Ten Things I Love About ArchLinux
Posted by Vince Wadhwani on May 31, 2007
I've been back on Mac OSX for over a year now, using it for all my daily activities from email and web surfing to programming and device syncing. Something has been eating at me though and I find myself pining for my old linux desktop. Since buying a new rig for kicks is out of the question, I instead dug up a beat up IBM T22 and grabbed my Kubuntu Alternative Install CD and went to it.
Unfortunately, Kubuntu didn't install in the two times I tried it. It's unusual and is probably a reflection of my hardware more than it is Ubuntu. Still, I had an itch to scratch and I was determined to get at it. Enter Arch Linux. I've used Arch before and this article isn't about how it does on the Desktop or how well it installs. If you want to figure that out go find a review or, better yet, grab an ISO and install it yourself. (Arch installs nicely on VMWare Fusion BTW..)
After getting up and running with Arch again, I discovered there are things about it that I just absolutely love. Here are my top 10.
- It's fast. Yes, it's an i686 distro and while you might think that I'd grow impatient waiting for an application to launch on my aging 128MB RAM T22, you'd be wrong. It's actually quite snappy and I'm surprised. I've got both KDE and Fluxbox installed and they are both serviceable. Lack of bloat is a good thing.
- It's got a lean base. I recall a few years ago when I was overseas, I made a bad, stupid, mistake that ruined my linux install. I didn't bring a spare ISO with me but I needed to get work done. I had the choice of downloading a slew of distros but ended up grabbing Archlinux. The lean 140MB base CD downloaded in a few hours (slooow connections overseas back then) and installed in under 25 minutes. From there was I able to start downloading applications in one terminal while simultaneously working in the other.
- It's unbiased. KDE? Fluxbox? Gnome? Who cares! With Arch, you make the decisions so if you don't want something don't install it. If you want something, go grab it. Nothing is given more attention than the other and that's because the community has a varied user base with their own preferences. Somebody in there uses a similar setup to the one you're thinking about.
- The community. It's been said that some people use *nix because they hate Windows while other use *nix because they love Unix. (I've left the exact phrase vague for fear of starting a flame war.) I think I use Archlinux because I love linux and I think many in the Arch community feel the same way. The result is a strong, respectful community forum, a well documented wiki, and nice IRC Channel too.
- RC.CONF. Wait, you love Archlinux because of a file? Yes I do. Everything you need to mess with is in this file. Want to start a daemon on boot? Here you go. Want to eliminate a module from getting loaded? It's in there too. What about setting your IP address? Yup, it's covered. Overall, I find it lovely and I think many Arch users would agree.
- Pacman. Arch comes with a great, powerful package manager too. Unlike his peers, Pacman won't start installing packages without asking you first. What I mean by that is if you do a sudo apt-get install Foo, it'll go and do it. OTOH, if you type pacman -S Foo, you'll get a breakdown of what's being installed and then pacman will request permission to go ahead.
- It's a learning distro. Yeah, you need to know linux to really use it. Sure, it doesn't auto configure much. (In fact, sometimes I feel it screws up some things on purpose just to see if you're paying attention!) X11 won't work by default and neither will sound, suspend to ram, or much of anything else. But, it's all manageable thanks to the great community and documentation and you *will* learn a ton about linux while doing it. Much of that learning will stay with you no matter which distro you end up with.
- It rolls with it. Arch is a rolling distro so it's always up to date. Simply typing pacman -Syu will update your installation to the latest greatest everything. Sounds like a nightmare for a server but it's actually never let me down even after long periods of neglecting it. Still, I looove my install so I care and feed it daily. It blooms.
- It's current. With Arch, the packages are in the repository very quickly after they're released. Sometimes it doesn't become generally available (they *do* test) but if you want it you can enable the testing repository and help out with the bug hunt. Regardless, it's my experience that the versions of the packages in Arch are always further along. It's nice to have the latest greatest and it's also nice to know if a current version of a package fixes or adds a feature I'm interested in. If so, I'll take the time to compile it on the linux distro I use for my servers (Ubuntu).
- Ok, there's no number 10 and I lied.. this is just a Top 9. Sorry folks! Take a minute to suggest a 10th thing and maybe I'll append it to this list.
