Anyone here moved away from Arch Linux?

[nicop06]

I also switched from Arch Linux to Gentoo on my main desktop mainly because of systemd. I recently came across Void Linux and Alpine Linux and find them to be a good replacement of respectively Arch and Debian, but without systemd, more customizable and way more minimalistic. I use the former one my low specs laptop and the later on all my servers.

[Wbhurst411]

I only recently tried Gentoo for the first time, and found that I am loving the Gentoo approach to implementing operating systems by compiling the source code into the existing system. This feels so much more natural than just installing binaries that were compiled by someone else, on some other type of machine. It also lends an air of comfort; knowing that the source code is always available for review on your system.

However, I am finding that there is a considerable learning curve involved in figuring out how to control all the many different ways a system can be put together, how the compiles are controlled through the 'use' flags, and all the different kinds of conflicts that can develop during the installations, updates and removals of software applications. It seems to be a true 'living' system.

I also have an 'arch' laptop -- which I am planning to switch over, once I get more comfortable with the Gentoo commands and processes

[mimosinnet]

[LdBeth]

As a former OS X user who use a lot of command line tools, I feel pretty comfortable with FreeBSD. However I can't get a proper network driver for MacBook on BSDs.
I had a quick trial on Arch but find it unfriendly to new Linux users. Although Arch has a awesome wiki. At that time I don't want systemd. Void Linux seems good but I didn't get mirrors around. It seems only Slackware and Gentoo are the systemd free main stream distros. (Actually Arch and Debian provide options to remove systemd)
Once you find the joy of complie and optimize your system, you would no more want a third party binhost or binary pkg manager. Recently I switched to hardened musl profile for my laptop without particular reason except bleeding fast and light weight.

[HungGarTiger]

[tuggbuss]

~1996-1998 - Redhat
~1998-2009 - Windows NT4, W2K, XP, 7
~2010-2014 - *buntu/Fedora/Windows
~2015-... - ArchLinux/Windows
2016-> Gentoo Linux / ArchLinux - Use them both as daily drivers. Ditched Windows

2020 - Will perhaps be the year of LFS

[shevy]

> I had a quick trial on Arch but find it unfriendly to new Linux users.

I don't know how Arch is these days because after it got systemd-infected I had no interest
in it anyway. But I remember that I tried it a bit after Judd left - and it sucked compared to
what it was a few years before with Judd still actively involved.

So to me, I don't think it was systemd that killed Arch - it already happened earlier. You can
very quickly ruin a project if the wrong people are put in charge, I see this everywhere.
Rubinius for example - also totally changed after evan was gone.

The systemd move on Arch was more like the "icing on the cake" aka "we don't care about
those who have another opinion, you'll be systemd-assimilated, period".

> Although Arch has a awesome wiki.

That is indeed a good point. Gentoo had a great wiki; still has a good wiki but the arch wiki
was IMO better at some point. Still doesn't matter because what use is a wiki if you have
to use systemd.

> At that time I don't want systemd. Void Linux seems good but I didn't get mirrors around.

Ah, the Void guys know about polishing-problems. Give them a while. They are the spiritual
successor to Arch. I know quite a few ruby-people who hopped from Arch to Void.

(You can of course also ask why they did not use Gentoo instead. I have no idea but
I think Void is in some ways a bit like a merger of oldschool Arch and oldschool
Gentoo, with a mix of BSD.)

> It seems only Slackware and Gentoo are the systemd free main stream distros.

Sort of. The two lonely survives of the nuclear systemd-fallout ... how long can they
resist?

> (Actually Arch and Debian provide options to remove systemd)

Have you tried these options? I do not know about Arch but the Debian way does
not work. It's not solely debian's fault but there are hardcoded dependencies in
Gnome that require systemd, so you get at best a reduced gnome. There was
some gentoo dev who explained it in an article, wasn't there? I can't find it nor
do I remember the name..... but the code he wrote to remove parts of the
systemd-inection in gnome, is available on github somewhere.

> Once you find the joy of complie and optimize your system, you would no more
> want a third party binhost or binary pkg manager.

Dunno. When things compile without problem then this is nice, but this is not
always the case.

> 2020 - Will perhaps be the year of LFS

LFS/BLFS is nice. Teaches people. They also did the only SANE choice -
their wiki has both systemd AND non-systemd. This is EXACTLY how all
these distributions should have made things too - by giving people a choice.

