge
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| But isn't that the whole point of Arch. It is advertised and
| promoted and therefore its well documented with a lot of
| support.
|
| As a novice, if I am stuck somewhere the odds that I find the
| answer in the Arch Wiki or can ask an Arch enthusiasts and
| get an answer is orders of magnitude higher than the
| equivalent sources for Debian.
| ilyt wrote:
| there is also [1] preseed, we use it to install our
| servers/VMs. It is a bit quirky tho, especially partitioning.
|
| * [1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed
| throwaway62132 wrote:
| If one isn't bothered by (or prefers) lack of systemd, Artix
| provides ISO prepackaged with most common desktop environments.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > Then I tried installing Arch in a VM... and it took me
| several days and several attempts, but when I finally got it
| working I felt, for the first time ever, like I actually
| understood the system I was using.
|
| Honest question: why days?
|
| I have installed arch multiple times in the past decade and I
| don't remember anything exceptionally out of the ordinary. You
| just follow the step-by-step instruction and you are good to
| go.
|
| It's all fairly standard: boot on a live cd, get internet,
| format the disk, mount, arch provides a script to install the
| base and another to change the root and it's vanilla Linux
| config from there.
|
| Edit: Hmm, I guess how to configure a vanilla Linux might be
| quite complex for someone who has no idea of how to do that. I
| might have answered my own question actually.
| bradrn wrote:
| > Honest question: why days?
|
| Because I was a total novice. I barely even knew what a
| partition was, let alone anything else. Now, of course, I
| find it much simpler.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even if you follow a guide exactly as stated, you will often
| find when done that you now know more about the steps you
| took and want to immediately start over so it's closer to
| what you want.
|
| The same thing happened to me the first few times I installed
| Gentoo. Could I have migrated the first install to what I
| wanted at and had at the end? Sure, if I had the knowledge I
| didn't have at the time.
| jonfw wrote:
| If you know most Linux file systems well, you would probably
| choose one in a few seconds. If nobody has ever asked you to
| pick a file system before, you could probably spend a couple
| of days researching.
|
| I think there's a lot of decisions like that to make in Arch
| luxcem wrote:
| I've installed arch a number of times, and every times I want
| full disk encryption I struggle a bit on dm-crypt config and
| bootloader. Other than that it's pretty straightforward.
| dartharva wrote:
| Not anymore. Archinstall, an easy-to-use installation script,
| now comes included in the ISO and so now anyone can install it
| and get a full-fledged OOTB distro ready within minutes.
| silisili wrote:
| Does archinstall let you luks encrypt without LVM? I've never
| understood why every distro feels these two are dependent on
| each other.
| dartharva wrote:
| I'm not sure since I did not use disk encryption, but it
| very likely does. You may want to Google it to confirm.
| ttarr wrote:
| I use luks with btrfs, setup using archinstall, works as
| expected, I hope this helps.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Installing arch used to be a lot easier before they deleted the
| Beginners Guide and redistributed the contents to a bunch of
| different pages in the wiki.
|
| edit: Beginner's guide, not install guide, is what was deleted
| rmbyrro wrote:
| If we could combine Ubuntu's easiness of use with Arch's
| simplicity and performance, that'd be my ideal distro for work.
|
| I love Arch for its simplicity and performance.
|
| But it just wasn't productive for me to get everyday tasks
| done. I'm not advanced Linux user, occasionally I'd need hours
| to get seemingly simple stuff done.
|
| For a hobby desktop, fine. For a work tool as a developer, I
| moved back to Ubuntu (though I have moments of regret every
| day).
| malermeister wrote:
| > If we could combine Ubuntu's easiness of use with Arch's
| simplicity and performance, that'd be my ideal distro for
| work.
|
| You're describing endeavourOS. It's Arch, but with an
| installer that gets you a sane default desktop quickly.
|
| It's what I use now that I'm too old to waste all that time
| it takes to get Arch running properly
| jorgemf wrote:
| As I developer I solved my issues with arch using the latest
| dev tools in arch and running the code in a docker container.
| That way I also solve all developers issues with dependencies
| as everybody runs the same docker container with the same
| libraries.
| me551ah wrote:
| Manjaro Linux is what you are looking for then.
| bradrn wrote:
| This summarises my feelings so far precisely. Alas, I'm not
| quite sure it's possible to have this: the easier and more
| full-featured something is to use out of the box, the more
| components it needs -- or at least, its components become
| more complicated in and of themselves.
