 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1001, 9 January 2023 |
Welcome to this year's 2nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
While many developers and open source enthusiasts were taking the last two weeks of December off work to enjoy a holiday, our Jesse Smith had other ideas. He decided to dedicate the time to playing with Arch Linux, one of the more well known rolling release distributions and the parent to over two dozen child distributions and spins. Arch has a reputation for technical simplicity and being a challenge to install and we explore those tropes in this week's Feature Story. Do you use Arch Linux or one of its many children? Let us know in this week's Opinion Poll. In our News section we discuss efforts to port KDE desktop software to OpenBSD along with a look back at the history of the HardenedBSD project. Meanwhile the Edubuntu distribution, which has been dormant for years, may be making a comeback in 2023. Did you use Edubuntu in the past? Let us know about your experiences with Edubuntu in the comments section. Plus we talk about the Slax distribution gaining faster access to persistent storage while Ubuntu tests out a new system installer. We also comment on OpenMandriva's new rolling release branch which is called ROME. Then, in our Questions and Answers column, we talk about verifying files, which were copied between storage drives, were transferred without any errors. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Arch Linux at the end of 2022
Arch Linux is an independent Linux distribution and one of the more well known examples of the "keep it simple" (KIS) philosophy. In this case, "keep it simple" refers to simplicity from an engineering point of view. It refers to a technical simplicity rather than an uncluttered or an easy to use system from the user's point of view.
Arch is probably the world's most famous (or infamous) rolling release distribution. Its heavy focus on do-it-yourself computing, lack of a graphical system installer, and buyer beware attitude toward package upgrades has made running this project a rite of passage for many Linux users. People often talk about running Arch the same way they'd discuss earning a merit badge.
Personally, I have some complex views when it comes to the Arch Linux project. On one hand, I appreciate the concept of a technically clean, minimal distribution on which we can build things. I like having the option of starting light and adding components as needed, at least in theory. However, I often get the impression Arch Linux is trying to make things harder just for the sake of making things harder.
Arch Linux is intended to be installed via manual commands from a shell, the install media has no graphical interface and no graphical installer. Technically, there is a command line system installer, but, as I've pointed out before, it's buggy and limited. This makes it more effort to try to use the installer than to set up Arch by hand.
There doesn't seem to be any technical reason for this hands-on approach to installing Arch. There are over a dozen distributions in the DistroWatch database which are, essentially, "Arch Linux, but set up with the Calamares system installer and your option of desktop environment." Philosophically, Arch seems to want users to do more work, more reading, and more editing configuration files by hand. This approach isn't bad, necessarily, but it is more work and rarely offers an improved experience. It's similar to building your own kit car: if you have fun doing that sort of thing, that's great, but in the end it doesn't give you a benefit when you're driving on the road.
One more thought, before I talk more about my latest experience setting up and running Arch Linux: part of my mixed view with regards to Arch comes from not being sure if it is a distribution. Arch supplies a lot of packages, including the Linux kernel. It also supplies support forums, rich documentation, and a place for users to upload recipes for installing third-party software, similar to the BSD concept of ports. All of these things make Arch seem like a Linux distribution. On the other hand, Arch Linux, as an operating system, doesn't really have a design or layout of its own. It is like a box of Lego bricks we can assemble into a shape of our choosing - aided by detailed instructions - but without any automated help. It feels like a bunch of parts we can use, or not, as we like. This makes Arch more of a meta distribution than a regular Linux distribution.
These characteristics make it difficult to review Arch Linux because it doesn't really have a structure so much as optional pieces. As a reviewer, I'm basically tasked on building my own operating system from parts and then asked my opinion of it. I feel like I'm grading my own art project.
Getting started
I started experimenting with Arch in the middle of December to give myself a few weeks to experiment with the project. The Arch Linux install media at the time was 818MB in size. Before making use of it I recommend people check out the project's installation guide and its associated resources which walk the user through the steps necessary to prepare the computer's hard drive, set up time zones, enable networking, set the system clock, set a root password, install a boot loader, configure the boot loader, and add more packages.
