Arch linux

Explain Arch linux to a lifelong Ubuntu user.

What are the advantages? What's different?

Is Arch better or worse for security?

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help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
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Arch's 'package' repository is AUR, which is the Persian Bazaar of repositories.

>lifelong Ubuntu user
Are you 12 years old?

Arch is a distro for hipsters. It provides newer packages but it's an unstable mess. It also comes with less bloat, but that's basically every modern distro as compared to Windows or OS X. There is literally no reason to use anything except Debian, Fedora, or a distro based on one of the two.

There is no reason to use Arch unless you're just wanting a baptism by fire on how Linux works.

>There is literally no reason to use anything except Debian, Fedora, or a distro based on one of the two.
I can think of two reasons, shitty package managers, and shitty release cycles. You shouldn't present your opinions as absolutes, it only makes you look stupid.

It depends what your goal is.
If you just want to get shit done stick to Ubuntu or Fedora.
If you want to learn more about the design decisions of linux then arch will give you just it's bare bones.

Not him but the package managers are fine and the release cycles are what you'd expect for stable. Don't like it, go bleeding edge.

Someone post that image, quick. The one with the pool.

See? There are different opinions about everything. You're ok, user, can eat poop.

Arch is best if you want to heavily customize your distro. It's only as secure as you make it.

here you go f󠁒a󠁒m

Newer packages.
No ppa's needed.
No 'requires cmake>version-you-got' errors using github clones, because everythings in the aur anyway.
Nice if you like ricing - tweaked conf files are checksumed and not overwritten. But pacman tells you a .pacnew (the updated conf) is installed alongside your tweaked version. It's up to you to merge in the important parts. Not really a pain if you use something like meld, or don't tweak many .confs.
Pain in the ass to install, but a rolling release.
You'll probably learn a bit about linux, if you haven't installed arch or maybe gentoo before.
Any de I've tried on Arch is really nice out of the box.

every rolling release users are people who think it's stable enough for their uses and still didn't get a single major bug

...but a bug will definetly occur and they will go back to long support realese system

if you need something more up-to-date upgrade this thing and not your whole system

>Is Arch better or worse for security?
Out of the box it's worse. Ubuntu uses AppArmor by default, and most of its binaries are compiled with stack protection, as position independent executables, and with some kind of RELRO. Arch doesn't.

>it's an unstable mess.
Ancient, tired meme. I used Arch for years, and it was quite stable.

No, no, no. Morons repeat this about Arch every time there's a thread about it. Arch will not "teach you how Linux works." It will teach you how Arch works.

If someone wants to learn how Linux works, they should build LFS (SysV and systemd versions), then try Buildroot (uclibc) or Sabotage (musl) to see what a non-glibc Linux is like.

>Fedora
Is it a rolling distro?

What is this? Nigger Twitter?

This

Arch works for daily use. You realize that the stable repo it's quite stable, the bleeding edge repos are just for developers and there are no chance that anyone use that by mistake.

Why would you need explaining? I'm shure you've read the differences at least a hundred times by now. Maybe you should just accept people might have different needs and tastes. I use Arch since I happen to like just installing tools when I need them and the AUR. But honestly, you can make almost all distro's work for you if you wanted. It's not that relevent even.

No but it is pretty much as up to date as arch is most of the time.

Arch is a distro for either people who want to feel cool and elitist because they "built their os from scratch" or people who actually think that arch is the only way they could get a customized desktop and the latest packages. It's really terrible and has never been very secure (it took them years just to implement package signing) and the aur is just a bunch of scripts that run make for you.

>Ancient, tired meme. I used Arch for years, and it was quite stable.
Depends what you are running, I've tried GNOME and KDE plasma with wayland which was an unstable mess.
XFCE+i3 on Xorg has been rock solid though.

No its an emu forum for edgy emus

This kind of.
t. Arch user

at least the wiki is good, even though you can reference it without using arch at all.
I am thinking of switching else currently.

Does Fedora have GCC 7.1 out of the box?

If you do it right, it just werks.

Thanks senpai. Polite sage.

pretty much the same, but with pacman, rolling releases, and aur. ubuntu has some graphical installer like windows but arch you have to use the command line, but it's pretty simple. was a bit of a pain to install with fde because the documentation is actually wrong on the init parameters, so you have to google some shit and you realize that instead of just using the parameter to name the new mount like the doc says it can do, which doesn't even work, you have to set the param to the uuid of the drive concatenated with the default prefix.

Aur is from the gods , you can find anything under the moon and sun. Keep using bobontu where you have to ad ppas.

