Arch Linux – the distro that teaches you to fish

I installed Arch Linux for the first time on January 5th, 2009.  From that time till now, apart from a very brief stint with Debian for a few weeks, Arch has been my primary operating system.

I have re-installed it only once – after i wiped Debian. The rolling release system has kept my system up-to-date through these two years. yaourt and these days, clyde, help me with additional software I need from AUR.

The system so far hasn’t broken,  or has never let me down when I really needed it. I was using KDE4 till 2011 January at least, and shortly after switched to using openbox + xcompmgr as a desktop, with a disconnected set of utilities including pcmanfm, Firefox 4, gnome-terminal, picasa, mplayer, feh, leafpad and emacs.

Why I’d recommend Arch Linux for a student/technically minded user :

1. The system makes you learn about a GNU/Linux distribution and how it operates.
2. The documentation is great – its the best I have seen so far, and beats even the mighty Ubuntu wiki.
3. Its simple to install and once configured, can be left alone. Updating can be delegated to a cron job.
4. Customizing a package is easy via ABS.
5. Maintaining a package via AUR is easy because of the great packaging tools.
6. The tools are simple and get out of your way to help you get things done – no dialogs asking you to click next and provides clear and concise messages as to whats going on.
7. Package maintainers, IRC channel, forums and mailing lists are all friendly. Not in the spoon feeding way, but in the teaching you to fish way.
8. If there is broadband, then you can safely setup the system for anyone and run an automated update every month or so. It will simply *work*.
9. Features a simpler BSD style init that’s far easier to understand and maintain
10. Killer feature : New packages arrive fast – very fast.  Arch users usually get the latest version of their popular desktops a few hours after the release announcement. This is one of the reasons why Arch is one of the best OS’s to have KDE4 running on – bug fix releases arrive fast.

Why I won’t recommend Arch Linux to everyone :

1. No GUI installer.
2. Default installer doesn’t install a graphical desktop.
3. Requires reading documentation ( quality documentation, lot of it).
4. Some packages may not be available at all – you’d have to roll your own
5. Requires fiddling with configuration files
6. Requires broadband – this is a must if you want an up to date system.
7. There are no particular “versions”. If people run into issues, they cannot simply say that they are running a particular version of Arch when reporting an issue.

I haven’t stuck this long with a distribution except for Slackware. ( I like Arch because this is what Slackware should be, IMHO).

If you haven’t tried it yet, you can either start off with Chakra, which is a distro based off Arch that comes with KDE or you can simply install Arch.  Read the “The Beginner’s guide” which will walk you through the installation – it is well maintained and covers everything. It teaches you to fish.