There are a lot of manual steps, most of them covered in detail in the project's documentation. I say most, because the documentation tends to provide generic or least-tool-for-the-job instructions. There are personal preferences we can make, for example which text editor to use. We might also prefer to use more friendly tools than what the documentation suggests. For instance, I used the relatively friendly, menu-driven cfdisk partitioning tool while the wiki mentions fdisk.
At any rate, once the install steps have been completed we can reboot and load up our new copy of Arch. By default, Arch boots to a text console where we can sign in as the root user.
Post-install steps
Once I got signed into my new copy of Arch, I wanted to install software to get utilities and a desktop set up on my system. The first thing I noticed was networking wasn't enabled, though it had been working on the live disc. It turned out Network Manager was installed, but not enabled. Once the Network Manager service was enabled I was able to connect to my local network. Then I went to work installing new packages.
A quick note here on package management. Arch uses the pacman package manager which has a short, unusual command line syntax. The pacman utility is fast though and handled my requests to add, remove, and find software without problems. I sometimes found pacman to be a bit too literal with its searches where APT or DNF might be more forgiving, but on the whole it worked well.
Once I had a few command line utilities installed I set about performing the larger task of installing the X.Org display software, a desktop environment (Xfce), and a display manager. A display manager provides, among other things, a graphical login screen. Looking through the list of available display managers, I decided to go with LightDM as it is relatively independent of desktop environments. Others, such as GDM and SDDM, are often associated with specific desktops and will pull in dependencies from those desktops. LightDM seemed like safe, neutral territory.
At first, the graphical environment was not launching successfully. I thought it was perhaps because I'd freshly installed video drivers and they hadn't been detected yet. After a reboot, the graphical display still failed to launch and the LightDM service failed to start. I was still stuck at the command line.
After some troubleshooting which involved installing more generic video drivers, looking through the X.Org logs, and confirming the Xfce desktop environment would start if launched manually, I realized the issue was the LightDM service. It was crashing when launched, preventing me from getting to a graphical environment. I disabled it and installed GDM (the GNOME Display Manager) in its place. The GDM service started without problems and I was able to login to start enjoying my Xfce desktop.
Arch Linux 2022.12.01 -- Confirming Xfce runs
(full image size: 228kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Well, at first GDM logged me into GNOME rather than Xfce. The display manager had pulled in a working GNOME desktop session (two, if you count the Wayland option) and I had to switch the session option to Xfce from the login screen.
Installing Xfce and its associated xfce4-goodies package provided me with the Xfce desktop, a terminal, the Thunar file manager, a settings panel, image viewer, task monitor, screenshot tool, and the Parole music player. This is about it, as we haven't yet installed a web browser, video player, office suite, or other applications. These can be fetched using pacman.
Making it feel like home
Since Arch is largely a do-it-yourself project with a lot of options and alternatives for those options, each step we take in setting up Arch branches us further away from other people's installs of the distribution. Each time we pick a login manager, a desktop environment, an office suite, or even a text editor our setup becomes more customized and less like someone else's version of Arch.
I feel this distinction, this path toward uniqueness, accelerates after we get a graphical environment installed and start acquiring desktop applications. At this point we're less likely to be following a guide which provides suggestions for boot loaders, drivers, and desktops and more likely to be installing whatever it is we want. Earlier I mentioned setting up and then reviewing Arch feels like making my own art project and then evaluating it. This impression really kicked into high gear at this stage because I was rapidly customizing my own system and key bits of information I'd usually record became more blurry.
How much disk space does a new copy of Arch use? It depends on which software we install. How much memory does it use? It depends on which services we enable and which desktop is installed. Does Arch work with my hardware? It does if I installed the proper drivers. Does Arch support filesystem snapshots? It can if I set up the right filesystem and utilities. Can I run Flatpaks on Arch? Yes, if I install the Flatpak framework. You get the idea; with Arch virtually nothing exists or works "out of the box", it's a manual, customized experience.
