DVCS

Gour gour at atmarama.net
Thu Jan 20 06:51:36 PST 2011


On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:19:54 -0500
Jeff Nowakowski <jeff at dilacero.org> wrote:

> Please yourself. I quoted from the FAQ from the distribution's main 
> site. If that's wrong, then Arch has a big public relations problem.

Arch simply does not offer false promises that system will "Just
work". Still, I see the number of users has rapidly increased in last
year or so...mostly Ubuntu 'refugees'.

> You're talking about somebody who is running a nearly 3 year old
> version of Ubuntu because he had one bad upgrade experience, and is
> probably running software full of security holes. If he can't spend a
> day a year to upgrade his OS, what makes you think he wants to spend
> time on a more demanding distro?

My point is that due to rolling-release nature, distro like Archlinux
require less work in the case when one 'forgets' to update OS and has
to do 'major upgrade'. It was my experience with both SuSE and Ubuntu.

> And what happens when the kernel, as it often does, changes the way
> it handles things like devices, and expects the administrator to do
> some tweaking to handle the upgrade? What happens when you upgrade X
> and it no longer supports your video chipset? What happens when you
> upgrade something as basic as the DNS library, and it reacts badly
> with your router?

In the above cases, there is no distro which can save you from some
admin work...and the problem is that people expect such system where,
often, the only admin work is re-install. :-)

> These are real world examples. Arch is not some magic distribution
> that will make upgrade problems go away.

Sure. But upgrade in rolling-release distro is simpler than in
Ubuntu-like one.

> Yeah, I know. I also run Debian Testing, which is a "rolling
> release". I'm not some Ubuntu noob.

Heh, I could imagine you like 'bleeding edge' considering you lived
with ~x86 and 'unstable' repos. ;)

Now we may close this thread...at least, I do not have anything more
to say. :-D


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 

Gour  | Hlapicina, Croatia  | GPG key: CDBF17CA
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