Arch Linux – Chiselled to Perfection

I have been using GNU / Linux for about five years; regularly for a year and exclusively for about six months. Over these years I have used Mandriva, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, SLAX and one or two distros whose names I do not remember. Yet I found each of these distros lacking in something or the other. Mandriva is buggy, Fedora is slow and buggy, SLAX is unstable and openSUSE is slow (though not as buggy). Even though Ubuntu was (is) the most intuitive distro in the list there are certain things even Ubuntu lacks (!). In an attempt to offer ease of use it lacks many qualities prized by the average GNU / Linux geek. It was on one such night of frustration I discovered Arch Linux.

It would a slight misnomer to call Arch Linux a complete distribution; especially on the face of what you get after a full install. A full install entitles you to a basic kernel installation (with the required modules), bash and some ‘optional’ command line utilities like ‘make’ and ‘cc’. After that you are on your own. It does have a (very fast) package manager named ‘pacman’ and the package update process is automated (you need to type something like … say … ‘pacman -S maxima’) which is a relief. Since almost nothing is installed by default you can ensure that your installation contains only those packages you need. Even the main installation procedure involves some hand-editing of files like rc.conf. Some people may find this to be a pain; I on the other hand quite enjoyed the experience. What I like about Arch Linux that it itself does not assume anything about what you intend to use it for – Arch Linux is what you make it.

One thing I noticed about Arch Linux is that is well equipped with all the development packages (am talking about a base install). Compiling VLC on Ubuntu has always been a huge pain in the neck (censored) – you need to install loads of stuff like sqlite3-dev (apparently sqlite0-dev or sqlite3 will not do) and packages which are not there in the repositories and need to be hand-compiled (and then you have their dependencies) etc. but VLC compiled like a charm on Arch Linux.

Let me be clear – Arch Linux is not for the faint hearted or for those who do not know what nano is or how to set up alsa. I have always supported Ubuntu and still do; it is just that once you feel the need to progress beyond ’sudo apt-get’ do give Arch Linux a try. To customize your distro beyond Arch Linux you will have to create your own from scratch.