Hello, May be a quick history of my time on Linux. Originally I started out on slackware, mainly because of slackware containing speakup on its standard install CDs. Slackware gave a good base system and I got to like the way it did things. However slackware has got some problems, dependency checking is very weak, its not one of the distros commonly targeted by software developers so you sometimes have extra work to install some third party software and it lacked gnome. I had a bit of a look around trying a number of distros, ubuntu, gentoo and finally settling down with GRML (essentially debian with a few extra packages). GRML is very good as a LiveCD but it can become a bit much to maintain (its based on debian unstable, you have other packages from the GRML repository which can lead to conflicts, etc). Possibly if debian had more accessible install options I would say debian is very good (NOTE: my comment on accessible install relates to recommending it to those who may not have a hardware synthesiser or Braille display, the espeakup enabled disc Samuel made didn't seem to have the volume raised on my computer and I couldn't find a volume controll app to raise it). Now for ArchLinux, they have many reasons on their wiki and a description of how Arch compares to other distributions. May be its my use of slackware and debian which makes ArchLinux nice to me. Things I like about it include, technical simplicity (its possible to make the package manager in Arch have a preferred order of repositories but simple to specify a package from a specific repository should you want that) and the flexibility it offers (one thing though in this bit I am unsure whether I like or not is that unlike debian it puts the whole of a software package in one package, eg. Arch only has a brltty package including development headers, bindings, etc where as debian puts each part of brltty in separate packages). Although gentoo may offer greater flexibility in how the packages are compiled I personally found very little gain in that compared to the time spent for it compiling the packages (NOTE: I am talking for desktop/laptop systems, normally compiling on their own processors). Michael Whapples On 03/14/2010 05:26 AM, trev.saunders at gmail.com wrote: > Hi, > > SO my current view on distros is the following. I have two general use cases. > Case 1: > This is mostly servers, but also personal machines for other people and such where I want to do as little maintanance as posible. I also want a stable basic system that general is fairly small. FOr these system I use debian either stable or testing depending on exact needs. > > case 2: > System which will be heavily customized to fit my exact needs. For these systems I care about how things are configured, and am willing to put energy into configuring them. For these machines I run gentoo, accept my laptop which will become a gentoo box soon. > > From what I saw on the arch wiki it looks like arch is somewhere between these two. It looks like debian meets my need for a system I can setup and basically let run with the occasional update better with far less effort. It looks like arch's use of binary packages will make it not customizeable enough for the machines I care about. > > An example of a system I want to setup and just let run is the mail openvz container on my server I want to set it up and just let it run. Debian stable does a good job here it's fairly secure and I trust it to run without my intervention, and only gets updated every couple months. On that system I can deal with dependancies pulling x libs etc. > > On the other hand the hypervizer of that server runs gentoo, because there having x libs etc hauled in is far less aceptable because of security etc. THis makes gentoo's use flags which alow me to control dependancies are very useful. > > So I'm curious what people like about arch especially over gentoo? > > Trev >
