Arch (overview) review

From: Dave Brockman 
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Just wanted to give kudos to the couple of you who were discussing and
describing Arch a few weeks ago.  One description in particular which
lead to the missing comparison between Slack and Arch for our discussion
purposes.

Ed, pay attention, you might like this too (keeping in mind the
architecture limitations, but you like slamd64 don't you?)

So I've run through several installs at this point.  I actually have a
couple of VMs that I plan on keeping around for more debauchery.  My
only real complaint is the partitioning wizard could do a little
detection and offer more sane defaults than the default hard-coded
values.  For some reason I couldn't seem to get my partitions configured
how I wanted them, and make the installer happy, but I moved on and just
let it do it's own thing so I could actually dig into it a bit.

I'm very impressed.  The simple (mostly) vanilla sources,
KISS/minimalistic view and BSD style init of Slack, combined with
(compared to slack/debian) the bleeding edge of Gentoo w/o the
compilation downtime, and the package management bliss of Debian
(almost... search... search should be easier).


And bonus points because IceWM (+ themes) were an easy pacman away.
(Needed a browser on the same subnet as the pfsense VM, lost it's routes
and all :)).  syslog-ng installed by default also gets bonus points.

I've also explored installing it with server roles, and while I don't
have any real uptime or stress reports to sing it's praises,
configurations are straight-forward, and easy to find.  open-vm-tools
work in console and X, as is.

So unlike the last few installs of new flavors of the old dogs, I found
Arch a little refreshing, lots of things to like, seems to have a good
combination of things from across the spectrum.  I will most likely not
be able to get too in-depth with my VM in the immediate future (other
pressing things on my TODO list), my initial impressions are extremely
favorable, and if you find yourself with an afternoon to burn, I
encourage spending a little time with Arch.  Hey Gentoo guys, I said
afternoon and not weekend :)

Regards,

dtb





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From: Troy Melhase 
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Former slack, then debian, then gentoo refugee here.  You nailed it
with that description.


Install yaourt.  Then you can search the default packages and AUR
(arch user repository) at the same time.  I keep a command in my
public bin repo for just this purpose.  See:

    https://github.com/natural/natural-bin

Specifically:

    https://github.com/natural/natural-bin/blob/master/pacman-grep


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From: Bobby 
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+1 for Yaourt -- it adds functionality and a better interface to pacman.



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From: Billy 
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this in itself would be valuable :)

--b



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From: Adam Jimerson 
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+1 for Yaourt or my favourite Clyde (when Clyde breaks I fall back on
Yaourt, then if all else there is pacman).  I have no problem is the way
package search works in Arch, just have to remember its "-Ss".  I agree with
the way pacman handles upgrades though taking a uninstall & reinstall
position to the issue instead of having to maintain packages for patches.



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From: Adam Jimerson 
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On a side note if you ever need a laugh check the version information for
both pacman and clyde, IIRC Yaourt just uses pacman so its not as good.