At the heart of the setup process is pacman. It's a blissfully fast, if frustratingly cryptic, package manager. Both the syntax and the options it offers while working are oddly arcane compared to other package managers. It works, but in an oddly terse way. By using pacman and the official Arch repositories we can get a good deal of popular software, such as text editors, LibreOffice, the VLC media player, and Firefox. Where I find the Arch experience falls down a bit is the official repositories are not particularly large. At the time of writing, Arch's website lists just over 13,500 packages. For comparison's sake, Debian's last stable release offered 60,000 packages and Fedora was offering about 67,700. This leaves some gaps in Arch's functionality.
Arch Linux 2022.12.01 -- Running the pacman package manager
(full image size: 500kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
We have the option of using third-party repositories to fill in the gaps in Arch's official offerings. The Flatpak framework, for example, is available as a package. Installing Flatpak on Arch automatically sets up the Flathub repository, giving us access to a wide range of desktop software.
Another alternative is the Arch User Repository (AUR). This is a collection of install scripts which are provided by the Arch community to fetch and install software not available in the official repositories.
While the AUR provides access to a great range of software and is often praised by the Arch community, there are warnings about using it in the Arch wiki and there is a strong "use at your own risk" tone in the guide providing instructions on using it. This is with good reason, this software is not verified or officially supported.
To start using the AUR we usually would want to install a package manager for building the available software. To do this, we'd first build one of the AUR's package managers (there are several options) as they all appear to be part of the AUR and not in the official repositories. There is a certain "chicken and the egg" issue here where we need to build software from the AUR in order to have easy access to the AUR. It serves to underline the separation between the official project and the community maintained AUR.
We can install the necessary packages, such as fakeroot, git, make, and gcc) to get started with the AUR. Then install one of the AUR package managers and use that to then fetch additional software. I took the popular yay AUR package manager as it works quickly and has a syntax which matches pacman.
Arch Linux 2022.12.01 -- The settings panel and Thunar file manager
(full image size: 216kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
I find using the AUR to supply third-party software usually works well, particularly for smaller utilities. However, I found it inconvenient when it came to desktop software and I much preferred using Flatpak when possible. Software installed from the AUR is usually compiled from source code and this means large programs may take several minutes, or in some cases, a few hours to compile. The same software can sometimes be fetched in a minute from Flatpak.
Major upgrades
One interesting characteristic of Arch Linux is its rolling release nature. Arch is constantly on the cutting edge of open source software and frequently publishes new versions of packages within a day or two of new releases becoming available upstream. I was hoping to get to try a few big upgrades during my three weeks with the distribution and I happily got my chance about a week into my trail when a new stable release of Xfce (version 4.18) became available at the same time as a kernel upgrade.
When I installed Arch, Xfce 4.16 was still the latest version of my chosen desktop environment, but within days 4.18 (the first new release of Xfce in a few years) became available. I performed a full system upgrade using pacman which pulled in a minor kernel upgrade and the new version of Xfce. The experience went smoothly and, following a reboot, I was able to enjoy the latest version of the Linux kernel and shiny new Xfce 4.18 packages.
Arch Linux 2022.12.01 -- Running the latest version of Xfce
(full image size: 389kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
One of the few issues I ran into when performing regular updates was pacman would sometimes ask me if I wanted to substitute packages I had already installed with alternatives. Which, to me, seems unnecessary and counter-intuitive. I specifically picked the packages I wanted, often from a list of alternatives. Offering to remove my selected package and replace it with an alternative I've already rejected seems pointless and risks breaking my workflow when the two packages are not compatible.
Conclusions
Eventually, I managed to fetch all the software I wanted and customized the Xfce desktop to my liking. I ended up with what I wanted - something fairly light in memory, no frills, with just the applications I wanted. Well, the applications I wanted, plus a few gigabytes of Flatpak and build dependencies which come from using non-official repositories.
Since Arch requires us to set almost everything up manually, I ended up with just the items I felt I needed (and the dependencies they needed). All the software was up to date, thanks to Arch's rolling release nature. Most software worked as expected, with the exception of the vim text editor which kept crashing when run with root privileges.
