Arch Linux 0.7 Reviewed

Eugenia writes "Andrew Roberts posted a long and informative review of the newly released Arch Linux 0.7. It describes the installation method, post-install configuration, features included, package management and the available support for the distro. Trying to describe Arch Linux in a single sentence, many would say that it's a distro that's almost as speedy as Gentoo is, as simple as Slackware is and with a package management similar to Debian's. [Semi-]advanced Linux users would probably like it a lot."

Arch

[FictionPimp]

I've used arch in the past and found it a great distro. It has its quirks, but for me it was rock solid and ran like a charm as a development/test server for a side project I was working on. It does require you to know a little bit more about linux and your hardware then most distros, but its not anymore complex then gentoo or slackware. Plus it is targeted at i686 which is nice for speed. I found the package choices a bit small, but it is way easy to make a new package from souce and install it with pacman.

Anyways, its a great distro.

I used to use Arch Linux

[Cthefuture]

I used Arch Linux for about 6 months not too long ago.

It has some annoying quirks but nothing too bad I guess. The biggest problem is lack of packages and the very slow package manager. Although packages are easy to create, I got tired of having to create packages for every little thing I needed. After looking at the code for the package manager I could tell it was written by someone who did not know what they were doing. Maybe that has improved since 0.6, I don't know.

It is not any faster than any other distro. With the exception of boot time, all distros are really about the same performance-wise. In fact, I found the Arch package manager was incredibly slow (try running Arch on an old machine).

Overall, between the goofy quirks, lack of packages, and lack of coding skill, I went back to my old friend Debian (actually, Ubuntu Linux).