[YLUG] Arch

[mike cloaked]

As a long standing Fedora user I recently thought I would try a new
distribution - having looked at the various distributions and their
mailing lists, and taking into account that Ubuntu and its various
clones are extremely popular, yet most distributions have one feature
that I find "difficult" - that is that if you are maintaining a
reasonable number of machines of different types, then having to
re-install every year or so (or less) is a true PITA - and yet if you
don't then you risk not being up to date once support is switched off
by the developers - if you choose something like Ubuntu LTS then you
get long(er) term stability but are no longer going to be near the
cutting edge, and risk being somewhat out of date by a year or two.

So what I wanted was a distribution which was designed as
"rolling-release" - but which keeps very up to date and at the cutting
edge or close to it, and keeps close to upstream for supported
packages such as desktops, kernel, and xorg etc.
My brother and I had been thinking about this for some time, and
increasingly getting more than a little concerned at developments such
as Gnome3 which appears not to have been the success that had been
hoped for, and also the introduction of systemd to replace the SySV
init startups which has been a long and difficult development.
Pulseaudio has been a long a often troubled development also (and also
udev in fact!).  So where does that leave us in terms of satisfaction
and hope....

We decided to make an initial assessment of Arch Linux.  It has a
dedicated team of developers, has a rolling-release model, and keeps
very close to upstream on the key packages.  Rolling release means
that once you have a system installed then you just keep updating the
packages you want and it stays close to cutting edge and close to
upstream.....    I have now been running a machine on arch for just
over a month - and I have to admit I am liking it more and more.

I think that if Ubuntu, Fedora and other "big" distributions were to
move to a rolling release also then I might have thought about staying
with Fedora or moving to Ubuntu - but right now I am thinking more and
more along the lines of dumping both in favour of Arch progressively
when it comes to the next time I am forced to upgrade when a system
reaches end-of-life. If you are managing of order 6 to 10 machines or
more then re-installing every year means a lot of time getting a new
system working properly after new installs. Upgrades as opposed to
clean installs are very prone to leaving a system with nasty config
issues that can often take longer to resolve than clean installing and
configuring from scratch using previous config files.

I wondered if anyone in YLUG was running Arch Linux, and if so why
people decided to move to Arch?  Perhaps some people simply started
with Arch and never wanted to leave?

Anyone have any thoughts on these issues? - (and by the way this is
not supposed to be flame-bait) I am just interested in what people's
thinking is in choosing a distribution - admittedly installing Arch is
not simply plugging in a CD and follow the prompts kind of install to
get anything other than a basic system - even getting xorg and a
desktop means manually choosing the packages you want and need - so
perhaps not best for beginners - but for more experienced linux users
in this group I wondered what thoughts you have in how you chose the
distribution you have plumped for ( I know some will be gentoo fans,
others Ubuntu, and others may have opted for Linux Mint or perhaps
Slackware/Suse/ etc)

This might be an interesting discussion if it doesn't degenerate into
a complaint war!

-- 
mike c