I don't remember where I've seen the statement, perhaps on the forums. It wasn't a secret though. I've seen it a few times.
Although its not explicitly stated that Arch Linux is for developers, the decisions that the developers make for Arch Linux (like moving to systemd, merging the bin folders, etc) are not up for public vote. You can politely discuss ideas and the developers may even consider them but they have the final word. BTW several years ago Dusty Philips (a former? Arch developer) wrote a short article Arch Is Not a Democracy
No, probably not unique. I was just trying to backup new2security's statement of "You realize Archlinux was made by the devs for the devs only?". Arch Linux is what it is.
hi As an example, i've tried Arch in 2007, after a recommendation of a friend working in critical environment industry. With a short experience in hands with Mandriva, THE DISTRO in France in the 2000's, short and limited, if we consider the easy install of Mandriva as summarized by Mrk www.dedoimedo.com/.../install_mandriva.html I've done the install with no guide before, only boot the CD and avanti... My first impression was "what this f.....g prehistoric s...t!" For an user who has never experimented a command line installer, Arch installation is hard and is not at all for beginners or from Windows to Linux switchers... And beginners really need a pacman -Syu command to upgrade their skill and experience before... Yes of course, most Arch users are fans of pacman As pointed out by the good posts of amarildojr, the Arch beginner's guide is not for beginners at all, but for intermediate users, as also said by famous geeks site like Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5680453/build...tion-and-learn-all-about-linux-in-the-process I needed two try, this does not mean i am an idiot, and those who can success for the first try are not necessarily genius. This is pure snobism. All linux users do not need Fu-rch, this does not mean it is unnecessary for many others. The work of other people must be respected, even if not required for ourself. Especially if this work is for the benefit of any real beginner who wishes to try Arch. And i can also understand that the Arch devs and elite community is not driven by the Bible law "be fruitful and multiply". Good things have been said about Arch, and i can add the custom criteria about this dsitribution as you can only set up what you need or want. I remember an article from the Arch team, and making the install easier was not a priority for the devs http://www.osnews.com/story/22692/Arch_Linux_Team Alternatives install listed on my previous post https://github.com/helmuthdu/aui and https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/archboot Edited links
I like it very much. I find it superior to any other package manager. apt, for example, can't "restore" some packages after you mess with them. I messed up flightgear one day at Debian, and I thought it would get to it's default state after I re-installed it. Mere mistake. You're absolutely correct. I needed 5 tries at virtualbox and 2 at the real deal hehehe. It's optional. So is Arch
That's pretty impressive. I would never attempt an install without the Beginner's Guide. We all have our own preferences, whether it's following the guide, using Fu-rch, or an Arch derivative. The nice thing about Linux is that there are plenty of choices to suit everyone's personal tastes. I spent about a month playing in Virtualbox before attempting an install on my real machine. That helped a lot, but I still encountered a few issues that, thanks to the excellent ArchWiki, weren't too hard to fix. Another big help for me was that I read The Linux Command Line book before jumping into the Linux world. I also picked up How Linux Works, but haven't started it yet. I decided to take a tech book break and read Crime and Punishment first.
@WSFuser - thanks for the link. Arch isn't really unique, I believe Ubuntu devs decide what new feature the next version will have etc. But in spite of it Ubuntu was made by devs for users. I think there's a difference in that statement.
ArchWiki is a great source of information no matter what Linux distro you use. It seems to pop up often when I'm searching for a solution to a particular problem, and, more often than not, it helped me. So, hats off to them for providing that great resource. Later...
I had not tried Arch for several years. Back then I installed it in Virtualbox, and I remember that it wasn't very easy Now I've tried it again with Fu-rch and it was quite comfortable It's running well so far, nevertheless I ran into some problems. For example, I looked for a GUI for pacman and chose pamac from AUR (which I'm using in Manjaro - also running in Virtualbox). There are 2 packages: pamac and pamac-aur. The first one wouldn't install because of wrong dependencies, the second one finally installed after a while. Then I installed Google Chrome which comes as a .deb package also from AUR. It took some time until it was successfully installed. Now every time I start Chrome, Arch crashes reproducibly I had seen that also in Manjaro (also based on Arch) but only when I started Chrome the first time - all subsequent Chrome starts succeeded without problems. This may be related to Virtualbox. However, I've installed many Linux distros in VB and this is the first occurrence that a "simple" application crashes the whole OS ... Very strange!