Instead, they did not give a choice.

I myself use slackware and GoboLinux; the former because it doesn ot
get into my way, the latter because it is (to me) beautiful. And ruby. Gentoo
uses a lot of python; Gentoo has some very, very, very clever programmers.
But I feel more at home with ruby. And I am very lazy, the less time I have to
deal with issues in Linux, the better. Systemd also caused me more issues
whenever I used it, so that also explains why I don't use it. (I don't have
a need though since ruby manages my whole system anyway.)

[Logicien]

From a practical point of view ArchLinux is one of the best Linux binaries distribution. You can easily install it from command lines with an image up to date monthly. The packages are divided in groups what's easy the task to install softwares. It's a Linux kernel and packages rolling release with a stable and a testing branchs.

In my opinion, Arch have made a good move to switch to Systemd because Systemd work very well with the Arch and free resources for packages management development. The Arch offer a very good choice of packages in it's official repositories who can be complete with compilation from AUR. Arch is fast and reactive and the KISS philosophy help to it. It's wiki is also of a great help for all Linux users.

I hope that Arch will have a long life because I always fall back to it when I cannot resolv or don't want to resolv problems with other distributions. Arch is as stable and reliable than GNU/Linux itself. It always upgrade very well. I rarely have to debug the Arch itself.

I hope that the Gentoo developpers take example on the Arch to give an as good source code distribution than the best binary distributions.

Long life to GNU/Linux !
_________________
Paul

[arnvidr]

If you want to use Arch but not systemd, they've always had a more or less official openrc community spin. This was recently forked off to its own distro named Artix, which works great. I always use Gentoo for a machine that can manage the compiling workload though.
_________________

[Goverp]

I'm on the way back, having moved from Gentoo to Arch because my older machine ran out of horsepower for compiling its desktop. I'd been via Distcc, but that was proving too much hassle. But now Arch is dropping i686, so I'm coming back to Gentoo. I'm planning to (a) lighten the desktop to LXDE, and (b) create a binhost on my main machine (AMD Opeteron with 6GB RAM) that can easily compile the stuff quickly (apart from libreoffice, of course, and I don't use chromium). Mind you, I'm beginning to lust over the latest generation of CPUs that finally seem significantly faster (i.e. > 4x) my current kit.
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Greybeard

[Trademark97]

Just about a week ago, I installed Gentoo on my desktop box, and about two days ago, I converted my laptop that I use for schoolwork to Gentoo as well. In the 7 or so years I have actively been using the various Linuxes, Gentoo is the best I have found thus far. The installation was not as difficult as I thought it was going to be, in either case. In the case of the laptop, it was just boot up my SystemRescueCD USB drive, load up the Gentoo Handbook, download the stage3 tarball, chroot in to the new environment, and install following the instructions of the Handbook. The after-installation (such as getting things like NetworkManager set up and installing a DE [Xfce]) procedures were much easier than I thought they would be, and very enjoyable. Tinkering with this particular installation, and carefully crafting a fast, responsive, stable environment that works well for my schoolwork and other such things associated with my school life has been quite an excellent experience. It is crafted and setup in such a way that I feel that I can be confident it will remain stable and dependable for as long as I use this system.
On my desktop box, that I use for everything else (gaming, video editing, rendering with Blender, music experimentation, etc), I have been somewhat more adventurous. I have mixed in considerably more ~amd64 packages, done far more customization to the USE flags (in order to enhance performance or to add in features that sound intriguing), and added in some overlays to bring in what I feel completes the necessary ensemble of packages on this system. Getting the graphics card to work 100% properly with the proprietary drivers (on an Nvidia card) was a bit challenging, and took some time to make things work smoothly (figuring out the kernel .config modifications necessary to allow the system to boot with just the proprietary drivers was a fascinating challenge), but I feel that in this circumstance, I learned far more than I have ever learned with any other distro that I have tried, and now that I understand the configuration process involved, I believe that keeping the drivers working in future will be a much easier and simpler process to perform.
In either instance, I have heavily enjoyed the degree of customization possible. This sense of "everything in the system is mine, just the way that I like it" was why I originally used Arch (my previous distro), and why I eventually abandoned it for Gentoo (as I feel that Gentoo offers fuller and much better customizability). Also, I like to be able to have some confidence that on any given day, and after any given update, the system has a high chance of remaining stable (nothing unnecessarily major breaking), and other distros have not inspired such a degree of confidence in me. Another good point, is that when a major new technology is introduced (whatever the next equivalent of PulseAudio or systemd will be, for instance), if I do adopt it, it can and it will be on my terms and on my schedule, which will allow me to feel a true sense of "ownership" over the setup I have on my installation. Next, from Debian, to Ubuntu, to Fedora, to Arch, I feel that there is something just a bit "off" in their release policies or practices that prevents their claimed stability from working or occurring in the manner intended or stated. Gentoo's clear, well thought out, and well laid out release principles, which seem to a high degree to actually be followed, inspire in me a much greater confidence that my system can (and will) remain stable and reliable.
Finally, the community is a big part of why I joined. Everyone here seems friendly, welcoming, intelligent, tolerant, and to have a desire to both teach (whenever and however necessary) those that have a strong desire to learn, to carefully explain why something is being done incorrectly, or how something works, and to try their best to nurture a person's interest in mastering and using Gentoo. Having such an excellent community available to join will surely make my experience of using Gentoo, and of interacting with its users and developers, that much more pleasant.
With all of these pros (and so few possible cons by comparison), I think it is safe to say that I have found my home for the foreseeable future (however long I continue to use Linux, for however long that might be). I'm proud and glad to have been able to undertake and perform all of the necessary steps, and to be finally able to use a distro that really and truly feels "just right."
_________________
devout linux user since 2010
devout gentoo user since november 2017
never going back to Windows

