One Slacker's view of Arch
 

Over the past couple of weeks I've been playing with Arch Linux on a spare partition. I've been faithful to Slack for most of my short time with Linux (only over a year now, still a noob for the most part), but every now and then I like to go see what the other distros are doing.

Arch is well worth trying out. As everyone says, it's got some of the strongpoints of Slack -- speed, relative simplicity -- plus Pacman, a pretty decent package management system. I did find that Arch is not quite as straightforward as Slackware. For example, after I installed a half-dozen packages, I realized that libraries were being installed in some surprising locations -- arguably the result of package builders' preferences, but still not as consistent as PV's approach. I guess that's what happens when you get a lot of people building packages. (You also get more packages, though; see below.)

Pacman _is_ a nice tool, and I had very few problems. However, I realized that I was always nervous about giving over control of my machine to an automated system that I didn't know much about. I suppose I could have spent some time in advance examining the package build scripts and figuring out what was happening. I do know that if you're craving for an automated package management system, you could probably do a lot worse than Arch's Pacman.

New Arch packages come out at a pretty good clip. I noticed today, for example, that a complete OpenOffice 1.9.104 package is already up, along with binutils 2.16, Mono 1.1.7, most of the confangled *-sharp packages that you need to do a lot of Mono stuff, and so on. That's just from the past day or two. So you might stay a tad ahead of the game -- and generally ahead of Slackware Current -- if you're into not-quite-stable stuff. But, especially when it comes to maintaining my system, adding new packages, etc., I suppose I'm one of those who has gotten used to driving a stick shift. I goof up a good bit, but at least I can usually find where the goof-ups are, since I'm the one at the wheel.

I'm not qualified to comment on many of the technical aspects of either distro; I hope someone else will. I don't know how to gauge the significance of Arch's claim to be "optimized for i686", for example. I do know that it feels about as nimble as Slackware, but that's subjective, all the more since my Arch and my Slack installations aren't perfectly parallel in terms of system load. Obviously the Arch folks like to keep an eye on performance-enhancing developments. Arch has had NPTL for a some time, I think, while Slackware just added it a week ago. But I figure PV knows when it's worth going for speed, and when it's better to hold onto stability. Certainly he knows a lot more than most of the rest of us do, anyway.

I don't think most Slackers will feel like they're selling out if they use Arch; it still makes you get under the hood from time to time. But your hands won't stay calloused and your fingernails grimy, the way a lot of Slackers like it.

I understand you and I don't see myself typing 'pacman' to manage my system..
(err... maybe if it was named 'tetris', I would like it)

" doom " would be a good name for an auto-package- manager.

egag

*high-fives egag*

Damn right!

lol :)

I played around with Arch as well and I basically liked it. But to me, some reasons make it a bad replacement for Slackware:

1- The lack of a stable branch with security updates. Arch is a bleeding-edge disto, and although Archers say they run production systems with it, I wouldn't.

2- The attitude of some of the people in Arch's forums. Too many, actually.

3- Arch is still a marginal distro. I think that the virtual community is an incredibly important aspect in non-commercial OSes. Both its size and the average skill level are important.

So, although being apparently similar to Slackware, I think that Arch rather appeals to Gentoo people which are tired of source-compiling but want to continue feeling "geeky" and "up to date".

Just my 2 cents.

Funny... ;) I agree... Theres something inherently wrong with automated PM's... Just doesn't feel right..

Arch is allright... I don't think it comes anywhere near the stability of Slackware. Kinda close but not really. Actually, arch is nothing more than a Slackware/LFS hybrid optimized for i686.... Thats basically what the main dev stated... I used it for a little while but as with every other distro, I abandoned it and went back to Slack pretty quick... I think I hit the mark alot better with my own creation than arch did, that is, if they were shooting for basic qualities of Slackware (including the vibe it gives off)... :D

Oh.... What the hell am I talking about anyway?

Thats funny you should mention that. I agree. I found most of the regulars there to be quite prickish. HUGE turn off. Actually, that's part of the reason why I chucked Arch. Very pretencious and self-important people over there, generally speaking anyway... If thats the image they want to portray to new users of Arch, then they can keep the damn thing. It's nothing to write home about anyway...

