TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Arch Linux is a strange beast. It's closer to Gentoo than anything else, and even that comparison is imperfect. It's a do-it-yourself, minimalist OS that has everything I don't want in a desktop.

I'm ranting on this distro because I received a request to do so. Not just that; I get requests a lot, and I don't always get around to ranting on them. I'm ranting on Arch because this made me laugh. To wit:

You did vista 3 times for crying out loud! Hows about you give arch another chance? It has really gotten better.

By the way, your site is awesome, but you already knew that.

How could I ignore that? So, here I am having downloaded another version of Arch. I picked the "core" ISO file which weighed in at a little over 300MB. By today's standards that's pretty light. Had I known in the beginning that the size of the ISO was inversely proportionate to the amount of frustration that was coming, I probably would have just given up right then.

Feedback was swifter than I expected for a relatively fringe distro. Several folks pointed out that I might have had less trouble if I'd actually followed all the steps in order. Fair enough. Others had less constructive comments. I assure you, I don't "talk out of my ass." That would be a parlor trick that could more than likely pay me more than running this site.

It's not my fault my rants get posted on DistroWatch, either. I see it as the eqivalent of The Daily Show getting called a real news source. It's just a misunderstanding. I do these rants for my own personal amusement, nothing more. Sit back, laugh at me or yourself, and try not to take things so damned seriously.

Install:

The installer is very Slackware-esque. It assumes a lot of Linux knowledge that immediately disqualifies anyone with less than six months to a year of Linux usage. Ever compiled your own kernel? If not, return to DistroWatch and try again. Package selection is equally cryptic.

I chose the "core" and "devel" package groups and sent the installer on its way. Everyone stare in awe of the endlessly entertaining ncurses screens.

I was then given a choice of nano or vi as my text editor. You can't spell EVIL without vi. Then I was given a chance to do last-minute manual tweaking of several system files. I generally just take the defaults on other distributions, so I skipped through everything except setting the root password. This would come back to bite me later.

Once I was done with that screen something began to churn. I have no idea what all this means but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with sending launch codes to an obscure, long-forgotten nuclear bunker in the outskirts of former Soviet Russia. I'm sorry, comrades. I was just trying to compile some stuff.

I rebooted, logged in to the command line as root user and added my regular user with "adduser." I always forget which command to use here. One will add the user and set up all the proper permissions, groups, as well as a /home/ directory, and the other just adds the user. "Adduser" creates all the things you need, whereas "useradd" just adds the user. Just FYI, in case anyone else suffers from command-line dyslexia.

I then logged in as my regular user and... stared at a command prompt. Perhaps I've just been spoiled all these years by distributions that either install a graphical user environment for you or at least give you some guidance on what to do next. I was off to consult the Arch website.

I chose the Beginner's Guide and was immediately introduced to "The Arch Way™," (not to be confused with "The Right Way," "The Wrong Way" or "The Way to San Jose").

To summarize what I read, basically Arch is for advanced users. Its purpose is to give you a small, solid base with very little fluff from which you, the user, can build whatever type of system you want. If only they were around when I was in college, I wouldn't have wasted weeks trying to get Gentoo running. As an adult with time at a premium, I am not their target audience anymore.

However, I am a competent Linux user so with an uncharacteristic bit of spare time I decided to try and build a system with Arch. Everyone stand back, I'm going to use computer science.

I skipped ahead in the tutorial to the "Installing X and Alsa" section and tried installing alsa-utils using pacman, the Arch package manager. Yes, *another* package manager. What does it do better than apt or yum? I have no idea. I'm sure there's some very well-reasoned article about it somewhere. Needless to say, running pacman right off the bat didn't work.

I figured I'd missed a step somewhere so I backtracked. Was there a pacman equivalent of "apt-get update"? There was, but I had to do some more text file editing first to set up my repositories. Have I mentioned how much I'm *not* into this sort of thing anymore?

I followed all the directions to the letter, ran "pacman -Syu" and expected a magical update. Instead I got two screens worth of "Transient resolver failure." I'm beginning to remember why I hadn't ranted on a version of this for five years.

I Googled that particular error. Some folks suggested checking my network. It was up, but I had no connection to anything. I looked closer at my /etc/rc.conf and found that Arch had inserted some garbage IP address into it during the installation. I changed it to DHCP and rebooted.

Suddenly pacman worked. There was a point in the install where I could have edited the rc.conf. I didn't think to do it because I expected Arch to use dhcp as default, rather than some junk value. I was wrong.

My choices of local mirrors in North America were apparently a bad idea, because the update process took the better part of an hour to complete. This left me with ample time to embellish the rant with colorful metaphors.

Arch is quickly becoming my least favorite distribution of all time. Even Slackware (which also targets advanced Linux users) offers *some* automation of the mundane tasks.

Arch belongs to the class of Linux distributions like Gentoo and Linux From Scratch, for people who not only have infinite free time on their hands, but the will and desire to customize every minute detail of their system so they can squeak out another millisecond of performance. I am NOT one of those people.

After the update was complete I continued on with the alsa/X install. Any time I had to download something it meant waiting for the mirrors to resolve it. Yes, I read about the tool that you can use to rank and order your mirrors by relative speed (/usr/bin/rankmirrors). I just skipped that step and didn't want to have to reinstall to get back my original list of mirrors.

I followed through the tutorial installing fonts, configuring xorg, and installing my desktop. I chose LXDE because it was small, simple, and I didn't want to spent another day downloading something like Gnome considering I planned on spending all of half an hour on it before I removed the harddrive, ran it through the most powerful electromagnet I could find and wrote random ones and zeroes to the drive in compliance with DoD standards. Have I mentioned I don't like Arch?

Finally, after several hours of downloading and hand tweaking I had a system that was marginally worse than what I can get in about 30 seconds by booting Damn Small Linux. Wow, what an accomplishment! I'm too tired to make a joke here. I'll be in my trailer.

Software Selection:

Considering the default "core" install comes with about the same stuff as a Debian net-install (which is to say, the base command-line system and nothing more) there's really not much to say in this section. Pacman, from what I've used of it, is no better or worse than apt-get, portage, or yum. I'm still not sold on why it is necessary.

Provided it's in the Arch repositories or you're comfortable compiling it yourself, you can put pretty much have as much or as little software as you want. This is really no different from a third-party perspective than a Debian net-install, and their repositories are immense. Given the choice, I'd take Debian every time.

Conclusion:

Had it not been for the glowing request I received, I would have given up on Arch at the first command prompt. Were this an evening sitcom or after-school special I'd probably have some meaningful music playing in the background and tell you that despite my difficulties it was all worth it.

Sorry, it wasn't. I'm not what you would call a "hot-rodder" with my operating system. I want it to work out of the box (or close enough) and not get in my way. Arch very much gets in my way at every concievable step and seems to delight in it, like an overzealous puppy.

If you are a hot-rodder, ignore anything above this line. You'll love it. Go download it now as though your very life depended on it. Just be sure and step out into the sun once in a while. It's good for you.

It's clear that some people out there spent a lot of time and effort to build Arch, and they enjoy it. Good for them. I however will return to the relative ease of my "bloated" distributions and newfangled graphical installers and see if I can somehow regain the last few hours of my life.

Compared to the last version of Arch I looked at, the tools and underlying OS have come a long way. Unfortunately they're going in a completely different direction than I want to go, so I don't see myself ever using Arch again unless someone does something very persuasive, probably involving hookers. Or funnel cake. Mmmm.. funnel cake.