What do you mean by Arch crashes? Does X.org crash, are you getting kernel panics, or something else? Also do the crashes happen if you use Chromium from the main repos? Alternatively try the beta or dev versions of Google Chrome.
I don't mind using the console if appropriate. Nevertheless a decent GUI for the package manager should be a matter of course nowadays. Call me spoiled and lazy if you want
The complete VM crashed. I could not find anything in the log files. I've just tried it again, and this time the VM didn't crash but Arch froze. I had to close the VM. I tried it also with Chromium. Arch froze again.
Did you follow the Arch wiki for installing as a guest?: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Virtualbox#Installation_steps_for_Arch_Linux_guests Also which environment/GUI are you using for your Arch Linux guest?
hi yes certainly due to vb, especially cpu settings. Then try to assign 1 instead of 4 or 2 cpu cores in the settings. Anyway VMs are not always the ideal way for experimenting operating systems, nothing can replace a full and live install...with or without fu-rch...
I wouldn't call you lazy, because I too like GUI driven package managers Synaptic for example is a really good one. But on Arch they're really crappy, so I prefer the Terminal.
Sorry for the late reply. Was out of town/busy with other things. Anyway, virtualbox-guest-modules was/is installed, and I'm using Cinnamon. I've just performed an update with sudo pacman -Syu and now the VM doesn't crash anymore.
Hello All As Jeremy Bicha once said... I'm de-lurking to just say that Manjaro Linux has a lot going for it. Simple installation (provided you are OK about giving it the whole hard drive) and gives you an Arch installation with a profanity delay (they 'quarantine' Arch packages for a couple of weeks before they arrive in Manjaro Stable). I was able to evaluate a fully functional Gnome 3.12 UI using Manjaro with the (Manjaro) Unstable repository selected. Helpful forums.
The only advantage of using Manjaro over Arch is the install process. Advantages of Arch Linux: 10x bigger community. Easy to get help even for very specific problems, since Arch is for intermediate to expert users. You won't get people asking you to do totally unrelated things to solve your problems like on beginner distro forums. Very active subreddit, G+ community and IRC channel. Better security, since Arch repos are really bleeding edge and maintained by dozens of maintainers. If some package gets a security patch upstream you'll get it right away. On Ubuntu security patches will get backported. Manjaro repos are maintained by a single guy and delayed for about a month compared to Arch. You can't expect to get updates for certain packages to get passed through more quickly if there is a security problem. So you'll be left vulnarable for about a month. Arch forces you to learn the distro and how to maintain it. If you can set something up you know the basics of how to maintain it. You'll be exposed to all the Arch specific tools like pacdiff, which you'll need to maintain anything that is based on Arch. I bet you money that most Manjaro users never heared of pacdiff and what pacsave and pacnew files are and why you'll sooner or later run into problems if you ignore them. It doesn't come with a wrapper for the Arch User Repo, which really is a plus. If you want to use one you'll at least have to use the AUR the proper way one time with makepkg and learn about the package management. You'll need that knowledge anyway someday. More to this here:http://jasonwryan.com/blog/2013/04/09/helpers/ More bleeding edge. If you need the newest feature in the kernel for radeon power management you'll get it first. It's not a downstream distro. Anything that has to follow what upstream does like what Ubuntu is to Mint or Arch Linux is to Manjaro is at a disadvantage. Downstream constantly has to adapt to what the base distro does and can't influence any changes on their own. That leads to more and more fragmentation between the base distro and the spinoff. Manjaro for example already doesn't use the same version of the package manager as Arch Linux does, because they had to fork it after Arch Linux dropped some features that Manjaro needed. Arch Linux is fast moving which makes it very hard for anything to keep up. The nature of rolling release requires manual interventions from time to time (about once a year) if the changes in the system are siginifcant. I remember Arch Bang (another Arch Spinoff) users getting completely screwed when Arch Linx moved some symlinks for glibc. If you use Arch Linux you'll follow the "Annoncments" RSS feed or better subscribe to the arch-dev-public