Arch Linux: a Ubuntu user's perspective

Installation

Installing +Arch Linux was honestly a little more work than I was expecting. I for some reason was under the impression that Arch LInux was a works out of the box sort of distro. I was sorely mistaken, installing Arch was a lot more like fighting balrogs; trying to get Gentoo working. Not the simple insert cd come back in 25 minutes and your done kind of install that I am accustomed to with +Ubuntu.

I had to try and try again to get grub2 to actually work, mostly because I wasn't very good at following directions... Though in my defense I believe that the installation guide for Arch could use a little clarifying.

I was somewhat suprised that after initial install Arch Linux has no network up by default. So after getting that worked out it was just a matter of installing the correct drivers for my wireless card, which I have to do in Ubuntu actually though the process much simpler, still not to big of a hassel.

After installing the desktop environment of my choice (xfce) and a desktop manager (gdm) I was a little suprised again that installing Xfce did not also install Xorg... I mean you would think that if you can't use Xfce without Xorg it would be a dependancy and the package manager would handle that for you.. oh well... After all this installing packages has been fairly straightforward and pacman seems to be a pretty decent package manager causing only minimal headaches.

The "Rolling Upgrade"

The one thing I do like about Arch that is missing from most other operating systems is this idea of the rolling upgrade. On Arch you are always just a 'pacman -Syu' away from the latest and greatest the open source software community has to offer. No need to worrry about upgrading to the latest release because you are always on the latest release.

Final Thoughts

Arch Linux is definately not for beginners, mostly just because of the relatively complex installation process and occasionally upgrading the system would break something like wireless. All and all I'd say I am happy with Arch Linux, though I am not willing to give up my first GNU/Linux love.

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