Ubuntu:
>install base
>spend forever stripping out the crap I don't want
>install a trillion PPA's to get the stuff I want because ubuntu has an old version missing a feature I want of something
>forever be hunting PPA's for shit I want

Arch:
>install base
>install the set of packages I know I want
>anytime I need literally anything I just yaourt -Ss and it's either there or not there
>and most stuff is in the official repos anyway

I also find that ubuntu likes to ship non-standard/non-vanilla/non-upstream configs pre-packaged, which I really dislike because it just puts in a layer of confusion when I'm reading upstream docs.

Also, for security, it's basically the same. Whenever a new CVE is published, generally it's either:

>everyone is vulnerable
>everyone patches in about the same time period

or

>only certain old versions are impacted
>Arch is not because they have the latest upstream

Look for Fedora Rawhide. It's the rolling release version of Fedora.

What bout security compared to Ubuntu and derivatives? Is Arch better?

>Ubuntu:
>install base
>spend forever stripping out the crap I don't want
help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

It just works

I use Debian.

>No gentoo

The PPA thing still applies to Debian tho, if I remember correctly. (^.^)
Perhaps even worse since Debian is a bit more conservative in what packages it takes into the main repository.

Debian has experimental repo, look it up.

funny thing
I am less worried about running arch as my system
than ubuntu or fedora when that huge letter jump is coming, it often fucked up my system in some way

>yaourt

does any distro out there have anything close to the AUR? I really hate PPAs

not him
but I love how aspies who know very little are triggered by popular and great yaourt because they dont really understand some table on a wikipage..

I tried to switch to pacaur, its shit that makes you do separate search for AUR and separate for repos, theres no interactive choice of search result and it cant hold candle to how informative yaourt update is or how it shows latest comments under packages so some quick fixes are easily spotted right there

and the worst thing about pacaur that when you try to explain the shortcoming to the author, he just says nope and thats it.

yaourt is the best

one word: Aura

benefits over yaourt or pacaur?

it has all of Pacman's options, with a seperate AUR option
just alias pacman for aura, and you have pacman with AUR on top
way more convenient

If you want to easily install newest gpu drivers and want to install new software/new versions and do it very easily and have access to more packages, then Arch is far better than ubuntu.
With ubuntu you always have to hunt for ppa's.

>Blindly trusting a pkgbuild
Wew lad

type screenfetch
if packages are more than 2000
you know

The main difference is that everything's really up to date. GCC on my desktop is 7.1.1. GCC on my Debian Sid VM is 6.3.0. I asked my friend who's on Ubuntu 16.04 and he said that his GCC was 5.4.0. Obviously, this means you'll run into upstream package issues occasionally. Virtual Machine Manager is just totally unusable for me right now, for example. Having bleeding edge packages is nice for things like GCC and Wine because newer is generally better.

Arch is also rolling release, so everything's constantly changing. As long as you don't have some workflow that requires a very specific set of tools that should never change, this is probably a good thing. One downside is that if you don't update for 3 months, things can break; I have and old Arch iso and when I tried to install it on a VM after 4 months, pacman had a lot of weird issues that I was too lazy to resolve.

Another difference is that the packages on Arch tend to be relatively unaltered. Some distros, like Debian, add patches to improve the user experience or add vulnerabilities to OpenSSL. It's not an advantage or disadvantage; just preference.

As far as security goes, it's probably not much worse than any other distro. Security is mostly about how you actually configure and manage your system. The Debian team appears to do security analyses on some of their packages and extensive testing, but if they catch vulnerabilities, the patches will make their way to Arch anyway. The Arch team is migrating to using a hardening wrapper to compile all their applications, which should improve security. If you really want security though, you should install Hardened Gentoo.

>Arch will not "teach you how Linux works." It will teach you how Arch works.
this, most archfags probably never even read the linux source code.

Any distro that has systemd is worse for security

What distro should somebody use if he wants to switch to Linux and thinks he is fairly good with computers? Also doesn't want bloat

You all make it look like arch doesn't work out of the box once you install a DE/WM after the initial spoonfed setup

Take your job, any hope of having friends, and sacrifice them all in the name of having 20 spare hours per day to fix shit that every other distro hasn't seen for 15 years. Pretend that you notice a difference in speed, spend 4 of your new 20 hours per day offhandedly mentioning you use Arch to people who don't give a fuck. And what was all this for, what did you give it away to do? You gave it all away for nothing to fit in with a bunch of other losers on IRC, who all also hate you because they think you're taking away from their perceived street cred and will sabotage everything you say.

if I wanted to do that I would use gentoo

Keywords:
>and thinks

So you haven't even used linux yet, and you're talking about "bloat". This is the kind of circular logic meme bullshit that trying to get new people on autism distros causes. These distros are not distros, they are technological extensions of special snowflakeism. The sooner you see this, the sooner you can use something that respects your time.

funny thing
once you go arch its the other ditros that you described that that feel like that
the lack of AUR is the issue
people thing I use Arch because of some high hacker skill
when all I do is read some guides and then just use the amazing AUR like a total noob

I used linux on my raspberry pi, compiled some stuff, but never really dived to deep. So I don't know how much I have to know honestly.

