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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

He comments in the conclusion that he runs Arch on his main machine. It seems like I've been seeing a lot of comments like that from people around the web lately.

What's the draw of Arch over Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint, etc?

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Honestly? It's just easier 99% of the time. And I don't mean easier in the sense that you could give Arch to a linux newbie and expect it to work.

But if something breaks in Arch, I can almost certainly just open up the wiki page and fix it. Ubuntu keeps breaking stuff over and over again that I just don't know how to fix.

EDIT: Thinking about it, a lot of those issues probably also come from the fact that I usually don't reinstall my OS. With Arch is designed for, but Ubuntu/Fedora/etc. not so much.

> I usually don't reinstall my OS. With Arch is designed for, but Ubuntu/Fedora/etc. not so much.

LOL. Debian has one of the best automatic upgrading procedure long before Arch is born. RedHat/Fedora was not good at automatic upgrading between releases when an conflict happens, but it was doable with third-party Smart package manager. Now Fedora supports upgrade out of the box. I never ever reinstalled any of my Fedora or Debian distro just for upgrade.

Debian sure has, but I wasn't talking about Debian.

Fedora on the other hand just doesn't, or at least not in my typical usage. Maybe third party package managers would help in that regard, but if I'm going to babysit my distro I'd rather have something I can understand, like Arch.

Why you think you cannot understand Fedora? RPM based distributions are easy to explore. "rpm -qf /path/to/file" to get name of a package, "rpm -ql name" to get list of other files in the package, then RTFM of package.

Smart packager is not necessary anymore. Default package manager dnf is smart enough. Smart was good because it is crossplatform (deb/rpm/tgz packages and apt/yum repos were supported), with both console and graphical UI. It also provides smart changesets, like dnf does now.

There are times i wonder if everything that Gnome and Freedesktop has developed in recent years is a response to issues with Fedora, but presented as issues with the larger Linux ecosystem.

It's a great way to learn Linux.

But really, the documentation is the best of any GNU/Linux distribution, bar none. There are very few things I cannot figure out by going to the arch wiki.

This may be the best thing about Arch. Their crowd-sourced documentation model covers a lot of corner cases and unique configuration that many other distributions cathedral model documentation lack. The wiki format also helps it keep up with the rolling nature of Arch. Even the Gentoo wiki links to the Arch wiki in a lot of scenarios.

For every Fedora release, the Documentation Project prepares a new version of the System Administrator's Guide[1] and of five other high-quality manuals. These manuals are usually up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive, and since they are maintained in the DocBook format (which is very superior to wikimarkup for technical documents), they can be converted into HTML (for the version on docs.fedoraproject.org), PDF (for printing or viewing in a PDF reader) and EPUB (so I can put the guides on a e-reader and read them comfortably). The documentation is even translated in multiple languages.

[1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/25/html/System_A...

Fedora is my preferred Linux distro, but when I'm looking for a solution or how-to on setting up, say MPD or bittorrent, I inevitably end up at the arch wiki.

I personally view Arch as a "poor man's Gentoo." It's a rolling release, which is great considering the never-finished state of free software. Many projects have different release schedules, which means that stable distributions will always miss out on the newest version of X% of their packages. With Arch, those updates get pushed when they're ready, instead of pushing what works by the release deadline.

Arch also has the AUR (Arch User's Repository) which provides a lot of software that isn't available through most distributions for various reasons, such as quality, stability, maturity, patent, freedom or packaging/dependency issues. This makes customization a lot easier, at the expense of all the trust, stability, and security expected from using a distribution (I guarantee none of you actually verify the packages aren't malware when installing through AUR)

From my perspective, Arch seems a little expedient. It provides a good Desktop experience, but is not as robust as distributions based on package managers like Portage, APT, or RPM. It is a lot easier to install and set up than Gentoo though, and provides similar benefits in terms of software freshness and builds with a few different configurations - hence my assessment.

All of my packages are actually up to date, since Arch is a rolling release. Even on Xenial there are packages that are behind enough that I notice due to missing features/bug fixes.

The AUR is a far superior system than PPAs and offers far more software than I've seen "natively" available for any other distribution ever.

You hope they're up to date. If you install / depend on very much from AUR, I'd wager you're probably missing a security update or two.

AUR packages: local/caddy-full-bin 0.9.3-12, local/kakoune-git r4563.e441295-1, local/kubectl-bin 1.5.1-1, local/neofetch 2.0.2-1, local/package-query 1.8-2, local/tmuxp 1.2.2-1, local/yaourt 1.8.1-1

They're all completely up-to-date (kakaoune might be an exception because it just builds HEAD since there are no releases).

I regularly observe AUR getting packages before the equivalent PPAs and before ubuntu packages are even updated. Even for security releases.

But you're certainly right, it depends on the given package maintainer. In the rare case that updates take more than a day or two, I just pull the PKGBUILD, edit it, makepkg, pacman -U and I'm done.

On the other hand, I could list hundreds of packages that are a version or two behind in Xenial that are update to date in Arch (not even AUR). Maybe not security fixes, but sometimes important bugfixes, etc. For example, Qemu in Xenial, can't make VHDs for Azure, which is constantly a thorn in my side (qemu takes a long time to build from source, even if you disable all non-x86).

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