Anyone here moved away from Arch Linux?

[Doorbreath]

Anyone any idea of the size of gentoos userbase compared to arch? What advantages does gentoo have over arch? I'm stuck choosing between them

[d2_racing]

Gentoo is sources based and you can configure your Cflags and use flags.

With Arch, by default it's a binary distro but you can use the AUR and compile your own stuff.

I don't think that you have any use flags, but at least you can change your cflags.

[John R. Graham]

As a very rough comparison of the user bases, as of today, the size of the forums are:

• Gentoo: 128,188 registered users; 5,107,149 posts (some of which are not spam).
  
• Arch: 35,654 registered users; 740,593 posts.

- John
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[jonnevers]

easy.

do you want to compile everything from source?
Yes: try gentoo.
No: try arch.

I doubt you'll be disappointed by either.

[leprosys]

You can see the comparison in the Arch wiki:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_to_Other_Distributions#Gentoo

But I like Gentoo for the reason it's more simple. Has more packages in the official ports.
I don't like AUR is maintained by Arch Linux users and some packages are unstable.
Some packages are necessary or useful, are in AUR. Arch need more developers?
The downgrades are difficult to make (you need the binary of the previous version.).
Pro for Arch Linux, the installation is obviously faster, pacman is simple to use, they have good documentation on the wiki.

[Doorbreath]

Not sure I like how arch handles package groups (if I'm understanding it correctly), say if the devs add a package to the base group, I would not get that package automatically as the group is already installed (right?). If the gentoo devs add a package to the base (profile?) I'd get that on my next emerge -uDNav world (right? Excuse me if I've got everything wrong)

[d2_racing]

I think that Arch has some meta packages.

[phajdan.jr]

[Jaglover]

Gentoo documentation is good, no doubt. But often, when googleing, the best answer comes from Arch wiki.

[Logicien]

I use ArchLinux because it give what Slackware, if I am up to date, miss to have: a complete package manager. Between others, Slackware and Gentoo give's to the user the possibility and the need to personalize and control the system, so ArchLinux who his, as it's say, based on Gentoo and Slackware, have this charateristic too.

Gentoo is a sources distribution and is more complete then ArchLinux in that way. However, you do not need USE flags to personalize what you compile. You can do it with the configure options in general and more specificaly in the PKGBUILD with ArchLinux. For a complete compiled system, it would be painfull.

There is one thing it's say in the ArchLinux world, that compile sources for machine specific architecture and material do not give more performance and stability then generics binary's. I doubt.
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[Kingoftherings]

[Shining Arcanine]

[pilla]

Merged some posts.
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[cach0rr0]

moved my main box from Gentoo=> arch, running a nice chunk of Gentoo guests in KVM

I do miss Gentoo already, and would prefer it on the desktop, but it simply makes the process of crafting an initramfs for crypt-root way, way, way too cumbersome.
What worked for me in '04-'05 no longer works. I tried 40 or 50 different permutations of an initramfs, different methods (genkernel, mkinitrd, crafting by hand) and finally said screw it.

Arch automates this, very very nicely.

Need full volume crypto, so this was a killer for me. At some point I'll back up my VM's, and move this back to Gentoo after "reverse engineering" the initramfs that Arch creates, but thus far Arch has been pretty damn stable for me, and the doc pretty top quality (I think the loss of the Wiki a year or two back was it? Was a major setback)

That's it. That's literally the only reason I tried out Arch. I'm going nuts from not having the same level of control, but alas at this stage it's a critical requirement I have that Gentoo is not meeting.

If I had a decent - and most importantly, RELIABLE - tool for an initramfs, where I could just change a few configuration settings somewhere, fire it off, and have one that's pretty well guaranteed to get me to luksOpen without issue, I would be back tomorrow.

I prefer Gentoo in every single other capacity, top to bottom, except that one niggling thing. And fuck, this community is amazing. I had another account back in '04, but well, the nick was totally gay; I've been 'round for a bit, and it's been top notch folks here day in day out.

Ah well, like I said, one of these days I'm going to rip apart Arch's initramfs, see where I went wrong, fix it, and go back to Gentoo.

It's about time to build out a new box anyway, so that may be the test bed. I just needed to have something up and running quickly, so I could put up my VM's for web/irc/mail. Spending a full week working on the crypto was not an option.

/me prices out a new rig on Newegg
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[dE_logics]

For productivity Arch is better than Gentoo, for many other thinigs, Gentoo is better than arch.

I prefer Gentoo for special purpose system...that's where it really shines.

Here's my complete opinion -

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-6286943.html#6286943

They also contain some benchmark facts between Arch and Gentoo.
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[trent9008]

I was a Gentoo user for a while, went distro hopping, landed on Arch for a year or so, got bored, and installed Gentoo again. So far I haven't gone back, but I intend to eventually -- maybe this summer.

Arch IMO really shines in terms of maintenance. There's less to do to keep an up to date, stable system. In a year of using it I only had one problem (not including the ones I caused myself) just running 'pacman -Syu' regularly (that was a libjpeg upgrade that broke backwards compatibility somehow -- it was simple enough to wait for the rest of the software to pick it up). Gentoo is still waiting for me to resolve 6 configuration file conflicts (I'll get around to it eventually) and, naturally, takes forever to update or install new software.

The Arch system is set up a little more ... sparsely, I guess, than Gentoo. BSD init scripts, for instance. It's easier to keep track of, in my mind at least. But Gentoo runs faster for me and offers a bit more control. Also I forgot the convenience of compiling one's own kernel. And the Arch repos lack some software that I like to use on Gentoo.

"Gentoo users will generally feel quite comfortable with most aspects of Arch." (Arch wiki)

[dE_logics]

You know you can use Arch kernel for Gentoo. I did the opposite... and I do it all the time (mixing up kernels of all distros)
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[cach0rr0]

[phajdan.jr]

[cach0rr0]

[dE_logics]

[cach0rr0]

[Shining Arcanine]

[cach0rr0]

[Shining Arcanine]