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Open Source Linux

Arch Linux Turns 20 (neowin.net) 29

Posted by EditorDavid from the older-than-Android dept.
"Arch Linux, the rolling Linux distribution that powers Valve's Steam Deck is now 20 years old," reports Neowin.

Slashdot reader segaboy81 writes that "What's cool to see here is that everything changed behind the scenes, but on the surface, things are the same." From the article: Announced on March 11th, 2002, and codenamed Homer, version 0.1 was released to minor fanfare. The release notes were a far cry from today's, essentially announcing it had broken ground and the foundation was going in, as it were.

Homer's release notes:

I've finally got a bootable iso image on the ftp site. The bad news is that you don't get a pretty interactive installer. But if you wanted one of those, you would have gone with RedHat, right? ;)

I'll try to get the docs up for ABS (Arch Build System) which, IMHO, is one of the best advantages of Arch. With ABS, you can easily create new packages, and it's trivial to rebuild existing packages with your own customizations....

It shipped with Linux kernel 2.4.18 which many of the Linux old-timers (myself included) will remember was right before we started to get nice things like auto-mounting USB drives in kernel 2.6. XFree86 4.2.0 was also in stow, which is what we now call Xorg. If you wanted to build software, you had to use an absolutely ancient gcc toolchain (2.95.3). Web browsing was covered by the ghost of Netscape Navigator, Mozilla 0.9.9. Heady days, these were!
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Arch Linux Turns 20

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  • I run Manjaro on my main home machine, which is sort of Arch for dummies. Unlike pure Arch, the installation is very much simplified. But you get the benefit of having access to the huge Arch repositories.

    Just for shits and grins I installed Arch one time on a VM just to see if I could get through it. It's not that tough really and the configurability can't be beat. if you say Linux to the average person they might think Ubuntu or Mint or maybe they have no idea what you are talking about. But for the hard

    • Re:Arch is awesome (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Shinobi ( 19308 ) on Saturday March 12, 2022 @01:46PM (#62351273)

      "and the configurability can't be beat"

      I find Gentoo/Funtoo etc to be far more configurable, though a bit more complex. But it's fun being able to do stuff that Arch disciples consider impossible. Such as, just for shits and giggles a few years back, running hardware accelerated Wayland+Gnome 3 on Nvidia proprietary drivers and no SystemD. Something many Arch people loudly proclaimed impossible.

    • I really don't get this view that Arch is 'hardcore'. I've used it as my daily driver almost ever since it came out and - if anything - it has completely de-skilled me.

      I used to compile my own kernel, optimise svn mplayer, etc etc. Nowadays I just do 'pacman -Syu' and that's it.

      The killer application in Arch is an amazing package manager - it just works, and beautifully. If I was going to try a 'harcore' distro it would be Gentoo.

      • I really enjoy Arch. I've only had one problem as a casual user. I can't understand why my wireless works for some weeks then suddenly starts crapping out....then absolutely dies. I've tried the solutions that I've found on the internet but nothing brings it back. I always have to either install new or reinstall an image. I boot multiple OS'es and only have this problem with Arch-based Linux...no other linux does this....that's why I keep them on as boot options. It can't be a hardware failure, as the

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by waspleg ( 316038 )

          I had Mint on a Lenovo desktop I took from someone at work and it would do quirky shit like that, mostly with not recognizing my phone and USB was weird. I always figured it was the shit machine, because Lenovo. I have an old as fuck Thinkpad 420 (?) with Kali on it that I have to recompile and load a fuckiing kernel module and fuck with it to get it to work every time I update anything.

          I've had a linux machine in some form since 1995 and there is always some kind of quirky bullshit with fathomless rabbit

      • You call Gentoo hardcore? If you want hardcore, get LFS [linuxfromscratch.org]. No ebuild cruft.
  • We wish you a merry Christmas
    We wish you a merry Christmas
    We wish you a merry Christmas
    And a happy new year.
  • I've never used Arch. I've not debugged a problem in the last 10 years where Arch documentation wasn't valuable. Happy birthday!
    • Yes, the Arch wiki is an important resource, even for Ubuntu/Debian users if you're looking for a non-clicky distro agnostic way to configure stuff. For example the article for Bluetooth keyboard [archlinux.org] is how I learned to get my Bluetooth mouse to work.

  • I use Manjaro.

  • I had no idea what I was doing. I decided I wanted to change graphics card drivers and foolishly deleted the current drivers before downloading the new ones, reducing me to a command line and forcing me to learn how to navigate Lynx to download new drivers.

    • You're being too optimistic(*), it won't happen without some little help like:

      "What?! It uses systemd and is not optional? What? I can't install Arch without systemd? What?!"

      Now, sit down with your pop-corns.

      ----
      (*) Which is good [slashdot.org], so you'll live longer to actually see a distro war.

  • I used to run 2.4.22 with the OpenMosix patches to build clusters in my parents basement. When 2.6 came out those patches no longer worked and never again was I able to run something so cool.

    I also had some monkey something patch that allowed the cluster to migrate applications using shared memory which normally was not possible.

    The older I get the more I realize that some really amazing technology just doesn't make it, but it was extremely cool to have ran it.

    I used to use a graphical migration console tha

    • OpenMosix was indeed dope but in reality you could get the important parts of the same functionality (dispatching jobs to idle hosts) with DQS with only minor changes to scripts and such. DQS does back to the days of processor speeds measured in MHz with only two digits...

  • I started using arch on a VM 10 years ago and now it runs my raspberry and any laptop i buy as the single OS. Even if it has changed the init system during past years, system administration always looked easy enought to be performed with their helpfull wiki. Most users would prefer turnkey solutions like Manjaro instead, but when you know exactly which software you need to run your system ArchLinux become a perfect solution.

  • I had been running debian on the lan server since 2k or so and a multitude of distros in virtual machines, curiosity mostly, SuSE, Ubuntu, then debian. KDE, never liked Gnome. Then, somewhen after 2005 I began moving towards linux on the desktop, in a dual machine setup at first and moving win apps into virtual machines from there.
    It was debian and after a while I realised that some things about KDE that never really worked weren't a KDE problem but debian specific.
    I had already met that incredibly useful k

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