[Novalug] Arch linux impressions?

[Omari Norman]

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 9:20 PM, Nick Danger <nick at hackermonkey.com> wrote:

> Looking at distros for my new home workstation. nothing fancy but new to
> me anyway. been a happy fedora guy for years and other stuff thrown
> in/out during those years. Havent tried Arch yet but reading good things.
>
>
Anyone running it/run it for some time that have comments?


I'm a bit late :) and looks like you're already off installing Arch. But my
thoughts anyway:

It is a good system, if you like rolling release. Running it will mean that
you will have to update all the packages on your machine before you install
anything new. The developers do not truly track dependencies the way that,
say, Debian does. Instead they seem to assume that your system is up to
date. This can matter if you install a new package but your installed
libraries are old. Programs might not run or, worse, might malfunction. If
they had specified that program foo depends on library libfoo >= version
2.0, and you have version libfoo ==1.8, this might not have been a problem.
But Arch won't specify that you need libfoo >= 2.0; the foo package might
not even specify that it needs libfoo at all.

None of this is a big deal if you like the Arch way of always keeping your
installed packages up to date. Of course, if you like having the latest
software, this is not a big deal. I don't really care all that much about
having the latest of everything (wow, new dhclient version is out, can't
wait, I'll put that in right after I install this new liblzma) so the
constant updating gets old. For me there is Debian stable.
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