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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

As an Arch user, I agree with some of his points regarding the community. In particular, the attitude of some Arch users annoys me as they think all other distributions are inferior.

Arch is great. It's a local minima. It's the closest thing to LFS with binaries done right. I think minimal binaries are a key thing of Arch. They get rid of a lot of complexity. By avoiding heavy patched packages, I've found Arch much easier to debug and maintain.

But IMHO NixOS/GuixSD are the future as they tackle a big set of issues most distros ignore. Namely making sysadmin transactional and reproducible. Perhaps they're not ready for prime time yet, though.

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> In particular, the attitude of some Arch users annoys me as they think all other distributions are inferior.

Well, they are... if you want rolling releases that are very up-to-date.

(That not to say there aren't valid reasons not to want a RR distro.)

> But IMHO NixOS/GuixSD are the future as they tackle a big set of issues most distros ignore. Namely making sysadmin transactional and reproducible. Perhaps they're not ready for prime time yet, though.

Agreed, but it really depends on whether NixOS/GuixSD can get enough packagers (people) to get close enough to Arch Linux in terms of "recentness"... so that people would actually start to adopt these distros.

Ideally, I'd want one of this type of distro, but in practice Arch Linux is just ridiculously more current for everything I care about. (I know that I should probably volunteer as a packager, but I just don't have the time or motiviation to do the "make-work" that most of packager life is.)

Last time I checked Nix & Guix repos were really up to date.

It's also much easier to package stuff than in Arch. So easy a user that is savvy enough to use either distribution can commit missing packages with minimal work. But they have plenty of stuff.

Admittedly, a problem they have is that it's hard for them to package things with minimal dependencies, something Arch is particularly good at, but this is being worked out with multiple package outputs.

> It's also much easier to package stuff than in Arch. So easy a user that is savvy enough to use either distribution can commit missing packages with minimal work. But they have plenty of stuff.

It's not that they don't have plenty of stuff -- it's that when I last tried they didn't have the stuff that I want.

(Incidentally, I think the Nix approach kind of retards adoption of "new things" because it lets old stuff "just keep working" despite old dependencies. I'm sure what the security implications are, but I think they might be quite severe. However, this is just an aside.)

Frankly as i grow older i am getting more and more tired of the magpie-like chase of new and shiny in tech. I want my stuff to work tomorrow like it did today, thank you very much.

Frankly if bridges were built like software/firmware is built, they would be blown up and rebuilt every 6 months. Good luck getting that past the planning department, much less the public.

That is basically why people do not update, because they worry that their workflow will be more disrupted by a changes to the tech they use daily than some potential security breach.

Debian Sid is very up to date and rolling.

Last I time I tried it... not really. Their KDE packaging was about .2 versions behind mainstream[1]. Admittedly this was about 2-3(?) years ago.

It was a terrible experience.

[1] IIRC, for various technical reasons due to having to maintain upgradability between stable versions of Debian. If you don't totally embrace RR as a distro, you are consigned to these bizarre situations where you try to be RR, but can't really because you have a secondary distro which requires release-to-release "upgradability".

> Well, they are... if you want rolling releases that are very up-to-date.

Exherbo has this in spades, but with additional configurability and multiarch support.

Well, damn, I hadn't checked in a year or two (or three), but last time I checked Exherbo was actively user-unfriendly... so I didn't bother checking again. I'm not being hyperbolic here, btw, it explicitly had a statement to the effect of: "If you're not a developer, don't even try to install Exherbo".[1]

I am a developer, but why would I want to support such a negative position?

[1] The general messaging seems to have improved. Still source-based, which I now don't tend to like. I want to save some electricity for the benefit of the world.

Things have matured significantly. No, you're not being hyperbolic -- I've been one of the developers since 2009 and we were actively hostile to users who we thought would cause more trouble than worth the effort.

Now it is at the point where things usually work well and major breakage is exceptionally rare (if ever, now). It's used in production environments, too.

#exherbo on freenode is pretty friendly and active.

I still feel straight jacketed in Nix, the entry point is just a bit too high when you spent your life playing in super mutable land. Nix-likes are the haskell of distro, one needs to learn the basic principles to be able to do anything outside `nix-env -i php`.

As a Slackware user, and also having used LFS for a while, I thought that it was Slackware that was closest to LFS, without all the trouble of having to build the base system by hand. Once installed, the system could be extended, if needed, by using software packages from different sources, just like LFS. I did try Arch a while ago and found that Slackware was easier to install than Arch. Here's an analogy: being more of a kit, Arch is an AR-15 of Linux, whereas Slackware is an AK-47: it just works (it never failed me, anyway).

I never get the reason why that gets downvoted. It's just the metaphore?!

i know i don't understand the specific differences between those guns to understand it.

(i didn't downvote because of i that. I just found it to be a poor one)

I admit that the analogy I have used may not suit everyone's taste, and I apologize, but, as always, reality trumps imagination: turns out, there exists a version of UNIX for Z80 called UZI: http://www.dougbraun.com/uzi.html.

OT: AK is more reliable than AR may not be true:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX73uXs3xGU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAneTFiz5WU

Re arch community, It really depends on which platform you communicate on. Those on the Arch IRC channels are massively elitist, but I've found that to be equally true for most other distros as well. The arch message board can be extremely terse at times, but that's intentional to improve the signal to noise ratio, much like how SlackOverflow operates. However if you chat to arch users on other forums like here, people are massively more friendly.

My point being you get good and bad sub-communities within any distro / OS.

Not sure where i first encountered it, but ever since the idea of Arch as a "humblebrag" distro has stuck with me.

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