|
| One alternate approach I find interesting is that of NixOS:
| everything is declaratively specified in a single place, so
| it's easy to configure stuff, but also easy to see how
| everything works. I actually tried out NixOS before
| installing Arch on the aforementioned desktop box, and if it
| wasn't for the sheer opaqueness of Nixpkgs I'd still be using
| it. On the other hand, I can hardly call Nix 'simple'... as
| with everything, it's all tradeoffs, I suppose.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| I'm afraid simple and easy don't go well together.
|
| You either have automation to make things easy to the user,
| but then it's no longer simple.
|
| Or you require the user to do everything manually, but then
| it's no longer easy.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| True. Maybe there's a viable middle ground between Ubuntu &
| Arch.
|
| Perhaps with a focus on the audience (e.g. a web dev
| distro), it becomes viable to make sensible compromises on
| both (easiness & simplicity) that result in a good
| combination for the user.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Perhaps Manjaro? It tries to be a more user-friendly
| Arch-like distro.
| zdragnar wrote:
| For general audiences, Manjaro (arch base) fits your ask
| pretty well, I think. I ran into problems installing
| arch, switched to Manjaro, and never looked back.
|
| Pop_os! is coming from the other direction, but I found I
| prefer using i3/sway instead as I had trouble configuring
| certain things about pop.
| jamespo wrote:
| Have you looked at EndeavourOS?
| tshanmu wrote:
| kali
| pantalaimon wrote:
| That's just Debian
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Check out endeavouros. It is arch with an opinionated
| installer and WM/DE setup, but then you get a pretty standard
| arch setup and it's great.
|
| IMO it combines the best of both worlds.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I've been installing Ubuntu this week. Checking download
| updates during install gave me a broken libc dependency graph
| which blocked installing ssh or gcc. Libpci-dev conflicts
| with gnome as far as I can tell, installing that took down X
| and the network. Changing to the server iso of the same
| version gave me an OS that can't use the builtin intel NIC,
| though the desktop version can. The driver errors on
| modprobe, -2.
|
| I'm going to try again with a different Ubuntu release as
| soon as I can find the patience. Where prior lessons have
| taught me to vandalise automatic update or it'll brick itself
| in the future.
|
| Ease of use has not been the defining characteristic of
| Ubuntu.
| luxcem wrote:
| Same experience from my days in Ubuntu world, it sure is
| relatively easy for a first time linux user but I had so
| many issues on it that were completely obscure. I had the
| feeling of fighting against the system itself all the time.
|
| With arch, sometimes it breaks (not that often), it always
| is quite clear what went wrong (pacman errors are limpid,
| logs are clear). You'll find the fix on the Arch Linux
| News, in the wiki or the forums. Bonus you probably know
| your system better and as a side effect be more efficient
| in fixing it.
| ilyt wrote:
| I'm now firmly confirmed that it is Ubuntu that fucks
| something up. Upgrades seem to work much better with plain
| Debian.
|
| We've seen many failures during upgrade, from both novice
| and advanced linux users, meanwhile one of our sysadmins
| accidentally upgraded Debian by _two releases at once_
| (From Debian 9 to 11) and it still "just worked"...
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Debian occasionally falls over on me when running
| unstable but that's kind of the point. Testing hasn't
| failed on me in at least a decade.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I had pretty constant issues with Ubuntu every time I've
| tried it as well.
|
| I run pure Debian stable everywhere I can in my personal
| life (laptops, desktops, servers). It's predictable and
| there's not a lot of planning at update OR upgrade time.
| Backup, push the button, reboot, done.
|
| Just kidding, backups happen daily automatically, so it's
| just update and reboot.
| me551ah wrote:
| You should try Manjaro Linux, it's based on Arch but has more
| stuff out of the box.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "For this reason, I'm planning to install Debian instead on the
| new laptop I've ordered"
|
| Maybe have a look at manjaro, it is based on arch, but comes
| prepackaged, so you can just boot up the luve image and
| install, if everything works.
| bradrn wrote:
| I've heard of Manjaro, but on the occasions when I've brought
| it up in conversation, people have almost unanimously warned
| me off from it in fairly strong terms... not entirely sure
| why, but that alone makes me reluctant to use it.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Manjaro is like Arch but not exactly like Arch. If you have
| a problem with Manjaro and then go to the (stellar) Arch
| documentation to try to figure out why it doesn't work in a
| case like this, that documentation won't help you.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Well, this I cannot confirm. I regular go to the normal
| Arch docs for help and usually find it suitable. So it is
| not fundamentally different, but yes, it uses different
| repos and some things indeed work differently.