In any case, Arch isn't the only distro with the above great things and I obviously am not trying to imply that it's better than your favorite distro either. But, I do really enjoy it. A little later on I'll probably publish my list of 5 things I hate about Archlinux. But I'm only up to two at this point so it'll be a while until that list is fully compiled. Still, I'm sure some of you have suggestions for me. ;)
Very good article, but you must realize, Arch is not the only OS that has almost (if not all) these good things/features. I use Gentoo and it does most of those things, also, i believe CRUX does most of them as well…I kind of like Gentoo because it’s so fast, customizable, and everything is actually optimized further than i686 down to your specific processor architecture (pentium 3, 4, prescott, Core Duo, etc) and of course it has all the features you like of Arch :)
JD
ABS and the AUR, that’s gotta be on there for sure. There’s a 10 for ya ;).
pbw
Hi JD,
The last time I used Gentoo (about 5 years ago) I wasn’t experienced enough with linux to do it justice, but I was aware of all the great things that Gentoo has and maybe soon I’ll give it another whirl. If you’re a Gentoo fan, I might also suggest giving FreeBSD a try. I learned a ton about unix in general using BSD..
vince
@JD
Gentoo does optimise further, but there is such a thing as “optimising too much”, which makes the system actually slower. Arch is great since it’s optimised, blazing fast (reportedly faster than a Gentoo setup) and it’s binary so you don’t have to spend hours just waiting to compile a program.
I’m not trying to bash Gentoo here, use it if you like it, I’m just pointing out that the level of optimisation in Gentoo may not be such a great thing.
ABS is definitely a great side of Arch as well, it allows you to make Arch a “primitive source based distro”, in the sense that there is no automatic dependency checking and such when compiling using ABS (not when you want the deps to bo compiled as well). Though there is a small wrapper utility called yaourt which does do that.
The system is very much like FreeBSD Ports, so i’m sure a few FreeBSD fans would like it as well. Definitely worthy to be on the Top 10 :)
Xilon
@Vince: Yeah, i use FreeBSD on my home server and i work with it on servers that the hosting company i work for has and i love it, i just don’t think it’s good as a desktop OS yet. Also, Gentoo has much improved in the past 5 years…Portage is updated frequently and well and the installer can be very fast and easy (the new GUI installers) or you can still install it the old way which takes a lot longer, but you also learn a lot more about Linux/Gentoo .
@Xilon: Gentoo can optimize too much, but that’s all set by the user (with your cflags level of -O2, -O3, etc). The Gentoo handbook recommends O2 and also, i realized, that’s what any app you compile from source manually on any distro (i used Debian and Ubuntu to get this information) uses so it’s not too bad. Also, it does take longer to install packages, but you have the nice option that if you want to install VLC (for example) on Gentoo and you know you’ll never need/want FLAC support, you can compile it without and save some space and CPU cycles when you’re using it. The only downside to this is when you get screwed a bit by weird USE flags…I installed Gnome on Gentoo and i wanted to listen to MP3’s, but neither Totem nor Rhythmbox had MP3 support and i looked in their USE flags for a MP3 or lame flag to enable, but it turns out the flag for MP3 was mad :( But in all honesty, issues like this haven’t happened to me too much since running Gentoo and i’m very happy with it.
JD
Tell us the things you dislike about arch. Maybe, you feel the same as we do, and we can change something.
I like to read articles where people say they actually like the way arch is. It’s like a compliment for everyone working on publishing a good linux distribution.
Of course, there are several other distributions which have quite a similar setup, probably with different package managers, different file structures or a different init system. What ever those things are, it are things arch is loved for as any other distribution is loved for it’s unique features, and that’s why there are numberous distribution - or not?
// STi
STiAT
Archs robust too. I screwd up my suspend2 and rebooted TWO times missing. But it worked with only minor issues. The same error wuddav made ubuntu and gentoo unbootable.
Also if any new version of any package is screwd, I can revert to the old package in my cahce and nothings ever happened (TM).
I managed to install 30+ packages,onky KDE and amarok1.4 having minor glitches and only X for which I needed help.
Way to go arch!!
Jesvin
I completely agree with rc.conf! I actually still can’t get my daemons, etc. configured properly in other distros (I’m on Linux Mint right now) because the rc.d is a total mess, and is completely unintuitive.
Also, to the Gentoo-ers. It doesn’t matter if my system is 3% faster than Arch (which is already very fast) if to get it there I need to (a) compile everything from source, which takes hours, and (b) there’s always the threat of my system breaking if I do anything wrong.
Thomas
No offense, but I can’t read white on light blue. Could you have black text?
Brandon
Arch rox a lot. You can choose between a binary distro (pacman) or a source like gentoo (ABS), it keep it simple, its easy, its fast…
ÃÂlvaro