Arch Linux [Was] Re: [Sussex] Ubuntu used in the fight against AIDS

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Sun, 2007-03-18 at 07:30 +0000, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> > Still, my little daliances in the world of Fedora and the like are
> > breif - I always end up back with Arch Linux sooner or later :-)
> 
> Really? Why? It's not one I've worked with, so I'm quite curious about your 
> experience with it. 

Imagine a system that:

 - Is structurally as clean and simple as Slackware

 - Has a packaged software versions that are consistently ahead of
Ubuntu (It's a rolling release system, so if you stick to stable and
update regularly you'll find you both stay up to date but stay stable).

  - A package management system that's like apt, but not designed by
comittee and therefore simple, consistent, easy to understand and
develop for.

 - A side effect of the previous point: http://aur.archlinux.org

.. that's about it really.  In the interest of balance I'd point out the
bad points:

 - You won't see much under /usr/share/doc unless you're prepared to
remake packages - Arch installation are meant to be light so only
minimal docs are installed by default.

- You're not going to get a fancy GUI installation procedure - there's
no default desktop setup, i.e. this is not a the distro to use if you're
going to hand out CDs to friends/newbs.

- There's no policy with regard to freedom - this is not GNewSense, you
want the propietary Nvidia drivers you install them from the "extra"
repository (enabled by default). 

You'll find a lot of similar comments here:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way


-- 
Geoffrey Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation