[members at lugog] Hi

[GARY SEVIOUR]

Arch is great, you have to put in a little work to get everything set up, but generally your desktop is going run faster, you are less affected by the whim of corporate politics and if something breaks it is easier to fix. Generally the people who frequent the Arch forums are much more savvy than the the ones on Ubuntu. 

I used to use Ubuntu and still recommend it to new users (although with Unity I am not so impressed). 

Having said that, I dont think my current setup with Xmonad (with a completely spartan desktop) is going to help me to convince anyone to give linux a try, even if i can do my web browsing and coding much more efficiently. I still have a long way to go, but as this is basically my life so I can invest the time and that investment will eventually pay off. 

I used to use Ubuntu for my desktop machine and tried various music distros for music. I found that arch actually beats the music distros on two points: you get much closer to the latest and greatest releases of various music software and you can achieve much lower audio latency, mostly just by using a light weight desktop and also by using the "pro audio overlay". The original Ubuntu Studio looked cool but was awful in practice.

Advantages of Arch:
+The organisation of system is much more transparent than Ubuntu (or other desktop distro).
+It has a rolling release (get the latest software now, no more waiting six months (this is important in the linux world where the next version of firefox, Inkscape, Gimp or whatever can be very important, like what if the next version of Gimp can handle the CMYK colour space properly, you will not want to wait (actually ive been waiting for this feature and spot colours (pantone etc) about eight years).
+You dont need to bother with pulse audio (can anyone tell me what purpose it is actually supposed to serve). The first thing i used to do with ubuntu was uninstall pulse audio.
+The wiki, forums and beginners guide are excellent.
+ its fast and lightweight
+ you can tailor it to just about any purpose.

- It has a learning curve, but it is easy enough if you take your time.
- You have to put in work to get your system to where you want to be.

If not Ubuntu or Arch, how about OpenSuse? (has any one tried it or used it, the latest incarnation looks promising), Im thinking that this may be the one to recommend to windows users.

Ok that should probably have been a blog post, I got carried away.

Gary
 
--- On Thu, 3/11/11, Ian Dickinson <i.j.dickinson at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Ian Dickinson <i.j.dickinson at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [members at lugog] Hi
To: "The Linux User Group of Glastonbury" <glastonbury at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Date: Thursday, 3 November, 2011, 17:26

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:03 PM, Dan Dart <dandart at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Currently pondering which distro to switch to in place of Ubuntu, because of Unity
> that old chestnut, eh?
I don't think Unity has been around long enough to be an old chestnut
:)  Fwiw, I've been completely happy with Ubuntu until now: it gets
out of my way and stays there! Sadly, the same cannot be said for
Unity.

> Arch is awesome. Huzzah!
[I shall probably regret this]  Go on then: what are the concrete
reasons that Arch is awesome? With evidence. Bonus points for graphs
and detailed statistical hypothesis testing :)

Ian

_______________________________________________
Glastonbury Linux User Group mailing list
Glastonbury at mailman.lug.org.uk
https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/glastonbury

User group website: http://www.lugog.org.uk/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/glastonbury/attachments/20111103/258397e8/attachment-0001.htm>