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| I mean that's not true: I daily drive ubuntu and the arch
| wiki has been very kind to me. But to slightly rework you
| point, if you're a manjaro user expecting the arch wiki
| to apply 1:1 to your system, you're mistaken and are in
| for a bad time.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| There was a lot of controversy around their swapping
| LibreOffice out for some proprietary closed source office
| suite for a while: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevange
| lho/2019/08/03/manja...
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| They had multiple issues with opsec in the past. Something
| that when repeats, makes people skittish. Fool me once and
| al..
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I am not aware of critical issues, but there was indeed a
| time of confusion, when the dev leadership changed. So
| sources please for current flaws?
| stryan wrote:
| This Github repo has the most common issues I've heard
| of: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno .
|
| Big ones are: shadiness with funding, letting their SSL
| certs expire _4_ times, and the fact that their idea of
| stable isn 't additional testing, but just letting the
| packages sit for a week.
|
| There was also a recent kerfluffle not covered there
| where they shipped a broken kernel to Apple Sillicon
| users without contacting the Asahi devs:
| https://twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/1576356115746459648
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Well, the funding issue I find to be quite trivial and of
| no big concern to me, but the repo issues are indeed
| something that has bothered me at times, where I ended up
| modifying repos to get the most up to date ones.
|
| The recommendation from the repo, EndeavourOS sounds
| interesting, though.
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4inrut/manjaros_s
| sl_...
|
| The link for the post is dead, but they've let their SSL
| cert expire multiple times. While it happened a few years
| ago, I find that a hard thing to come back from.
| seized wrote:
| I think the most recent incident was a few months ago...
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| Good lord.
| oynqr wrote:
| It literally took them two months to push the critical
| expat update on aarch64.
| zdragnar wrote:
| N=1 and all, but I've been using it for several years
| without complaint.
| jasperry wrote:
| Another Arch/AUR-compatible distro with a more automated
| install process is EndeavourOS. Last time I checked, it was
| closer to vanilla Arch than Manjaro. But I've mainly used
| it for spinning up VMs to work remotely. For a long-term
| workstation I still feel better sticking to plain Arch.
| realgeniushere wrote:
| This is a false sense of understanding that many Linux users
| develop. You basically built a puzzle by putting together the
| pieces that fit together. And you have the illusion that you
| learned something about the picture drawn on the pieces.
|
| You don't really understand anything more except how to
| configure a system with a poorly designed configuration system.
| Installing a difficult-to-use Linux distribution teaches you
| nothing about operating systems, compilers, linkers & loaders,
| shared libraries, or anything else about the foundations of
| modern computing.
| nathias wrote:
| I've been runing arch for 7 years, I had to reinstall once to fix
| something I broke with deleting python packages but I never had
| problems with just updating the system ...
| samgranieri wrote:
| I just discovered Arch Linux this year, and I'm running it on a
| few raspberry pis. I love getting the latest packages, and the
| docs are great. Arch works well for me because I like updating my
| homebrew Mac user land daily, and updating Arch just feels
| natural.
| nixcraft wrote:
| Only 8 month late (this is an old article from 15/March/2022).
| laerus wrote:
| pacman corrupted my installation twice in a year. Obviously I did
| something wrong but who knows.
| Jnr wrote:
| I have been using it for 10+ years and it hasn't corrupted
| things for me. It can't corrupt.
|
| It could get a bit tricky if you update very rarely, like once
| a year, but not sure what else there is to do to break things.
| Please elaborate a bit more.
| randbox wrote:
| Pacman will happily break pacman and sudo without warning if
| the user requests updating openssl without upgrading the
| entire system. When updating a package it does not pull in
| all of the other packages which will break if not updated
| simultaneously.
| cwaffles wrote:
| Any chance your RAM has errors?
| jorgemf wrote:
| probably you installed something manually at some point,
| otherwise pacman does nothing wrong. Rarely you have to touch
| something manually because a mayor upgrade, but I think it has
| been like 4-6 times in 20 years for me.
