Hacker News Reader

Comment by banachtarski | Hacker News Reader

Lifelong linux user.

For desktop I’ve settled on Arch and it’s been smooth sailing for over ten years. The package management is vastly superior to ubuntu/debian and most mainstream distros. As a software developer, I often need recent mainline releases of major compinents like gcc/clang and other such libraries. Other distros force me to manage these manually and tend to have bad packaging conventions.

For server, I tend to do whatever is the “default” of the cloud provider I am working with as they tend to be tested the most and get security patches the quickest.

View on HN

I use Arch also, as a desktop. I like:

  * Rolling releases which mostly doesn't break things
  * Solid package management
  * Doesn't handhold too much, while still not being too much of a pain to get a desktop going
  * Doesn't start services because you install them (Debian/Ubuntu)
  * Doesn't try and force snaps and an essentially proprietary store on you (Ubuntu)
  * Still popular enough to have momentum behind it (problems are Google-able)

I don't really like:

  * systemd. It's almost a necessary evil at this point, but not quite

I also use Alpine on my personal server. The package manager is blazing fast, and it uses OpenRC, which I prefer over systemd. I know the musl memory allocator isn't all the fast, which bothers me, but not enough to rebuild it with a different distro. busybox is also a bit bothersome sometimes (/etc/network/interfaces syntax is a bit limited, for example).

I am using Artix right now. Arch with no systemd. It has it own repos with -s6 -runit and -openrc packages, and uses the Arch repos for fallback.

It's been pretty smooth sailing just a few slight quirks you need to keep in mind. Would suggest checking it out if you get a chance.

I use Debian and feel satisfied about package management. What should I miss from Arch?

As a big debian fan who runs it on everything... apt works great, yeah, but packaging itself is a nightmare. Try to source patch one of your packages and rebuild it, and maybe distribute it internally. It’s a mess. Haven’t used Arch but e.g. APKBUILDS are heaven in comparison.

What is a mess? The build scripts? More often then not, patching a source package amounts to add the patch in debian/patches and write its name in debian/patches/series.

I don't find it terribly difficult, but maybe I am biased here, because I am a Debian Developer, so I work on Debian packages pretty often and know it well enough. It's true that packages can be very heterogeneous for many reasons.

Yeah, the heterogeneity. Having to figure out whether to use sbuild, pbuilder, cowbuilder, or that one that does it in a fakeroot, the debian wiki pages on these tools are quite dense and it’s hard to tell which info is 15 years out of date. I definitely cannot remember how to incant dh_make correctly given I only use it every 6 months. E.g., last time I wanted to patch a package debian already had quite a few patches, and I couldn’t figure out how to get the source into the debian patched state, change the code and rebuild it smoothly to test. I acknowledge that the tooling is good enough that if I used it regularly, I probably would have no problem with doing all of this in 2 minutes, but it’s nowhere near as nice as https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Patching_packages.

That said, again I love debian, its stability and high quality, and thanks to you and the volunteers who make it that way :)

Yeah, I can see that. Fortunately on many axes the situation is getting better and better, as data in https://trends.debian.net/ show. But every single developer is still free to choose whatever tools they like, so there will be always packages that do it differently.

On the other hand, there are reasons for scepticism towards proposals of forcing a uniform style. If such policies were accepted, they would have accepted years ago, so we would now be stuck with packages on SVN, much cruder tooling, etc. Back then SVN was really the future. What will be the future in ten years? We don't know, and that's the reason why we want to be sure that we'll be still free to move to it when it will arrive.

(and, BTW, of course you can change your SVN policy, but then you have to update all at once 30k+ source packages and the habits of 1k+ developers, not really easy)

Not to be meant as a rant, just an explanation for the current situation.

> That said, again I love debian, its stability and high quality, and thanks to you and the volunteers who make it that way :)

Thanks to you for your support!

The AUR is really nice. Also creating your own packages is super easy.

AUR can be used to install git version of software and configure them to your liking. For example, I run Emacs, rebuilt every month or so, that's directly from the most recent commits. Arch Linux makes it really easy to compile any package from source and configure how you would like (change gcc optimization level, compile in optional features, etc).

Pacman (the package manager) is also a lot faster and full featured than Debian. Everything just works.. better. And with the AUR, Arch Linux undoubtedly has more packages than any other distro. And the packages aren't ancient, either.

Another plus is that Arch Linux includes all development headers with the main package. In Debian you have install a special dev pack, which I think is pretty stupid.

Arch's package manager constantly loses information

Reply on news.ycombinator.com