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| Screenshot within Arch |
PS: This is my personal experience of using Arch Linux and should not be taken serious in any way.
After hearing about Arch Linux from many forums I thought to try it. First impression, it's fresh and different. You start with almost nothing and then install packages, even those built by the users of Arch itself.
First I went to the official website to download Arch minimal ISO. Then I created a live USB in my laptop and used it to boot up to the minimal Arch system.
The first thing I remembered were my early days of using Linux. Almost everything had to be configured manually
It was surprising that I had to install the open source drivers for the touch pad, the graphics card, etc. I have not done that for a long time. And I am not sure what the 600 MB Arch Iso really contained.I had to manually make Fstab entries. For a moment I thought about the dreaded Xorg configuration file, but luckily that was dynamic. A single restart after driver installs was enough to get things working.
The next challenge was installing software. For a long time Debian/Ubuntu user this is weird. You will easily notice the lack of apt-get and remember the days when you installed Linux on a computer that cannot connect to the Internet. Downloading software dependencies is a big task. I hate it. But luckily there are some alternatives to apt-get that are not available by default. (after all, what was really in that 600+ MB ISO ???). Thirty minutes later, I was able to install one utility called yaourt, then things became better. In fact it is better than ppa. You can find different repositories and install at the same time. This was a long wanted feature when I used Debian/Ubuntu.
There were some pain areas. The codecs installation was messy. I had to remove many things that I installed during this process. I wish there was some kind of meta package that could have made things simpler. Also at times, I think about Synaptics and how great it was. The closest I got was PacmanXG, which is good by the way.
So my final verdict. It is not worth promoting Arch to everyone, unless the everyone have specific use case other than normal desktop usage. like Rasberry pi. OR to try out the latest software available in the FSF world OR if you do not like upgrading whole system every now and then. For me I think, not requiring system upgrade is the best reason to use Arch. Every update is like a mini system upgrade.
To be precise, you can install whatever you need and remove anything you don't like. For example, I installed gnome desktop and removed many gnome specific applications that I don't use. Doing the same in Ubuntu is a nightmare.
Everywhere on the Internet everyone said that a rolling release is not stable and can cause many issues. In the past 6 months ,the only issue I have faced so far is Gdm. The upgrade to Gnome 3.16 messed up the login screen. Since then I have replaced it with LightDM and things are back to normal. So far the system is more stable than any version of Ubuntu that I have used.
Summary
Pros
- Configure anything. No restrictions.
- Latest versions of everything.
- No need to upgrade the whole system when a new version comes out. This is the best part that I like about the rolling release thing.
Cons
- Open source drivers not available by default.
- Software installation. Something like yaourt should be available by default.
- Cannot recommend it to someone who has no/slow internet connection. No one would waste bandwidth and resolve issues that work out of the box in many leading distributions.
What I would like to see
- Since it is a rolling release, there should be a simple inbuilt fool proof restore point creation mechanism. This will make me brave enough to do the big updates.
- A non-minimal ISO that has everything that Ubuntu has. Everything except unity ☺
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