Comment by crypt1d | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crypt1d | Hacker News Reader

Surprised to see a tutorial on Arch linux on front page.

As a sys admin, I appreciate the effort to tune everything to your needs, and Arch has its place there for sure. As a user, I just want things to work. So I usually stay away from tweak-everything-you-can distros. So now on one hand you have the distros that do pretty much everything for you (ubuntu style), and on the other you have to do the tweaking for yourself(arch, gentoo, slackware, etc). I, for one, would prefer some middle ground - eg, a system being able to predict the most optimal setup for my box, but also allow me to tweak it should I prefer something different. RHEL/CentOS seems to be slowly getting this, and I enjoy its tools quite a lot (tuned daemon for kernel params optimization, kickstart for package customizations, etc.)

I use arch for few years already and I've found out that actually one does not need to make any tweaks - in 99% of cases, just install the package you want and it just works. The only thing I've replaced is font rendering pipeline -- I use the outstandingly beautiful bohoomil's repository[0].

And that's it, everything else is right there.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality#Custom_repos...

I recently had to reinstall my arch and was pleased to find this repo. It is much easier than installing everything from AUR and trying to keep it consistent. And my fonts look even better now.

What you described is basically slackware. If you install the whole image (roughly 6 gb) you get a working desktop machine that's easy to keep up to date (just run slackpkg update once in a while). Yet when it comes to tweaking, it's easy, because everything is a shell script or text file, no binary blobs of weird file formats. It actually reminds me a lot of FreeBSD.

Idk, 6gb seems excessive. I'd prefer a small footprint system (eg, my centos VM images take 1GB after installation), and to do the tweaking during installation.

I thought so too, but then I reminded myself that my laptop has a 256 gb solid state drive. 6 gb for a fully loaded system is pretty small in comparison.

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