|
| If you want to install something manually in arch it is better
| to create a package first (if it is not already in aur). That
| way pacman can check for corruptions before installing anything
| randbox wrote:
| Pacman works when updating all packages simultaneously.
| However when updating only a requested package it can break
| by failing to pull in other packages which need to be updated
| simultaneously. For instance, pacman can break pacman and
| sudo by updating OpenSSL to a newer version than the
| currently installed version of pacman and sudo expect.
| 8t88t8tttt8 wrote:
| Do you mean "an update required manual intervention but I did
| not pay attention and as a result my system was broken later"?
| If not, do you have links to the bug reports?
| chazeon wrote:
| Ubuntu's release upgrade also corrupts my system, so it's not
| just pacman
| Semaphor wrote:
| I run arch on my VPS. Before, I ran Debian, but if you need a
| special package version, or something, it just feels almost as
| hard as getting a newer IIS version on Windows. I got sick of it,
| removed Debian, and installed Arch from scratch.
|
| My Linux experience was pretty minimal. Some trying out on
| desktop in the early 2000s and later again after Ubuntu became a
| thing, but I always got weird errors. Then some in university,
| and again a bit to administer my VPS or rPi.
|
| Arch was a breath of fresh air, not only could I get current
| packages, everything was so well documented! The wiki is, as the
| article rightfully says, amazing. Now, even when I'm not using
| arch (I have a small Proxmox server with Debian and Debian
| containers), I still use the archwiki as I know it will help me
| for everything but Debian specific things. My first arch install
| (before that, I never installed an OS without an installer) took
| maybe 2 hours.
| morbusfonticuli wrote:
| I've been using Debian Testing on my personal Notebooks since
| ~10yrs: throughout university, and the subsequent work life.
|
| During that time, I oftened wondered whether I should
| "play"/experiment more with other distros; after all I loved
| tinkering with my vim config and network setups etc.
|
| However, I've been just satisfied with the status quo, and more
| importantly: I just wanted to get shit done.
|
| Apt, dpkg, systemd. If I want to get bleeding-edge SW I'll build
| the upstream source manually. No big deal - won't happen too
| often.
|
| Getting older, I'm beginning to despise fixing the os more and
| more ... I just want the machine to work. This results perhaps
| from my day job, which involves openbsd-developing/tweaking ...
| And general a lot of cursing.
|
| Granted: I'm not a gamer or graphics-enthusiast, and use my
| computer primarily for development, writing, watching
| movies/pictures ... Your typical senior resident trapped in the
| body of a 30ish guy.
|
| I'm often wondering whether I'm just lazy and/or whether my
| attitude is the norm or rather the exception respective to
| Unix/Linux (power)users.
|
| Edit: forgot to say "big thank you" to the arch community! Over
| the years I consulted the archwiki endless times! Almost
| everytime really helpful (in contrast to the debian wiki, lol)
| mcbuilder wrote:
| I've been using Arch for well over 10 years, they say it's true
| that you "learn Linux" using Arch. It's an excellent distro, but
| a few things make it a great learning OS.
|
| First it's as vanilla as possible, which mean that packages are
| modified as little as possible from upstream. This means you
| don't learn anything distro-specific by mistake, and you actually
| learn more how the package is intended to function.
|
| The second is great documentation and community. The Arch wiki is
| full of common tweaks that you'll likely have to do, many other
| distro's may have just held your hand and assumed you wanted
| those boxes checked, but Arch makes you check them.
|
| Being minimal also helps, it really doesn't overwhelm you. Arch
| doesn't, it's just that only at a time is usually broken, so
| you're doing something like that.
| wvh wrote:
| The main benefit of Arch Linux to me is that when you do a drive-
| by patch to some software project, it is not unthinkable that the
| fix reaches you through upstream and an Arch package update in a
| matter of hours. This flow is not possible with distributions
| that run pretty out of date software and have long release
| cycles: the version that's included with the distribution is
| usually too old to be able to check out the source, test and
| directly apply fixes to the upstream repository, and getting
| those fixes back would take months. This also applies to security
| updates, as it's easier to rely on instant upstream project
| updates than on some distribution package owner to remember and
| backport those fixes.
