iamah
September 30th, 2008, 02:39 PM
EDIT: This rant is solved(?) :) thanks to fwojciec, I understand better now what Arch is.
So I jumped in the hype over this Arch distro and tried installing it. I knew it was a tricky distro. But I used Linux before Ubuntu, now I'm a lazy linux user, amen!
Let me organize this rant by alledged Arch advantages I've heard about.
1. Size. I went to the basic: xorg, xfce, firefox, mplayer, vlc and some wifi tools. Well, df tells me theres 2.1GB used. I really dont see the size advantage here. Even Xubuntu can deliver that with more ready to go features like Openoffice, skype, IM, working wifi and battery apps... Maybe they refereed to the core installed. Yeah, thats nice, but nothing to get excited over, I remember using Debian floppy disks and still getting small size... Now the only distros that impressed me with size were oldies Kurumin and Vector... they're probably dead now
2. Pacman. Its a nice tool, but I really don't see whats the greatness, apt also is nice, with some nice frontends, lots of packages... maybe the package format, they say it take less time to process the package but nowadays I think processing packages is not a big deal, to some people downloading is more of a problem...
3. New versions. Well, I didn't go out checking versions to see if they're really up to date, but I'm typing this in Arch using Firefox Gran Paradiso 3.0.1, even after updating pacman -Su which gave me 120MB of stuff, but no Firefox 3.0.2 which I already have on Ubuntu for more than a week.
So yeah, I don't take fun in assembling my distro anymore, I did that once. I was just a little disappointed at what other experienced users praised about Arch. Things there were here long before, others that just weren't so.
So I jumped in the hype over this Arch distro and tried installing it. I knew it was a tricky distro. But I used Linux before Ubuntu, now I'm a lazy linux user, amen!
Let me organize this rant by alledged Arch advantages I've heard about.
1. Size. I went to the basic: xorg, xfce, firefox, mplayer, vlc and some wifi tools. Well, df tells me theres 2.1GB used. I really dont see the size advantage here. Even Xubuntu can deliver that with more ready to go features like Openoffice, skype, IM, working wifi and battery apps... Maybe they refereed to the core installed. Yeah, thats nice, but nothing to get excited over, I remember using Debian floppy disks and still getting small size... Now the only distros that impressed me with size were oldies Kurumin and Vector... they're probably dead now
2. Pacman. Its a nice tool, but I really don't see whats the greatness, apt also is nice, with some nice frontends, lots of packages... maybe the package format, they say it take less time to process the package but nowadays I think processing packages is not a big deal, to some people downloading is more of a problem...
3. New versions. Well, I didn't go out checking versions to see if they're really up to date, but I'm typing this in Arch using Firefox Gran Paradiso 3.0.1, even after updating pacman -Su which gave me 120MB of stuff, but no Firefox 3.0.2 which I already have on Ubuntu for more than a week.
So yeah, I don't take fun in assembling my distro anymore, I did that once. I was just a little disappointed at what other experienced users praised about Arch. Things there were here long before, others that just weren't so.