Blog Post #10, In Which I Talk About Arch Linux
After the great rm catastrophe, i had a golden opportunity to switch operating systems. Debian-stable had been a thorn in my side for a while, because the packages are all perpetually out of date. My original plan was to use Ubuntu, but i changed my mind because i don't really like where Ubuntu is headed. It seems to be falling for the same trap as GNOME, in making things "easy to use" at the expense of making them configurable. For a power user like me, this is unacceptable. So instead i went with Arch, which i remembered hearing about somewhere. I read the Arch Way and found that i agreed with it.
Arch is a rolling-release distro. This means that there are no fixed releases, no version numbers. The "stable" version-and the only supported one-is the most recent one. Arch packages are always of the latest stable release of the software. Unlike many other distros (such as Debian and Ubuntu), Arch prefers not to patch software themselves. They also prefer to let bugs be fixed upstream. (Since Arch always has the latest stable version, users quickly receive the bugfixes.)
Arch strives to keep its packages as close to the original upstream software as possible. Patches are applied only when necessary to ensure an application compiles and runs correctly with the other packages installed on an up-to-date Arch system.
-https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchLinux:About#Source_Integrity
Let's look at the patches that Ubuntu and Arch apply to Firefox. Arch's patches change a total of 9 lines. Ubuntu... well, here is the patch. I have no idea how many lines of source code it changes because it adds a bunch of build crap. I'll just say that, after you remove the changelog and the MPL, the diff is 374kB and 9,291 lines long.
Arch also has the Best Wiki Ever. There is an excellent tutorial on installing and setting up Arch. There are informative and helpful articles about seemingly every major piece of software; for example, Xorg, PostgreSQL, Postfix.
I knew i had made the right choice in picking Arch when, a couple months after i installed it, Arch made Python 3.1 the default Python version. Why is that so great? I'll try to explain.
Python 3 is the next major version of the Python programming language. It breaks backwards compatibility with the older and more popular Python 2. It is a better language than Python 2 because the primary goal when designing Python 3 was to fix "warts" in the language. Unfortunately, it is struggling to be adopted by developers, for reasons that could fill a blog post of their own.
Anyway, the point is that Arch is forging ahead where other distros are dragging their feet. Debian is still using Python 2.5 for crying out loud. They are 2 minor versions behind! (The latest (and also the last) release of the 2.x series is 2.7.) Although Python 2.6 will be in the next release of Debian, there is still no release date set.
Arch is bleeding edge. We do things first. We experience the pain before others. That what makes us full of awesome.
-Allan McRae
Arch is indeed pretty awesome, i also have to admit that it can be annoying sometimes.
pacman (Arch's package manager) is decent, but is certainly no aptitude. It has a somewhat cryptic syntax as well.
Arch's package repositories only keep the latest version of packages, so if you need an older version of some software, you'll have to download and compile it from source.
The relentless pace of package updates can be overwhelming at times. Major updates of packages will come out at times when it isn't convenient, and you will have to deal with it or maintain the older version yourself...
Though pacman is not my favorite program, i do like how easy it is to create packages on Arch. Arch's packages are built using PKGBUILD files. A PKGBUILD is little more than some metadata and a script which runs make. I have even created a few packages myself, as opposed to Debian, where i've never created a package.
Anyway, i use Arch; and if you if you love software, if you are serious about linux and open source, or if you are looking for a new distro, i think you should use it too.