[YLUG] Arch

[Philip Morrell]

Hi Mike,

I too have become tired of reinstalling for no good reason and of
finding PPAs to keep software up-to-date. I have long planned to
upgrade to a rolling-release distro when I get the chance. However,
I'd like to stick within the Debian ecosystem as I'm a fan of APT and
there's a great spread of choices for how cutting-edge you'd like to
be.

I settled on Linux Mint[1] Debian Edition (LMDE) for my upgrade with
it's slightly-more-stable-than-testing aim (see also the CUT project),
but access to all the core debian repos (stable through to
experimental). The only downside is that the Linux Mint project seems
to be making some ambitious plans, which might cause them to be spread
more thinly than in the past. I think I've been spoilt by Mint's
prettiness, QA and sensible defaults.

I'm looking forward to the fun :p
--
Philip Morrell

[1] Disclaimer: I've contributed to Mint in the past, and currently
use Isadora+ppas.


On 23 January 2012 16:51, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 cutting edge, and risk being somewhat out of date by a year or two.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
>
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