Arch Linux 2009.08 Released With New Features

[HaaTa]

A neat little site that shows how efficient Arch's rolling release is:

http://oswatershed.org/

AUR makes trying out the latest open-source ati/radeonhd drives very easy.

[BlackStar]

I love Arch. It's not for people who don't RTFM, but pacman and the AUR are a true goldmine. Pacman is lightning-fast and makes it tremendously easy to create and share custom packages or modify existing ones.

Rolling releases are a double-edged sword. You *will* encounter breaking changes sooner or later, but fortunately it's easy to rollback and pin a package. However, you'll have to be more careful upgrading than with your run-of-the-mill Ubuntu installation:*it's a good idea to visit the forums prior to 'pacman -Syu' and hold back specific packages if there are known problems.

Even so, the wiki and the community are very active and will typically find workarounds to any problems you might encounter within hours.

Finally, Arch makes it very easy to customize its init scripts and general configuration (would you really feel comfortable doing that with, say, Ubuntu?) If something breaks and you can't boot anymore, you have everything you need to fix the issue at a single location. Nice!

A great rolling distro for sure. If distrowatch is any measure, Arch has been consistently around the 9-10th most popular distro for the last year, while Gentoo has been slowly slipping below the 20th place (22, currently).

[Zhick]

They don't even offer real installation ISOs anymore (not enough developers to do it, and there's not even an installer.)

Well, there's no real point in offering a installation-cd as you can install Gentoo with any liveCD (it's even the recommended way). Also not having an installer is exactly the point of Gentoo.
Still I agree on this:

Is it just me, or does Arch win (slowly but surely) over Gentoo, which seems to be dying as time passes on.

I'm myself very intrigued by Arch... After > 1 year of Gentoo you get tired of compiling everything yourself and having to sort out all kinds of blocking packages etc. I'll probably stay with Gentoo on my desktop though as it makes changing between fglrx (9.3) and radeon relatively simple (it's still a pain in the ass, but afaik Arch doesn't even have X Server 1.5 in it's repos anymore, which is necessary to do this), and since I've been playing quite a bit in the recent past this is important to me. But if I should ever be able to get together the money to get myself a notebook I'll most probably install Arch on it.

[MuPuF]

Yeah! Nice to see Arch is getting popular and gets the attention of Michael !

[Darkfire Fox]

I've used Ubuntu since almost exclusively since 7.10 Gutsy, but I decided to give Arch Linux a try about 5 weeks ago.

I had almost zero experience working with line commands (except when Ubuntu occasionally hiccuped), so I was sweating bullets when I installed it on a new partition and configured it to give me a fully functional KDE desktop. But, by simply following the directions given in the wiki, I encountered no major problems setting it up.

Ubuntu is still my primary distro, but I'm really starting to like Arch Linux. The rolling-release model is its primary attraction, and in some ways it just works better than Ubuntu does. Especially for non-Gnome desktop environments.

I can't say if or when I'll make a full transition, but Arch is definitely growing on me.

[RealNC]

Is it just me, or does Arch win (slowly but surely) over Gentoo, which seems to be dying as time passes on. They don't even offer real installation ISOs anymore (not enough developers to do it, and there's not even an installer.)

[hax0r]

Most useful GNU/Linux ATM, and one that sucks the least, it rocks. Hats off to the KISS principle and optimized pacman.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Arch Linux 2009.08 Released With New Features

The developers behind Arch Linux have announced the release of Arch Linux 2009.08. This ISO for the rolling Arch Linux distribution contains an updated snapshot of Arch's core, which includes the Linux 2.6.30 kernel and many other key package updates...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzQ0NQ