I love Arch. Best distribution by far in my opinion. Sadly, I had huge problems one week ago when I did a full system upgrade (took me 2 days to fix everything that was corrupted and lost lots of money because of it) but then it was my fault. (Never use --force with a system upgrade!) To be fair, there should be a warning when you try to execute the command as it's probably not what a user would want to do.
I have a bunch of painful stories about using Arch but the best one happened most recently.
I had some outdated package that I wanted to update so I asked in the #arch irc room how to just update that one package. I was told upgrading a single package is generally a bad idea and its better to just update the entire system. I have had a server running Gentoo for ~5 years and I frequently upgrade single packages at a time so I saw no problem with this but ok, I'm not an Arch expert so I followed the #arch people's advice.
I invoked the upgrade command and I see it wants to upgrade the linux kernel to 3.2 and a bunch of other stuff. After the upgrade completes I rebooted the machine (or it rebooted itself, I forget). It wasn't able to boot up. I put in a rescue cd but I couldn't figure out what was wrong.
This is exactly why I don't do 'emerge world' in gentoo anymore. It has backfired on me more than 50% of the time (when I used to do it). I simply do not trust these bleeding edge distro people to get everything working all the time and I am annoyed at the zealots who constantly advise to just upgrade as if nothing could possibly go wrong.
I think having to use an option like '--force' is considered warning enough. Which is, I think, perfectly reasonable. Of course, I don't know your exact scenario, but that's how things seem to work.
The more I use Arch, the more I do things on the command line. That means a lot less software to maintain. I think if you run tons of different software, you are asking for things to break.
I happily run dwm, and a handful of CLI tools. This minimalistic setup is enough for me - and seems to cut down on things breaking.
Arch rules. It is literally just what I wanted from a Linux distro: the dead simplicity and austere Unix-ness of Slackware combined with the up-to-the-minute-ness and easy source package integration of Gentoo. A true gem and reminder of what Linux is and can be, when Ubuntu makes it seem like we've lost our way...
Congratulations to all those past and present involved with Arch. Over the past few years Arch has become my favourite personal distro due to how much control it gives me over my system without being _too_ complicated.
Here is to another amazing 10 years for Arch as well as everyone working on other Linux distros. You are all pretty damn amazing in my opinion. Thank you for all you do and please don't stop =D
A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?
Unlike Debian, Arch Linux has what they call a "rolling release schedule," which means that the only choices you have are (1) refrain from using Pacman at all to update your software, which of course leaves security vulnerabilities unpatched and (2) opening yourself up to major changes to major subsystems, like Gnome, any time you use pacman to update your system.
In contrast, on Debian, major changes to e.g. Gnome are mostly limited to when a new version of Debian comes out, and you get a lot of leeway as to when to upgrade to the new version, and in particular, sometimes you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.
And I got the impression that updates of Arch Linux broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.
Still it is a very compelling distribution because of its "elegance".
I probably spend just as much time maintaining my OS X box as I did maintaining my Arch Linux box: e.g., when I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard and from Snow Leopard to Lion, I had to install a bunch of stuff (a dict client, Gnu coreutils, Carbon Emacs, even wget IIRC) to get a comfortable environment, and the installation took a lot more time than it would have on a Linux distro. E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only on key press or mouse button click.
Rolling-release distros and low-maintenance updates are pretty orthogonal concepts. That said, once you get it set up, it's only the major, breaking changes that require real work to maintain, and these are posted regularly on archlinux.com.
I update once a week, keep configs up to date with "yaourt -C" (yaourt is available in the AUR), and read archlinux.com prior to updates to avoid issues.
One caveat is that you need your /boot mounted if you keep it separate, or else anything that depends on linux-headers (like filesystem drivers :/) will break if there's a kernel update.
If you want stability along with the tweakability, go with Debian.
For me it is (unrealistic). Every update is fear that something will break. Vim, kmail, even gtk themes. You don't know the day or the hour.