| subsection1h wrote:
| > _This flow is not possible with distributions that run pretty
| out of date software_
|
| I use Debian Stable and Fedora on my systems and I have the
| latest versions of all of the software of which I want the
| latest versions because I can install software from source like
| a big boy. And my installers don't have version numbers hard-
| coded in them like PKGBUILDs do, so I get the latest versions
| immediately.
| horlux wrote:
| I was a big fan of Arch for several years but since the
| introduction of systemd I felt I lost control and didn't really
| knew what was running in my system anymore. Been using Voidlinux
| for the last 2 years and I just can't go back to Arch
| Operative0198 wrote:
| Arch isn't just simple, it is smart too. With alpm-hooks [0], it
| is possible to run specific commands pre or post-install/upgrade
| of packages. E.g re-sign secure UKIs with my keys after the
| intel-ucode package updates.
|
| This example and more such refined tools such as the AUR that add
| massive quality of life improvements to the overall Linux user
| experience is what keeps me happy at Arch.
|
| [0] https://archlinux.org/pacman/alpm-hooks.5.html
| dartharva wrote:
| Arch is awesome and was _the_ distro that finally got me to stop
| sticking to Windows. Every other distro I tried had some flaw
| that kept on making its experience subpar, and I have tried a lot
| of distros - Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, and a few
| more. I was staying away from Arch for its reportedly complex
| installation. But this month I decided to take the bullet and, to
| my surprise, got a fast and flawless system installed within
| minutes! Archinstall now makes it just as easy to install as
| anything else, the AUR is awesome and has everything you 'll ever
| need, and the wiki is just unparalleled.
|
| This distro leaves all others in the dust in terms of speed and
| software availability; I will highly recommend it to everyone
| looking for a no-nonsense and up-to-date system.
| subsection1h wrote:
| > _the AUR is awesome and has everything you 'll ever need_
|
| But what if I need packages created and maintained by vetted,
| qualified devs rather than the unvetted randos that upload
| PGBUILDs to the AUR? Many of the AUR contributors I've looked
| into have no publicly-accessible real names, no personal
| websites, no LinkedIn accounts, and their GitHub accounts are
| only a couple years old with Japanese cartoon characters as
| their account photos.
| belval wrote:
| > But what if I need packages created and maintained by
| vetted, qualified devs rather than the unvetted randos that
| upload PGBUILDs to the AUR?
|
| Pay for them or package them yourself. The nerve of being
| angry at people giving you their work for free and having the
| *audacity* of thinking you should have access to their real
| name, personal websites, LinkedIn and GitHub account.
|
| The level of entitlement dripping from your comment is
| disgusting.
| dartharva wrote:
| How exactly does any other distro solve that? Please don't
| tell me you genuinely find PPAs to be a better alternative...
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Been using Pop OS for a while for the It Just Works(tm)
| experience, but I'm missing Arch more and more.
|
| Mainstream Linux distros feel a lot more like Windows these days.
| Sure they require less condiguration, but they're also mich
| harder to mess around with. Starting up htop reveals a jungle of
| daemons and weird systemd shit I don't even know what does.
| Systemd is a terribly documented nightmare to configure, etc.
|
| It's so nice in Arch to know pretty much know what everything is
| for because I was the one who installed it. And to have
| documentation that isn't infuriating to navigate.
| dartharva wrote:
| It's been two weeks since I installed Arch on my daily driver
| laptop, and I have to say it actually gave me a more flawless
| OOTB experience than Pop, Ubuntu or Fedora could. The
| archinstall script automatically selects and installs all
| required packages for you'll need to get a working system up
| and running, _and_ it configures xorg and proprietary drivers
| for you so that you don 't have to. I haven't had to mess
| around anything honestly, I'll suggest you give it a look
| again.
| datsudo wrote:
| AUR makes me stop on trying other distros.
|
| _Oh that distro is great. Is there some community package repo
| in that, equivalent to Arch 's AUR? None? NVM._
| wesapien wrote:
| How does a similar Nix OS setup compare as far as number of
| packages? Is Nix just as minimal as Arch?
| rgoulter wrote:
| In terms of addressing "you want to know what your system has
| got", OP argues Arch is good because Arch will only have what
| you install.
|
| With NixOS, the whole system configuration is declared starting
| from a single configuration file.
|
| So, NixOS is great for addressing "I forgot how I set
| <whatever> up".
|
| You'll likely end up using more disk space with NixOS if you're
| changing your system, since NixOS has functionality which makes
| it easy to rollback the system to earlier configurations.
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