As you might expect, where I basically crafted the operating system from raw parts (parts that generally worked well), I ended up with something I liked. The issue I have with this experience, if I have any complaints, is that getting to this point takes so long. I could have installed Artix or EndeavourOS in under 15 minutes and ended up with a nearly identical user experience and collection of applications with fewer build dependencies and fewer helper tools. In short, using one of Arch's popular child distributions would take about four hours less time (including compile times for components from the AUR) and would result in a system that was about 3GB smaller on the disk.
Arch Linux 2022.12.01 -- Exploring the Xfce menu
(full image size: 312kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
This isn't to say using Arch is a bad idea, it is just that it's likely to appeal to a few very specific types of people. People who like to do everything manually, who like to be involved with the low-level processes, who want to read all the documentation, turn every knob, and tweak every file by hand. If you prefer building remote control helicopters to flying them, if you'd rather change your own car tyres rather than taking it into the shop, if you made your own cups from pottery clay, then Arch is probably ideal for you.
Arch Linux also appears to appeal to people who see doing things the hard way as a badge of honour or a rite of passage. Linux forums are often home to people who want to build Linux From Scratch just to try it, or who installed Arch just because they heard it was hard and wanted a challenge. These are perfectly valid approaches, but neither of them personally appeal to me. I can get the same result through faster, easier methods - such as one of Arch's many children with a graphical system installer and pre-configured desktop.
This isn't to say Arch is bad or unpleasant to use. The quality of the packages, the cutting edge software, and the documentation are all stellar selling points. It's just a system that is time consuming to get going compared to other projects and requires a certain amount of reading and patience. In the end though, you end up with an operating system made, in a sense, in your own image. To paraphrase Yoda, the Arch experience contains only what you take with you.
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Visitor supplied rating
Arch Linux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 9.2/10 from 229 review(s).
Have you used Arch Linux? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Porting KDE software to OpenBSD, history of HardenedBSD, Ubuntu tests new graphical installer, Slax gets faster persistent storage, Edubuntu makes a comeback, OpenMandriva publishes rolling-release branch
Rafael Sadowski has published a status update regarding KDE Plasma running on OpenBSD. The efforts to keep KDE Plasma and its related software up to date on OpenBSD are ongoing. "This will come as a surprise to some, but I was able to port (almost) all KDE Plasma components to OpenBSD. You can find all my work on GitHub in the sizeofvoid/wip-ports repository, branch kde-plasma-wip, directory x11/kde-plasma. I've been working on it for a very long time. At some point I was so frustrated that we don't have uDev and libInput. Read more here: OpenBSD and Wayland." The full overview can be found in this blog post.
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The HardenedBSD project is a security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD which implements and tests new security features. Shawn Webb, one of the project's founders, shares a look back on the past decade of work on the project, lessons learned, and challenges faced. "This was the first large kernel development work I had ever done, so I had a lot to learn. Oliver and I worked in separate personal repos in GitHub for a while until Oliver created the HardenedBSD repo to unify our work. Our intent was to do initial development in the HardenedBSD repo with the goal of upstreaming to FreeBSD. History would take us on a different path. As we worked on our ASLR implementation, we updated our submission in FreeBSD's patch review system to solicit feedback from the FreeBSD project's official development team. With this being our first real foray into FreeBSD kernel development, we learned a lot through this review process. After two years of the development and review process, it was apparent that we differed with FreeBSD on the technical merits of our patch. Our work was not to be upstreamed due to a variety of reasons, some technical, some political. I eventually became overwhelmed and burned out and opted to abruptly discontinue the attempt at upstreaming our work."
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The Ubuntu team is testing a new graphical installer which may soon replace the distribution's long lived Ubiquity installer. The Phoronix website has a write-up on what it is like to use the new Ubuntu installer along with screenshots of the experience. "When testing some Ubuntu 23.04 daily builds over the holidays on various test systems, I was pleased to see the new installer finally being used by default. This is making use of the Subiquity/Curtin install tech already used by Ubuntu Server and leveraging Google's Flutter SDK for the user-interface. Previously this new installer was available via an alternate ISO while the latest Ubuntu 23.04 daily builds are using it by default in place of the older Ubiquity with GTK interface. The user interface in my opinion is pleasant and subtly improved over the older Ubiquity installer."