At least that's how it is for me. I know many people who have no problems with updates breaking stuff in Arch; maybe it's the fact that I'm using a full-blown KDE instead of a mere xmonad or such. But I wouldn't recommend Arch to anyone who expects stuff to work.
Now that I have arch working for my needs, I spend hardly any time maintaining it.
The only issues come up when some sort of breaking change is released, and in that case there is always an article right on the arch homepage for steps to migrate to the new package.
I had the same concerns, but after a solid year on Arch only, I can say that things rarely break and if they do I learn something in the process.
Yes, sometimes, like every few months or so, there is some maintenance to do, but only after manually initiating system updates. Never once have I come across a maintenance issue that didn't have a quick solution already discussed on the Arch forums or wiki.
I find that almost every time something breaks it's really because I haven't been careful enough. What you need to do is watch out for any messages during updating (especially during kernel updates) and make sure to just use sudo carefully etc.
I also want to add that while people always seem to talk about Arch breaking, it has hardly broken more for me that Windows of Ubuntu have in the same period of time. The advantage is that when Arch breaks, you fix it because you just tend to really learn how your system works when you use Arch, while in Windows and Ubuntu, I'd just reinstall usually.
I use Arch as my only OS, for day-to-day use, and it's perfectly stable when I'm not actively experimenting etc.
In my own experience with Arch, things offered through AUR (while convenient) seem to cause more problems than that which is in core, extra, community, multilib, etc... In other words, things which pacman handles.
So using AUR introduces a bit of maintenance overhead in the sense that I spend more time reading the comments, checking the number of votes for an item, researching the dependencies that arise, etc. But I'm also happy AUR is there to supplement what is in the supported repos. That said, I've definitely had some MAJOR problems that I've had to work through using AUR packages.
I would say that your statement about putting in the time up front to learn how the system works in order to do relatively less system administration in the long run applies more to Gentoo than to Arch. I was a Gentoo user for several years before switching to Arch, and once you get all your configuration files set up on Gentoo, the system is rock solid. The only drawback is that you're compiling nearly everything from source based on your specific system configuration through make.conf and such, updates can take a while. However, the internal consistency and dependency resolution of emerge seems far, far better than pacman in my experience.
To me at this point Arch is as stable as OSX, and possibly even more so. I go weeks without reboots and my computer never slows down. I do updates almost every day, and most of the time have no problems. And I really appreciate the rolling-release paradigm. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that possibly sometime in the future, OSX could potentially go that route as well. It already seems like they're headed there in some ways.
I've been using Arch to 'get shit done' for about two years now. Apart from the occasional package upgrade to update everything to its latest versions, you don't have to do anything you don't want to.
I have seen arch break pretty spectacularly, but only on systems where i did some, to put it delicately, unadvisable things (put /tmp, /var/tmp on tmpfs, put /usr on unionfs over squashfs, etc). Where I have avoided breaking standard practice, I have never had a single problem. I also see it to arch's credit that I was able to do such horrific things to it with such ease (and fairly good documentation).
I have been using Archlinux for over 2 years. During this period I have installed it on all the machines I _own_ (3 laptops, 1 work desktop). The biggest problem I had was when I had /usr on its own partition. This behavior was not recommended and an update broke it. However this was easy to fix and took < 20 minutes to resolve.
If I never broke anything...I would not know much about Linux! I think part of maintaining a distro like Arch is dealing with things breaking. The good news is that you learn about how something works and usually can figure out a solution. The Arch community is awesome and is very responsive when things don't work.
What I don't like about Arch is that it doesn't provide debug symbol packages, which makes it useless for providing crash bug reports for programs written in compiled languages unless the user is willing to recompile them. IMHO general-purpose distros have moral (or at least pragmatic) imperative to support the development of the software that they ship, and making sure users can file decent bug reports easily is an important part of that.
Meanwhile, other distros have gotten to the point of automatically installing the right debug symbol packages right from the crash reporter built into app suites like KDE's to generate useful backtraces.
After experimenting with countless distros over the years, Arch is by far my favorite. It combines the customizability of Gentoo with the simplicity of Slackware. Long live Arch!
