DVCS

[Gour]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:57:46 -0500
Gary Whatmore <no at spam.sp> wrote:

> This is something the Gentoo and Arch fanboys don't get. 

First of all I spent >5yrs with Gentoo before jumping to Arch and
those are really two different beasts.

With Arch I practically have zero-admin time after I did my 1st
install.


> They don't have any idea how little time a typical Ubuntu user
> spends maintaining the system and installing updates.

Moreover, I spent enough time servicing Ubuntu for new Linux users
(refugees from Windows) and upgrading (*)Ubuntu from e.g. 8.10 to
10.10 was never easy and smooth, while with Arch there is no such
thing as 'no packages for my version'.

> Another option is to turn on all automatic updates. Everything
> happens in the background. It might ask for a sudo password once in a
> week.

What if automatic update breaks something which happens? With Arch and
without automatic update I can always wait few days to be sure that
new stuff (e.g. kernel) do not bring some undesired regressions.

> I personally use CentOS for anything stable. I *Was* a huge Gentoo
> fanboy, but the compilation simply takes too much time, and something
> is constantly broken if you enable ~x86 packages. 

/me nods having experience with ~amd64

> I've also tried Arch. All the cool kids use it, BUT it doesn't automatically handle
> any configuration files in /etc and even worse, 

You can see what new config files are there (*.pacnew) and simple
merge with e.g. meld/ediff is something what I'd always prefer than
having my conf files automatically overwritten. ;)

> if you enable the "unstable" community repositories, the packages
> won't stay there long in the repository - a few days! The
> replacement policy is nuts. One of the packages was already removed
> from the server before pacman (the package manager) started
> downloading it! Arch is a pure community based distro for hardcore
> enthusiastics. It's fundamentally incompatible with stability.

You gott what you asked for. :-)

What you say does not make sense: You speak about Ubuntu's stability
and comparing it with using 'unstable' packages in Arch which means
you're comparing apples with oranges...

Unstable packages (now 'testing') are for devs & geeks, but normal
users can have very decent system by using core/extra/community
packages only without much hassle.

Sincerely,
Gour (satisfied with Arch, just offering friendly advice and not
caring much what OS people are using as long as it's Linux)

-- 

Gour  | Hlapicina, Croatia  | GPG key: CDBF17CA
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