mailing list. You'll know about changes well in advance and how to manage them. If you are using "Arch made easy" you might think you're immune to this. Nope you're not. The installation is a lot more flexible and not tied to a specific way of doing things through some step by step installer. If you know what you are doing you can install proper Arch as fast as any spinoff with some complex installer that is more likely to have bugs due to its complexity. Advantages of Manjaro: Installation doesn't require any effort. It's not a real advantage if you look at it differently. Here is a good introduction to what you need to know to use Arch. Arch generally never breaks unless you break it. I never had a problem in the past 2 years. In the first 3-5 months of using it I screwed something up sometimes, because I did stupid things. It is tempting to try new and experimental things with Arch. Just don't treat your installation like a sandbox. It's really hard for most people to admit that the reason why they have problems is, because they don't know enough to use the distro. It's always easier blaming personal failure on the distro. http://www.reddit.com/r/LinuxActionShow/comments/1fccny/arch_linux_survival_guide/
I personally would add the Manjaro 'curation' of packages for a few weeks (Arch -> Manjaro Unstable -> Manjaro Testing -> Manjaro Stable). Plus their forums. But I'm not arguing with your basic premise. Of course, the Arch Wiki and Forum posts are available to the whole InterWeb, and very useful they have been on occasion as well for those of us well downstream. Basically: I was able to get a Gnome 3.12 installation running in half an hour (Install Gnome flavour of Manjaro, change repositories to unstable, update) as I needed to evaluate Gnome 3.12 against Gnome 3.10 (Gnome Ubuntu) and Gnome 3.8 (RHEL Beta). For that I am grateful. I shall go back to sleep now...
hi Evolution seems based on the Antergos installer. Antergos is the ex Cinnarch, renamed and designed to be more close to Arch than Manjaro http://antergos.com/ http://worldofgnome.org/antergos-vs-manjaro-gnome-editions/ More Arch based distro, "there is for drinking and to eating" as we use to say in my place (even pentest distros) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_based_distributions_(active) No time to add more lines, but Security in Arch is with no doubt a plus. rgds
Compared to what? And why? Because Arch always uses bleeding-edge packages? They are not necessarily the best, most stable and most secure ones. Don't get me wrong: I like Arch. I've been running it for some time in a Virtualbox VM and after some initial problems (which might have been due to Virtualbox itself) it's running very well. Two days ago I removed Cinnamon and replaced it with KDE without any problems. And I really like the idea of a rolling release. However, there are other aspects if it comes to security. Does Arch use, e.g., compiler hardening as Ubuntu does? Or why doesn't Arch support AppArmor, SELinux, Tomoyo, and other MAC systems? Support for them was removed in kernel 3.14 on the ground that the respective userspace tools are not supported by Arch, either. Now, I'm not saying that a Linux desktop system without MAC is insecure. Nevertheless, AppArmor, SELinux and the likes have been integral parts of the Linux kernel for years and are undoubtely a valuable security layer - considering this, it's rather strange that a distro where "security ... is with no doubt a plus" drops their support completely (unless you compile the kernel yourself). On the other hand it's interesting that an up-to-date Grsecurity enhanced kernel is available for Arch (although PaX is obviously not yet ready for usage). Bottom line: Arch is good but implying that the security it offers is better than in other distros is questionable, IMHO.
No word yet on whether TOMOYO will be coming back to the default kernel. The ironic thing for me is that the unsupported userspace tool was flagged for update in the AUR very soon after the kernel change and is how I learned why TOMOYO was broken. I pay pretty close attention to pacman's messages during upgrades and didn't see any warning, but it is possible I overlooked one. It's nice that thestinger added the grsecurity kernel / userspace tools, however from the little playing around with it I've done so far I still prefer TOMOYO. According to the grsecurity wiki, policy inheritance has not been implemented for socket policies so I have yet to figure out how to set up a network default-deny policy like I have with TOMOYO. Maybe with more time I'll get something I like. The upside is that the change forced me to learn how to compile the kernel.