It's a couple days too late to wish Arch happy birthday, but if you're very quick, you can still wish Albert Einstein happy birthday. He'd be 133 today. Unfortunately there's no real location of his corpse that you can visit as he was cremated, but last I heard, his eyes are kept in a safe deposit box somewhere in New York, there's a couple slides of his brain at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and the majority of his brain is somewhere in Princeton.
If you can, try and track down the documentary Einstein's Brain by Kevin Hull[1], an amusing yarn about a Japanese professor's trip across the US in search of the great man's grey matter.
3 machines running on Arch Linux and no major issues up to now.
It's just perfect for me. I love how easy it is to quickly build a new package (not that I need to write PKGBUILDS myself often, most things are available in the AUR)
I'm not sure exactly when I moved over to Arch from Crux, I'm sure the distribution was at least a few months old by then, but it's been a great distribution as long as I've known it.
It does suffer the occasional dip into making things more complicated than they need to be, some element of the distribution straying towards the "SysV" darkside and away from the "BSD" ideal, or an upstream's configuration system just getting too insane to work around any longer, but everything always works back to some sense of balance after a few years. And it does feel like upstreams come around to the Arch way of thinking more often that the other way around.
I do wish it was a bit easier to automatically build or just download pre-made packages with some of the more popular compile flag variants, ports- or portage-style, but not so much that it casts a shadow on all the other benefits of Arch.
Still, it would be nice to be able to install a console vim with python and ruby interpreter support without having to install gnome too, or being able to install java on a headless server without having to stick half of X11 on there, or not having to install Apache because you want to change nginx's modules. It's always possible to change the PKGBUILD and recompile, but it seems like just changing one enable/disable switch to ./configure should be easier than it often is (vim is especially a pain to keep a custom PKGBUILD of, the ABS PKGBUILD seems to undergo massive revisions every few months).
But really the distribution is just great, the best out there. It lets you use pure Linux and avoid all the hoop jumping other distributions make you do in order to keep their package managers happy, while still giving you all the benefits you want from a distribution like automatic pre-compiled upgrades. And that's enough to make it the best balance of a distribution out there for me.
I've been using debian based systems (including ubuntu) for over a decade now, and I can't think of more than a handful of times time I've had to jump through hoops to keep apt and dpkg happy. You may not always have the latest version of the software, but the productivity compared to compile.everything or rpm-based systems is significant. Almost everytime I need a piece of software, it's one command away.
Arch is what I have been running (since around 2006). I love the simplicity. When things do break, there is an amazing community waiting to provide support. The Arch community rules! I think Arch is quickly becoming what Gentoo was...(hopefully I dont start a war!).
Like others, I also love Arch and have been using it since 2007. Although I started with Slackware, I find myself using Arch as my primary Linux distribution these days because I feel it is the best of Slackware, Crux, FreeBSD and maybe Gentoo to an extent. As power users, I'm sure we can all appreciate Arch for what it has become. I look forward to using Arch in the coming years.
I'm using Arch on the desktop lately and liking the bleeding edge updates and simplicity however I'm still loving Gentoo more on the servers, the portage system forces you to build everything just according to your needs where by default with Arch I'm getting pre-compiled stuff.
Anyone running Arch on servers, how does it compare to Gentoo in your opinion?
I think they are in quite the opposite ends of Linux desktop distro spectrum. Mint attempts to provide nice out-of-the-box experience and Arch is "tweak everything". Mint being based (more or less directly) on Debian includes far more distro-specific patches than Arch which has fairly vanilla packages (afaik).
As for my recommendation, imho you should learn the system you are going to use. If you want to learn Debian, use Debian (or Mint, or some other close Debian derivate). If you want to learn Arch, then use Arch. Every major distro can be poked and prodded, tweaked to no end, and you can look what happens under the hood.
It's the community that really makes Arch a great distro in my opinion. Because of them we have an excellent well-moderated forum with technically competent and helpful members, an outstanding wiki and a huge amount of software available in the AUR.