[NeddySeagoon]

Trademark97,

Welcome to Gentoo.

Mixing stable and testing to any great extent is a recipe for slot collisions.
What happens is stable foo needs baz version A. testing bar need baz version B.
You can't have baz version A and baz version B installed together, so you can spend a lot of time resolving these conflicts.

Testing isn't quite stable but if you keep binary packages of everything you build, a downgrade when something breaks is fast and painless.
Also, only update when you have time to resolve issues.
That's not a recommendation to move to stable, just a few hints as to how to mitigate the issues that do bite from time to time.
As you rightly say, its your Gentoo your way.

Gentoo doesn't do releases, except for minimal ISOs and stage 3 tarballs. The master repository mirror updates every 30 minutes.

Enjoy your Gentoo.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[fturco]

@Trademark97: welcome to Gentoo!

[Trademark97]

I more recently moved away from not only Arch, but binary distros in general. My Linux journey started with Ubuntu 10.04, after awhile of experimenting with a KNOPPIX CD I had, and also a Red Hat Linux 9 3-CD set I had (that at one point had earned a dual-boot spot alongside Windows XP).

At the time, Ubuntu worked well for me, because due to bad internet, I could wind up going several months between updates (for instance, the first upgrade was from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 11.04). The system worked OK, and as I didn't know much about the system, neither did I have any idea that I was using out-of-date packages, nor did that bother me. From there, my next update was from Ubuntu 11.04 to Lubuntu 14.04 (which was a really long time to go without updates). Ubuntu 11.04 was where I began to discover the joy of WMs, as Unity ran terribly both on my old processor and the unfortunately low-quality Intel graphics driver I seem to have been saddled with at the time. Openbox was a natural and welcome relief from this particular situation.

Lubuntu 14.04 was a nice fit, as right from the get-go it was a perfect fit for my first (9 years old at that point) Linux PC; the low-resource desktop environment (LXDE) ran much better, and was probably in large part responsible for the extra year of life infused into that particular computer.

Once I got my second Linux PC (my current one) early in 2015, I decided to try to take advantage both of the increased processing power, and of the much better internet connection I had managed to acquire in the interim. I still rotated heavily between Windows and Linux, not really using one after another, as Windows 10 hadn't happened yet, and Windows 7 was somewhat decent as far as Windows goes.

I quickly installed an updated Ubuntu version (15.04) on the computer. I felt that Unity looked nice, and actually ran OK. I got bored with Ubuntu, though, and thus began my distrohopping affair. I first tried Fedora. This felt nice, but at the time third-party repo support was cumbersome, and when a major update was presented (23->24), I took it, and it managed to break the installation by somehow ruining the NVIDIA drivers I had installed.

