I’m officially finished messing around with operating systems for awhile, and I’m officially done with Arch Linux. I re-installed my office machine with Arch Linux a while back, and it was a great experience. Except for one thing. It sucked.
Seriously, if it wasn’t for the one tiny detail of Arch Linux sucking, it would have been awesome.
To be fair, I didn’t try hard enough. But, I just want an OS that works. Arch Linux is a great OS for performance nerds, like Gentoo fans who enjoy compiling every module for days. In my own experience, this is a fun way to really get to know Linux. However, those days are behind me and I just want an OS that works.
Arch Linux is so light and fast, but it’s also a desolate place where nothing lives but the core OS. You have to install every package manually and when I found that even the fucking calculator had to be installed (as part of gnome-extra) well, that was the last straw.
So I made an executive decision and did something I haven’t done in years.
I installed Fedora. Fedora 16.
Why? Two reasons. For one, most of our software runs on Redhat and Fedora is in the same family. Second, I use dual monitors and Ubuntu has become a complete idiot when it comes to managing that.
Well so far so good because Fedora 16 (Verne) works right out of the box. Yep. Everything works: external monitors (both of them) work which includes flipping them vertically or horizontally without having to mess around with your xorg.conf. No wireless issues, and the clean install is fast and snappy. Overall, Fedora 16 is a huge improvement over whatever Fedora I used in the past (like 2008). Even YUM feels better and package management seems tighter.
So for now I’m just going to use it as a regular desktop and see if any issues come up. I really have nothing else to say about it right now because I’m still blown away by the fact that the whole installation was complete and working in under 20 minutes. Also, xfce is light and clean. Had to install the ms-fonts after the fact, but no big deal.
Here’s the default desktop. Looking kinda Steampunk:
Mike, one question. Is that you in the submarine?
@Shawn
No, it’s Captain Nemo. Fedora 16 is code named Verne and the desktop wallpaper is an homage to Jules Verne’s Nautilus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(Verne)
Don’t you know nothin’?
Nice post Mike i was thinking on installing Arch Linux.
ArchLinux just sucks and that’s it.
I did a fresh install, updated and … no longer boot.
Something like tzdata errors from THEIR OWN repositories breaks the system, then I updated that and pcre libs too, and all system needed to be updated.
While doing that it updated something like ‘linux’ package (the kernel) and the system is DEAD.
When booting it does not recognize the disk, udev does not work and my system is all gone.
Good it was a fresh install but that really scared me for future updates.
No no no no… I surely don’t want a system like this.
Think twice if you’re planning to install archlinux, if you’re mad enough to loose all your work and configuration in just a second.
Fedora is a good choice, I’ve been using that for years and I’m very happy with it.
Not perfect but I trust this system.
@fair man
Arch has become (in)famous for their upgrades that leave your system in a disastrous state. I have a lot of colleagues that used Arch but eventually switched back to solid distros like Fedora. I used to despise Yum, but it’s really improved over the years.
I’m not sure why you had such a bad experience with Arch. I for one have been running it for over 3 years now with great success and none of the issues you have mentioned above. I do a full system update on a daily basis, use not two but three monitors and wireless as well, all without the slightest hiccup.
This article put a smile on my face. I’ve recently been looking for an as close to vanilla upstream gnome-shell distro as I could find. I’ve been running crunchbang for a while now on our servers, and have gotten bored of debian. So the only things left were Fedora and (sigh) Arch… Now I’m no stranger to arch, and have helped many times on the forums to fix peoples borked systems. But the fact that the last time I used Arch, my system borked from an upgrade, and left with no way to “roll-back” (yea, sounds stupid doesn’t it??) the offensive package (in traditional Arch style!), I quickly grabbed the Fedora ISO from the fastest mirror I could find, boarded up my windows, barred the doors (from the evil Arch monster) and sat down for a quiet night of things “just working”. KISS KISS BANG BANG
I’ve even managed to install Fedora 17 on btrfs with / and swap encrypted. OH JOY! Even though, Anaconda bugs out and can’t handle btrfs in 17.. It was quite simple to install to EXT4 and just do a post btrfs-convert.
JOYGASM!!!
PS: Arch sucks, but it’s not Arch’s fault, the decisions made by the higher authorities is what’s responsible.
@Mike
BTW: You mentioned installing xfce, yet the screenshot is of gnome-shell.. Some people may become confused..
And for anyone still using Arch I’ll share this little jem I came across the other day:
https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui
It’s a post install script for Arch, kinda like Fedora-Utils/easylife/autoplus for Fedora.
“Bridge Linux” also looks interesting..
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=bridge
@Mr. Hat
Thanks for your comments, Mr. Hat. It was just that, botched Arch upgrades, that turned a lot of us off of it. We’re free to use any distro we want at our office, and a lot of people chose Fedora over Arch if only to be more in line with our clients who are on RHEL.
Also, nice catch on my screenshot 😀 I’ll switch it out for an xfce one. Also, you’re hired 😉
Arch linux is KISS, for the developers and not for the users. If not for the rolling release most of people would have fled Arch linux a long time ago. AUR is a curse and gift for Arch. AUR is required to keep arch linux in the same place in the number of packages as the major distros, but the quality is severely lacking in AUR. You are not sure whether your app would build, when you are using the AUR. To me AUR sucks! Major Distros doesn’t need an AUR becoz they already got adequate quality apps in their main repos. I wonder why Arch users call AUR a feature.
Fedora quality and Arch linux main repos are not comparable. Fedora strives for Quality and most of the packages in fedora are reliable inspite of being cutting edge. Arch strives to push the packages before fedora and lot of times the package quality in Arch linux is questionable. One baffling thing about Arch linux is, arch *does not* have a Quality Assurance (QA) for an allegedly a major distro by the media. If you ask for quality of the packages in forums or ML , most of the mods will hunt you down and close the thread. Some times you feel the air of hostility among the mods if someone happens to criticize Arch linux. The easiesn’t excuse from the mod is ‘Arch linux is DIY distro’. So don’t complain here, and if you still continue you will be banned in a short while.
No wonder Arch Linux sucks.
Arch obviously require som sort of basic feeling and basic understaning of your own system. But if you have that you should never get a borked system. It was over four years last time I installed Arch. That was my second installtion ever of Arch and the computer was still decently new ;).