I used to hear that Slackware users were rude and arrogant, but at least from what I've seen in this forum, that myth is simply not true. I hope it is not true of Arch users either.

However, what I found interesting in perusing the Arch forums was that there was one thread basically saying that they didn't want Arch to become too popular, which sounds sort of eliteist to me, and other threads where folks jumped all over people who were proposing ways to make Arch easier for newbies or whatever. I don't know -- reading threads like that sort of gives me a bad vibe.

It's a fine distro, but for some reason Slackware just "clicks" for me.

right... Thats part of what I was talking about... It's really absurd. Don't quite understand it and don't quite care...

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Arch and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

A short note: I moved this to the Arch forum because the original post discusses an "outsiders" view of the distro. Anyone who is thinking of moving to Arch will probably read views such as this as part of their decision making process. Any "flaws" mentioned can be discussed rationally by people using the distro and we are likely to see a more balanced discussion than if it were left in it's original place.

I've been using arch for several months now, and I really like it. I also really like slackware, and you're right, it's not quite as stable as slack. It it very awesome, and very fast on my notebook, but I'd never run it on a production server. Then again, I would need a very good reason to run Slack on a production server too, since I prefer BSD for my servers :).

As for the eliteism, I do know some people like that, but I'm definitely not one of them. I am never in the arch forums, but I am ALWAYS in the #archlinux channel on FreeNode. In there, we do a LOT of joking around, but in the end, we almost always do our best to help someone that's actually seeking help. On a normal day, there is about 120 people in #archlinux, and only maybe 20 that are actually talking, with 10 or so doing 80% of the talking.

Honestly, there are a lot of people that come in there with bad attitudes, and that's when some of the guys get upset. As for the people who are saying they 'don't want arch to become too popular'; that's mostly because arch is a distribution indended for more experienced Linux users, not a fresh windows-convert. They don't want a ton of people asking very simple questions, which they wouldn't have to ask if they were using a more newbie friendly distro to get their feet wet.

I use arch because it's still got a the all manual configuration of distro's like Slackware, but a great package management tools with good dependancy resolution. And it's faster than anything I've used on my notebook(including Gentoo). Sure, because it's so bleeding edge, there are occasionally....egh... *snafoo's* we'll call them. But I haven't had anything that rendered my system crippled. And even so, the ABS system can build you a new package from source anyways, if someone elses package broke something.

All in all, I think Arch is very nice; and yes, it is still quite young. It makes a great and fast distro for my notebook, and has excellent multimedia support(And ease of getting the multimedia stuff).

quote from OP:
-----------
I don't think most Slackers will feel like they're selling out if they use Arch; it still makes you get under the hood from time to time. But your hands won't stay calloused and your fingernails grimy, the way a lot of Slackers like it.
-----------EQ

in fact OP asked for opinions of "people that use slackware " , not of " arch" users.
how will a post that " discusses an "outsiders" view of the distro " get the " the exposure it deserves."
on the forum of that distro ?
apart from the fact that it's rather a dead zone here, there will not be many " views of a slacker" responses.

so....please put it back where it belongs...

egag

As one of the "nicer" Arch users, I'd be pretty keen to see a link where you got this info. Arch Linux was built from LFScratch and its loosely based on Crux, not Slackware. After reading this thread from an outsiders point of view not having visited this forum for a while due to other commitments, it doesn't look like the Arch users are the ones who are full of themselves or their distro...

http://wiki2.archlinux.org/index.php/Crux%20vs.%20Arch

just my :twocents:...

I've only posted in the arch forums a few times (three or four). I might be the reason why you think arch users are so pretentious.

I made a really pretentious-reading post in the referred-to thread about arch becoming to popular. I'm kicking myself for being arrogant and annoying. I'm still a little immature sometimes. I want to take responsibility for that, because so far I have found the arch forums(excluding my idiotic post) to be extremely welcoming and friendly. I think that anyone looking at the threads there will agree.


this is the thread in question. My username there is "Chris DePauw". How embarrasing.

****edit
:: to the main topic

I'm trying to move to arch from gentoo. Arch seems easier and is defenitely faster to install. I haven't tried slackware because I don't want to burn the three iso-cds. Arch only uses one cd (I'm a cheap guy). I might try slackware in the next week or so.