Please stop with the quantum "recommendation" bullshit. We all know that you will stop recommending me to use arch if I went and actually started the download. Then it would be "oh arch probably isn't for you".

Autism distros aren't for anybody because what you are trying to say here is that you are capable of out thinking and out performing your 1 GHZ+ processor. This might have been valid in the early 90s but it's almost 30 years later and a C2D is $30 now. This also isn't "bloat", it's progress, just like how you see 70s turds unironically saying "all you need" is a 286 and thinking that their unix philosophy has any place in modern system design.

You know exactly what you're doing - you're "recommending" it so that you get attention, and you also hope that newbies crash and burn because you think that when they do this, they think you're smart or something. They think you're a total fucking loser and then they spend at least 5 years saying "I tried out linux and it's for losers", so linux suffers from this. We need to speed up this process and move all the hipsters to BSD.

I seriously have less issues with arch after the initial install than Debian or its forks.

Its true that arch install can be tricky for somebody who doesnt have another device to google answers from. But it is not outdated by any means, maybe you are one of the retards promoting Ubuntu with the millions of Amazon bloatware preinstalled.

So like pacaur basically

not him, but...

>somebody who doesnt have another device to google answers from
The Arch installer has either Elinks or W3M installed by default. I forget which it is.

>if I went and actually started the download. Then it would be "oh arch probably isn't for you"
No, I'd probably tell you that you should probably be on OSX if you are afraid of change and want your distro to babby you through everything.

>what you are trying to say here is that you are capable of out thinking and out performing your 1 GHZ+ processor
Surprisingly different system configurations don't all perform the same, even in the current year. XFCE boots up a lot faster than KDE because KDE has a ton of bloat. On my Sandy Bridge laptop that has a mechanical hard drive, typing into krunner causes the entire system to lag for seconds at a time.

That being said, Ubuntu minimal isn't very bloated. I don't know why Arch people bring that up. If they really wanted minimum bloat, they'd install Gentoo and make a custom kernel that only has the features they need.

>You know exactly what you're doing - you're "recommending" it so that you get attention
I see people memeing about how Arch takes 60 hours a week to maintain more often than I see people recommending it.

I am sure you do after you waste weeks manually setting up the same things you can get for nothing time wise in anything else.

OP, the choice is yours. You can have a working PC and make money or you can butt diddle decades down the toilet.

in the wiki it says elinks

yeah but without autism

not him, but I spent under an hour putting arch and KDE on my laptop and then everything worked as expected. Arch wiki holds your hand through everything

I guess it was a different distro that had w3m by default

>noone mentioned Manjaro yet

it has all benefits of Arch and 'just werking' distros like ubuntu or mint

>its shit that makes you do separate search for AUR and separate for repos
I'm pretty sure pacaur -Ss searches both.

>tfw 1199 packages

I use centos as my desktop OS ( not server ).

I didnt realise it was going to be such a bummer getting packages installed. Why is is less user friendly than ubuntu?

Am I being silly using CentOS as my home OS?

Former distro hopper here, used Arch briefly but went back to Ubuntu. It's a nice distro, their installation for dummies article is really helpful, but there were some little things there that bothered me. Honestly, if you're a casual user as me, don't worry about it.

Why did you even choose it in the first place? Just curious.

>this nigga doesn't install gentoo

basically, I'm a linux retard.
Arch comes with nothing, so any software that's installed, I installed it myself.
Any problems I experience, I caused them myself.
It's MY fucking system.
That's why it's much easier to use than Ubuntu, because in Ubuntu, I have no fucking idea how to do anything, because somebody else set it up.

CentOS is based off RHEL and RHEL/CentOS mostly targets the bussiness workstation and server market, so it does lack a lot of the more desktop related packages. Fedora has lots of the desktop related packages that CentOS doesn't have and it's pretty much upstream CentOS.

bump

Somebody needs to change the arch logo to gentoo.

Is there any security audit on the AUR?

I know Debian won't allow PPAs because you're basically giving someone root access to your computer and they consider it a security risk.

Is the AUR any different?

AUR packages are installed as fakeroot, IIRC, so they don't get access to root.

I don't think there's any sort of security audit. You should read the PKGBUILD files before installing. Usually they're short and you just need to verify that the source is from somewhere legitimate.