I began to wonder if maybe rolling-release distros would work better, due to a lack of traditional "major" upgrade paths that could update massive amounts of software at one time, and thus leave significantly more opportunities for things not only to break, but to do so catastrophically. So, I installed Antergos (as I felt I wasn't ready for "pure" Arch at the time), and used it for awhile. From there, I finally moved to Arch proper, as I now felt comfortable with the underlying Arch core powering Antergos. This gave me some satisfaction for about a year or so, until the abrasive and egotistical attitude of much of the community, the arrogant attitude of the developers, and the lack of overall reliability I had seen made me decide to look elsewhere for my Linux experience.

I went back to Fedora, as it had been a decent enough OS when things like the broken update hadn't occurred, and liked it for awhile, and due to some awful experiences with Windows 10, it replaced both current installations as the sole OS on my computer. Things still happened, though, and I left it as well. These things included my heavy over-reliance on third-party repositories, due to the Fedora Project's hard stance on proprietary or otherwise encumbered software, the fact that a major update that had come along had broken many of these repositories (some of which took a month to be fixed), and my becoming uncomfortable with the do-all approach of systemd and the impossibility of decoupling it from Fedora.

So, I did some more looking (with particular interest of finding a distro not 100% reliant on systemd), and Gentoo seemed to tick enough of the boxes I was looking to fill, so I downloaded a SystemRescueCD ISO, wrote it to my trusty USB drive, and used it to install Gentoo on both my desktop, and the laptop that I have that I had more recently acquired for school purposes.

I was initially worried that I would somehow wind up spending all my time compiling, and that this would render the distro far less convenient than other distros I had used (particularly Arch), so I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that my computers were both actually quite capable of decent compilation times, the underlying configuration of portage wasn't unnecessarily or unenjoyably difficult, and there were extensive opportunities for customization which gave me many things I had craved on Arch (but had been unable to achieve due to some of the limitations of that particular distro).

On my desktop, the i3-gaps environment I have set up along with polybar gives me a beautiful desktop that is sleek and performs extraordinarily well (which is most excellent, due to the fact that this configuration leaves maximum resources available for things like Blender and my games), and on my laptop the optimizations done as well as the minimal amount of software installed make it work much better than it has with just about any other system that has ever been installed on it. Somehow, it feels like I've been wandering aimlessly between distros for my entire time that I have been using Linux, and now with the discovery of Gentoo, I've found my home.
_________________
devout linux user since 2010
devout gentoo user since november 2017
never going back to Windows

[JackHunt]

Yep, new-ish Gentoo user here migrated from Arch. I really did like Arch(and didn't mind SystemD) but in my personal experience I found the updates to be a little inconsistent and untested. For example, a glibc update completely broke CUDA, which meant I had to spend my work time fixing my toolchain.

It's a nice distro, sure, but I'm now happy and settled with Gentoo. Everything seems to be better tested on Gentoo. Purely anecdotal, of course.

N.B. The tinkering potential in Gentoo is also a huge plus; plays to the Geek in me!

[pjp]

[Zucca]

[steve_v]

[Zucca]

[steve_v]

[P.Kosunen]

Is Void good for general home "server" usage?

[Zucca]

[Proinsias]

Void is nice.

The longest run I've had is a year or so on my Pi B+ which is ticking along nicely as a media player.

I think xbps may be the only package manager that's not made angry, it just works.

[P.Kosunen]

[pun_guin]

As it was talked about in above postings, I feel like (edit: typo) I might add my experiences about Void's "musl" spin since it was what I used before I came here:

Void is a truly lovely distribution with an amazing start-up time (although I had my usual issues trying to boot from the boot media the universe wants to tell me that I should stop installing operating systems, I guess). xbps feels like pacman (it even has a similar syntax), but without the random package problems from Arch. It does exactly what you want it to if you can live with the default settings for your packages - no Portage included.

But, in practice, using the musl spin has one big problem: Some larger applications (in my case: Android Studio) are not available with musl or (like qutebrowser) refuse to start properly because many Linux developers still (seem to) assume that everyone uses "the glibc". Unless you are a curious developer, there are more disadvantages than advantages from using the musl version of Void.

And I don't think that's good.
_________________
I already use the new Genthree.