Actually, Slack's only on two CDs (and if you don't want KDE or GNOME, you only need the first one), but, of course, that's still more than Arch's single disc.

I read that years ago and was recalling from memory. Looks like win32-sux found the link. I was close.. Altho I could have sworn I remember reading something about slackware in there as well... Nothing I said could be considered 'full of themselves'... Your just being defensive about your distro, which I understand... When Arch noobs post with a pretty basic problem and get flamed for it, that's being 'full of yourself'... I still answer posts like:

It's more of an effort to be a prick and tell someone to use the search function than it is to reply with one word... startx.
You do nothing but re-inforce the stigma about linux users when you act like that. People need to start being nice and helpfull towards one another in general, not just on linux forums. I've helped one guy in particular on another linux forum who was just starting for weeks. The thread ended up being 60 pages of just me and him talking.... And I'm talking basic shit man... Stuff you should have learned in windows... He didn't even know how to browse the filesystem via GUI but wanted to jump right in on getting his winmodem to work...

My linux expierence was at a crawl for the first year because of pricks on forums.... Thats a load of crap. We need to take the time to help people otherwise, there is NO POINT WHATSOEVER in being on the forum in the first place...

egag is right as well... This should have been left in Slackware because that was the posters intended audience. Not only does it have a possibility to degenerate into a distro war because of comments already stated but confuses the original poster as to what happened to the thread. Not to mention, I don't see how this is going to get the "exposure it deserves" when I've just seen a tumbleweed roll by....

As the original poster, I did start feeling really bad when the thread degenerated into rasberry time. I had figured that there were others like me who like to test and compare different distros, and that some of us Slackers could benefit from a discussion of the similarities and dissimilarities between Slackware and Arch, as well as their respective strengths and weaknesses. I especially regretted when the discussion moved from the distros themselves to users of the distros.

While I was a bit disappointed -- tears on the keyboard and all ;) -- in how it worked out, I credit XavierP for taking the trouble of writing me to explain his rationale for moving the post. Though I definitely intended the post for Slackers who are using, have used or are thinking of trying Arch, he thought it belonged more in the Arch forum and would get better exposure there. As moderator, that's his prerogative.

FWIW, I've spent a fair amount of time in the main Arch forum at www.archlinux.org and have also read the LQ Arch forum a bit, and I haven't noticed a greater degree of distro-chauvinism or nasty newby-spurning attitudes among Archers than among any other distros. By and large people treat newbies pretty well, I think, in both the Slack and Arch communities. Anyway, this year's expert was last year's newby, right?

i see it going either way. the only way i came across this was cuz i'm a slack user and like many others, i created spare partitions to use when trying out the different distros without having to sacrifice my slackware :)
tonights curiosity brought me to arch, which brought me here, although i would have found it sooner in the slack forum where i constantly surf for tips and tricks and opinions and stuff, much like (read: exactly like) dhave posted here :)

as for the pricks....in the almost 2 years i've been lurking around here, i've seen tons of them, and not one has really been distro specific. maybe it's people tired of answering the same "my middle button on my mouse doesn't work" or "which distro should i use", but as i pointed out a few times, it's easier to pass those posts by then it is to click on them, and rant and rave and spout RTFM or DISTRO-WATCH...
personally, i've been put off a few times by people who have been less than nice, but then again, i've learned maybe 80% of what i know about linux from this site, so it's clear there are far more happy helpful people than there are grumps...
anyways...i'm just glad there ARE posts like this...it makes people sit back and go 'hmmm'

I should specify that I was talking about the Arch forums on the Arch site, note the LQ Arch forums.

But you are correct, there are silly people in the Slackware forums here on LQ as well and ignoring them is the best solution. That works perfectly here, because the noise level is very low, the amount of really interesting posts is huge. Over at the Arch forums, I personally found the noise level too high because there were just as much stupid postings as interesting ones.

It's a pity for this fine distro Arch. But the LQ-Slackware forum is for me one of the major arguments in favor of Slack. You got a bunch of highly qualified people around here, and you can evolve with them by reading their posts or by trying to help others. That, Arch cannot match yet, and although it's not a technical point at all it's much more important than the technical differences.