Comments on: Arch Linux makes Linux fun to use again.

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 10:26:31 +0000

John,
Arch Linux is not exactly newbie friendly. You may not mess with the kernel (don’t usually need to) but the installation phase happens entirely in command line and you have to understand what you’re doing. I would not call this difficult (I do it and I’m no developer) but perhaps at your stage the learning curve would be too steep. If you wish to try something else, perhaps you may want to try Fedora. Fedora installs as easily as Ubuntu, but you need to do much more tweaking afterwards, such as installing non-free codecs for movies, dvd, etc.

By: John D

John D — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:06:42 +0000

I've been a Ubuntu user for almost 9 months now and even though I'm still learning, I do want to try other distros. This one looks like it's pretty good. How newbie friendly is it for someone who doesn't really know how to mess around with the kernel and all that other stuff yet? External Hard Drive Deals

By: D.

D. — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:20:16 +0000

I got most of the way through an Arch install a year or so ago. Then went back to Ubuntu. Feeling like I *should* be able to install Arch, I tried again, but unfortunately – combination of work and two small kids – by the time I sat down to my laptop my brain was fried and I kept putting off setting up the X server. Then my wife started nagging that she wanted a working computer (my laptop is our house’s only pc) so I just nuked my partial installation and put Ubuntu back on again. My wife is happy, but I have this nagging feeling that I chickened out, and that I should maybe have just another go at it…

By: Is it Time For Arch in the Workshop? | LearnByDoingIT

Is it Time For Arch in the Workshop? | LearnByDoingIT — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:08:38 +0000

[...] it Time For Arch in the Workshop? I was reading this post by Charles Schultz (not that one) and I am pondering setting up Arch on a machine, or even a VM to [...]

By: Harley

Harley — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:55:56 +0000

@Brad
I personally hate the Arch community for that (and their insufferable KISS attitude where it’s stupid to have such an attitude.) Basically here’s where I stand. A distro should work for you. If it doesn’t use one that does. If you don’t like Arch’s way of doing things, go to one you do like. If Arch’s way of doing things is too hard for you to do, but if Kubuntu’s methods work for you, use that. The reason a lot of us use Linux is for the choices. Is Arch any better or worse then Kubuntu? I’d say no. Arch may do some things well (PKGBUILD’s are great) but doesn’t do other things as well (Do most users need the development headers? Probably not, so splitting packages makes sense here. Do users sometimes want developer documentation that Arch sends to /dev/null on build by default? Yeah, I would like to have developer documentation for times that I may not have internet access.) Basically, you should try to pick the distro that fits your needs the best. If Arch doesn’t fit those (doesn’t work, don’t like it’s methods, whatever) don’t use it.

I love to help promote Linux, but I rarely ever promote the distros I use because I tend to use distros targeted at power users. Unless I’m talking to someone which I think would be interesting in that. Power users I tend to recommend Arch, Gentoo (if you’re into that type of thing, you know, compiling most everything, Sourcemage might be interesting too because it’s source based), Debian (really not that hard, but it’s not as easy as *buntu’s), Slackware, or even a BSD (because lets face it, BSD’s are pretty cool too.) All in all though, most people will just want something that works quickly and easily, and the *buntus, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and a few others are great for that. If your needs are more specialized, choose from one of the other couple hundred distributions.

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:02:21 +0000

@libervisco:
It’s funny because I still use a Mac as a laptop. I’m very happy with the mac hardware, the OS is beautiful, but it’s a commercial trap. Once you bought one Mac then you end up with an ipod. And for everything Multimedia, Mac is just a no-go for me. In the end I’m choosing to go back to Linux, which is done for my main workstation, and my phone which runs Android. Now all my music is on .ogg and .mp3 and nobody is telling me how I should listen to it So of course, we may start from different points, but fundamentally, I’m someone who is moving away from Macs despite all the good stuff they offer…

By: libervisco

libervisco — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:06:37 +0000

This article made me wanna try Arch again on a separate partition. I became quite frustrated with Linux recently even though I use Ubuntu. There’s always something that doesn’t quite work and it’s usually stuff that’s considered basic like audio playback. I’ve started wishing for a Mac which frankly I actually may get as soon as possible.

But then again while it requires some initial work Arch may actually be a better experience overall because of it’s underlying simplicity and control. There are not so many layers of abstraction that could all add up to some breakage.

But I dunno, most of all I’m just curious about it at this point.

Thanks for a nice post.

By: jyp

jyp — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:02:45 +0000

@Charles
sidux is a rolling distro; it is debian sid (unstable) made rock solid by the sidux team. I am not a geek but I have been using it for roughly 2 years on many machines and I cannot say anything else than “it’s a GREAT distro”. Have a look at sidux.com.

Ubuntu (Kubuntu), like many, have been there in the beginning; but no comparison possible. The closest to sidux, imho would be Arch. But Arch unfortunately (just my opinion) is not Debian; sidux is.

By: Charles

Charles — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:26:21 +0000

@frigault: controls and window borders: Sonar-Dust icons: DrakFire evolution. Wallpaper: don’t remember. It was either on archlinux.fr or .org, or even perhaps on gnome-look.org …

@jyp: I never tried sidux, but, how is it different from, say, Ubuntu?

By: jyp

jyp — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:54:07 +0000

Nice review; reading it, i was almost doing _s/arch/sidux/g_. Never used Arch, but the review made me curious. I am happy user of sidux though; debian, kde, super fast, great support; it would take a lot to make me change but, why not trying Arch too?

It is nice to see 2 rolling distros of this quality close to the spirit of Linux.