Hacker News Reader

The thing with arch is it’s mostly not more tweaks that give you better battery, it’s not having all the crap that Ubuntu preloads running that makes that happen.

View on HN

Folks think I'm crazy for using Arch as my main dev machine. I'm not an Ubuntu hater at all (it runs my main server in the basement at home)... but it'd be awfully hard to go back to using it as my main machine.

Really? Arch is... boring. Once you've set it up, nothing happens without your permission and you can just keep developing away. Sure you have updates imposed on you, but you can delay them a bit if you dont have time right now, and its not like upgrades are indefinitely avoidable on any other OS.

Using Arch often gives me advance warning that my apps will break on users machines due to changes in libraries. I see the changes first and can add compatibility for the new library version such that it's fixed before affecting my users.

I love it as a daily driver.

Yeah, for me, it's "just right". Most detractors claim it's "bleeding edge". What? just because it's got something newer than Postgres 9.1 available?? (this was my argument against Debian/Ubuntu for a long time)

Totally agree that it's a great daily driver. It has EVERYTHING!

Totally, Arch feels snappier in the same hardware that I am surprised that my machine can hold a lot of power for development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com