Happy birthday, my beautiful Arch! I've only been a devotee since October, 2010, and I don't know how I got along without it. While others are fighting with old. outdated bugs, I get to fight only the newest, shiniest bugs.
[+] [-] phzbOx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jon6|14 years ago|reply
I had some outdated package that I wanted to update so I asked in the #arch irc room how to just update that one package. I was told upgrading a single package is generally a bad idea and its better to just update the entire system. I have had a server running Gentoo for ~5 years and I frequently upgrade single packages at a time so I saw no problem with this but ok, I'm not an Arch expert so I followed the #arch people's advice.
I invoked the upgrade command and I see it wants to upgrade the linux kernel to 3.2 and a bunch of other stuff. After the upgrade completes I rebooted the machine (or it rebooted itself, I forget). It wasn't able to boot up. I put in a rescue cd but I couldn't figure out what was wrong.
This is exactly why I don't do 'emerge world' in gentoo anymore. It has backfired on me more than 50% of the time (when I used to do it). I simply do not trust these bleeding edge distro people to get everything working all the time and I am annoyed at the zealots who constantly advise to just upgrade as if nothing could possibly go wrong.
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yabai|14 years ago|reply
I happily run dwm, and a handful of CLI tools. This minimalistic setup is enough for me - and seems to cut down on things breaking.
[+] [-] bitwize|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Deinumite|14 years ago|reply
Ubuntu isn't around to cater to power users, the whole idea behind it is shipping a distro thats so easy your grandma can install and use it.
[+] [-] ditoa|14 years ago|reply
Here is to another amazing 10 years for Arch as well as everyone working on other Linux distros. You are all pretty damn amazing in my opinion. Thank you for all you do and please don't stop =D
[+] [-] stock_toaster|14 years ago|reply
Thanks! I still feel good about being listed on the fellows page as a past developer. :)
[+] [-] Vergle|14 years ago|reply
A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?
[+] [-] hollerith|14 years ago|reply
In contrast, on Debian, major changes to e.g. Gnome are mostly limited to when a new version of Debian comes out, and you get a lot of leeway as to when to upgrade to the new version, and in particular, sometimes you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.
And I got the impression that updates of Arch Linux broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.
Still it is a very compelling distribution because of its "elegance".
I probably spend just as much time maintaining my OS X box as I did maintaining my Arch Linux box: e.g., when I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard and from Snow Leopard to Lion, I had to install a bunch of stuff (a dict client, Gnu coreutils, Carbon Emacs, even wget IIRC) to get a comfortable environment, and the installation took a lot more time than it would have on a Linux distro. E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only on key press or mouse button click.
[+] [-] tadfisher|14 years ago|reply
I update once a week, keep configs up to date with "yaourt -C" (yaourt is available in the AUR), and read archlinux.com prior to updates to avoid issues.
One caveat is that you need your /boot mounted if you keep it separate, or else anything that depends on linux-headers (like filesystem drivers :/) will break if there's a kernel update.
If you want stability along with the tweakability, go with Debian.
[+] [-] tadzik|14 years ago|reply
At least that's how it is for me. I know many people who have no problems with updates breaking stuff in Arch; maybe it's the fact that I'm using a full-blown KDE instead of a mere xmonad or such. But I wouldn't recommend Arch to anyone who expects stuff to work.
[+] [-] abtinf|14 years ago|reply
The only issues come up when some sort of breaking change is released, and in that case there is always an article right on the arch homepage for steps to migrate to the new package.
[+] [-] rizumu|14 years ago|reply
Yes, sometimes, like every few months or so, there is some maintenance to do, but only after manually initiating system updates. Never once have I come across a maintenance issue that didn't have a quick solution already discussed on the Arch forums or wiki.
[+] [-] Edootjuh|14 years ago|reply
I also want to add that while people always seem to talk about Arch breaking, it has hardly broken more for me that Windows of Ubuntu have in the same period of time. The advantage is that when Arch breaks, you fix it because you just tend to really learn how your system works when you use Arch, while in Windows and Ubuntu, I'd just reinstall usually.