Arch is good because
- Up to date packages
- Easy to install source packages from AUR
- Huge package selection both binary and source
- Pacman/yaourt is one of the easiest to use package managers

Funny I spent less than 1 minute installing ubuntu, installer did everything for me. seems like you are real busy trying to impress internet losers who won't care.

Like I said before here we are with the "oh it's not that bad if you just dedicate a few spare hours to make up for features that everything else has had for 20 years"

stop bumping the thread. Nobody cares that you use arch. any newbie that you try to "convert" will give up in less than half a day. please fuck off to BSD

>Is there any security audit on the AUR?
only peer
you can see in the comments
aur helpers aren't recommended because you're supposed to READ the pkgbuild before you use it

up to date vanilla packages with a patch or two if needed
you may have to edit a file before you use some software
all ports closed by default
can be a time sink but doesn't have to be (and so can any other distro)
it's stable unless you break it

>If you just want to get shit done stick to Ubuntu or Fedora.
under contrary arch is great for development and anything really

>- Huge package selection both binary and source
The binary package selection is not particularly great. Arch even admits this, when comparing itself to Debian and Fedora.

>I spent less than 1 minute installing ubuntu
You must have really fast internet. 95% of the time I spent installing Arch was spent watching shit download. KDE takes quite a while.

>dedicate a few spare hours
If you need a few hours to read a 50 line file, you probably just shouldn't be using computers. You literally just have to open it, check that the source is legit and check if the build steps are legit. It'll take you 30 seconds and then you can more easily build tons of obscure software that you would need to build from source on Ubuntu.

I have two packages from the AUR right now. The AUR is not a thing you should be installing from on a regular basis.

>it's an unstable mess
It's sounds like you never used Arch in the past five or so years.

not him but centos is pre comfy if you don't mind the outdated packages. lightweight, secure, and stable. basically unexciting but just werks (tm)

Anyone that brings up autism as an argument is autistic.

well yeah, like everyone on Sup Forums. but the developer is unironicallly severely autistic.

It's not autistic to not want to help retards on the Internet.

Not that user but I put CentOS on a laptop because I use RHEL at work so I'm super familiar with it.
It's great for a shitposting machine, browsing, etc. Things are outdated, however I've found that CentOS/RHEL tends to have better backports than Debian because they live with a release for 10 years. You won't backport an updated desktop environment, but you'll at least get the newest browser + some latest dev and sys admin tools.

>Typing.like.THIS
>NOT AUTISTIC
topkek. but you're right, calling him autistic is an insult to the autists, he's just mentally ill.

>AND FOR GODS SAKE, do NOT ask questions to me. I'm not here to fix your freaking INCOMPETENCE.
the first thing a new user sees is the dev sperging out and getting called an incompetent [retard]. then he goes on to ask for money. wow, like, that's cool man, I'll just use another package like any other sane person would.

nasuhara is qt

>software that you would need to build from source on Ubuntu.
um you're still building from source. it's just set up for pacman

it's fairly easy to scrap systemd completely

============================
>>> ARCH WITHOUT SYSTEMD mine for reference
pacman -Qqs nosystemd
dbus-nosystemd
libpulse-nosystemd
libutil-linux-nosystemd
mkinitcpio-nosystemd
procps-ng-nosystemd
util-linux-nosystemd
xdg-user-dirs-nosystemd
xorg-server-common-nosystemd
xorg-server-nosystemd


>troubleshooting libsystemd.so.0 error
rebuild using aur or abs disabling lib/systemd flags
>notable mentions
qt5-base mpv - both have aur pkgbuilds

I used Arch as a server OS

it crashed every three days

>advantages
There aren't any. The main disadvantage of linux was that it was too broken to be a daily driver, you had to constantly waste hours and sometimes days by fixing constant issues, where windows just werkd out of the box, so linux never stood a chance back then. But currently ubuntu improved by 95% in that regard where it almost works out of the box like windows does. arch on the other hand is still stuck in that broken state where only unemployed neckbeards can afford to run it because they can spend all day by fixing it constantly as they have no other responsibilities

arch linux new Sup Forums meme confirmed

I installed arch or rather antergos through the graphical installer about 3-4 years back since the Mint one broke twice on me, it took about five minutes and everything worked smoothly since then.
Most of the time I don't update for 4-5 months since I'm a lazy fuck and even with huge updates nothing ever really breaks, I have Gnome, Xfce, a couple tiling wms installed and everything just works, trying KDE since today with wayland and it also seems to be fine.

I don't understand how everyone keeps saying it's not stable, if anything ever happens you have literally everything written on the wiki and literally every package on the aur.