One year onto an arch

Wed 16 October 2013

Arch bridge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

About one year ago, I decided to test archlinux. Now, I think I made my mind about it.

I must precise that I previously used Debian, and even previously I used ubuntu. I migrated from ubuntu to debian in 2008 because it was too automated for me. I hate when the computer make something I don't want without asking me.

The installation

It is not really complicated for people used to GNU/Linux installation. Just follow the instructions on the wiki for a standard installation. If you want a non standard installation, it is complicated (but still feasible). I recommend to make the standard installation once before thinking of a complicated one.

Note that many great stuff present in the temporary installation system (before rebooting) are not there latter. My advise is to save the .zshrc (which is cool) and to install `wifi-menu <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_Setup>`__ related stuff as soon as possible.

Every day use

Nothing special. network config is as in any unix-like OS. Just take care of the command name that are not exactly the same as in debian (e.g. dhcp-client→dhcpcd)
I installed wirelesstools because I used iwconfig, but wifi-menu is easier.
Otherwise, as I use the same desktop environnement (awesome) and the same softwares (mostly kde applications), there is no difference.
The main difference come from the AUR that is more up to date and contains more packages than the debian testing repositories (I'm made enough to use archlinux, but not to use debian unstable distribution)

Maintenance

I think package manager (pacman) is as efficient as apt-get and aptitude. Nevertheless, it is less intuitive (because less human readable).
Now I use pacmatic which is as describe, and pacaur . This way, the only AUR package I installed manually is pacaur. for the other, pacaur was (and still is) my friend.
The only thing that disturbed me was `systemd <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd>`__. Once you understand why it plays a key role, it is easy to make what you want with your computer.

The result of one year using archlinux is that it is a good distribution, adapted to my use. I would never tell an unexperimented user to install it (it often requires some knowledge on UNIX-like OS) (prefer mint for beginners), neither I would recommend it on a production whatever-internet-service server (prefer debian which is require less time consuming maintenance operations), but for my personal laptop, it is well-suited.