I use Arch as my only OS, for day-to-day use, and it's perfectly stable when I'm not actively experimenting etc.
[+] [-] kamechan|14 years ago|reply
So using AUR introduces a bit of maintenance overhead in the sense that I spend more time reading the comments, checking the number of votes for an item, researching the dependencies that arise, etc. But I'm also happy AUR is there to supplement what is in the supported repos. That said, I've definitely had some MAJOR problems that I've had to work through using AUR packages.
I would say that your statement about putting in the time up front to learn how the system works in order to do relatively less system administration in the long run applies more to Gentoo than to Arch. I was a Gentoo user for several years before switching to Arch, and once you get all your configuration files set up on Gentoo, the system is rock solid. The only drawback is that you're compiling nearly everything from source based on your specific system configuration through make.conf and such, updates can take a while. However, the internal consistency and dependency resolution of emerge seems far, far better than pacman in my experience.
To me at this point Arch is as stable as OSX, and possibly even more so. I go weeks without reboots and my computer never slows down. I do updates almost every day, and most of the time have no problems. And I really appreciate the rolling-release paradigm. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that possibly sometime in the future, OSX could potentially go that route as well. It already seems like they're headed there in some ways.
[+] [-] exch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leif|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavanky|14 years ago|reply
Also, try to use pacman as much as possible.
[+] [-] yabai|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sho_hn|14 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, other distros have gotten to the point of automatically installing the right debug symbol packages right from the crash reporter built into app suites like KDE's to generate useful backtraces.
[+] [-] w1ntermute|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drostie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _sh|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relics:_Einsteins_Brain
[+] [-] badboy|14 years ago|reply
It's just perfect for me. I love how easy it is to quickly build a new package (not that I need to write PKGBUILDS myself often, most things are available in the AUR)
Happy Birthday!
[+] [-] javadyan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jack12|14 years ago|reply
It does suffer the occasional dip into making things more complicated than they need to be, some element of the distribution straying towards the "SysV" darkside and away from the "BSD" ideal, or an upstream's configuration system just getting too insane to work around any longer, but everything always works back to some sense of balance after a few years. And it does feel like upstreams come around to the Arch way of thinking more often that the other way around.
I do wish it was a bit easier to automatically build or just download pre-made packages with some of the more popular compile flag variants, ports- or portage-style, but not so much that it casts a shadow on all the other benefits of Arch.
Still, it would be nice to be able to install a console vim with python and ruby interpreter support without having to install gnome too, or being able to install java on a headless server without having to stick half of X11 on there, or not having to install Apache because you want to change nginx's modules. It's always possible to change the PKGBUILD and recompile, but it seems like just changing one enable/disable switch to ./configure should be easier than it often is (vim is especially a pain to keep a custom PKGBUILD of, the ABS PKGBUILD seems to undergo massive revisions every few months).
But really the distribution is just great, the best out there. It lets you use pure Linux and avoid all the hoop jumping other distributions make you do in order to keep their package managers happy, while still giving you all the benefits you want from a distribution like automatic pre-compiled upgrades. And that's enough to make it the best balance of a distribution out there for me.
[+] [-] rufugee|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yabai|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leif|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PsyGeek|14 years ago|reply
Happy Birthday Arch Linux!!
[+] [-] karolist|14 years ago|reply
Anyone running Arch on servers, how does it compare to Gentoo in your opinion?
[+] [-] akurilin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|14 years ago|reply
As for my recommendation, imho you should learn the system you are going to use. If you want to learn Debian, use Debian (or Mint, or some other close Debian derivate). If you want to learn Arch, then use Arch. Every major distro can be poked and prodded, tweaked to no end, and you can look what happens under the hood.
[+] [-] bougyman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiloaper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bougyman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arc_of_descent|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeez|14 years ago|reply
But I do occasionally find it hard/difficult (from a mental POV), and I fall back on Fedora. I'll be a true *nix guy when I can stop doing that. :)
[+] [-] zobzu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|14 years ago|reply