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The Slax distribution will soon be getting a new filesystem for persistent storage. DynFileFS was providing persistent storage for the distribution in the past, but the filesystem had some performance issues which are being addressed in DynFileFS 3.0. The author warns the new filesystem is not backward compatible with previous versions due to on-disk format changes. " I decided to review the code and as a result I rewrote the filesystem's internal logic completely. New DynFileFS version 3.0 is now available at GitHub. It uses different file format on disk, so it is not backward compatible, but I believe it is worth it. How does it work? Simply said, it provides a virtual file called 'virtual.dat' after mounting it to some directory. This file can be of any specified size, like 30GB, but it does not need to pre-allocate this huge amount of disk space on mount. All changes made to this virtual file are stored in an indexed storage in a different file on disk, for example called 'changes.dat', and this file grows in time as your changes are made. As a result, it stores only the changes on disk, and not the free space between them." Additional details are discussed in the Slax blog post.
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The Edubuntu distribution was once a community edition of Ubuntu which was geared toward educational environments and computer labs. Though discontinued several years ago, the Edubuntu project may soon make a comeback. In an announcement on the Ubuntu Discourse forum, an outline of what the new Edubuntu flavour will look like was shared: "We're using the GNOME desktop. Edubuntu will simply, from a .iso image standpoint, be built on-top of the Ubuntu Desktop. This will ensure ease of configurability and administration as we won't have to 'reinvent the wheel' and instead use what the Ubuntu Desktop team has already established for workstations." The Discourse post includes additional information.
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People who like using the OpenMandriva distribution, but who may not want to wait a year between releases or use the bleeding edge Cooker branch of the project are in luck. The OpenMandriva team now provides a rolling release branch intended for regular use, not just development and testing. The young branch is called ROME and is available in both KDE Plasma and GNOME editions. "ROME is the rolling release designed for individual users, it will receive the most up-to-date packages including recent security and bug fix upgrades. Our development branch, Cooker, will continue as the main point of development. It can break at any time, so if you are using Cooker and you will not get scared if your system will break every now and then, nothing changes for you. But if you are a user who needs a system to remain working, while still wanting to get the latest and greatest features without having to wait for a new point release, ROME is for you." Details on ROME can be found in the project's announcement.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Verifying a disk's contents was copied properly
Verifying-correctness asks: Let's say I have two disks, Disk A and Disk B. I copy the contents of Disk A to Disk B. How can I confirm Disk B is now identical to Disk A without comparing the files, like with a checksum, one at a time?
DistroWatch answers: It sounds like you're wondering if you can just take a single checksum of a hard drive and confirm its entire contents is identical to another drive's checksum. This probably will not work. Even if you clone one hard drive to another, using a tool such as dd or Clonezilla Live, the two drives might not share the same checksum because they can still have different sizes. Most drives, even if they are labelled as having the same capacity, may not be exactly identical down to the byte.
If you're not cloning the drives, instead using regular copy tools, then the location of files on the drive will depend on which filesystems you're using, fragmentation, and partition layout.
In short, whether you're copying files individually or cloning a disk, you're unlikely to end up with a perfectly identical copy of your original disk on the new drive. Which means, unfortunately, to confirm each file has copied correctly you're going to need to compare and verify each file on Disk B to confirm it is the same as the corresponding file on Disk A.
One of the easiest ways to automate confirming the files in two locations match exactly is to use a tool called rsync. The rsync utility is usually used to archive files or synchronize files between two locations. By default, rsync will do a few quick checks to see if two files look to be identical. It does this by comparing the sizes and modification times of the two files. If the files have the same name, size, and modification time then rsync will assume the files are a match.
However, if we want to make really sure the files are identical then we can instruct rsync to look at the checksums of each file. This basically compares the "fingerprints" of the file in both locations and confirms they match. When rsync finds a file where the checksums do not match it will either print the name of the file that isn't identical or copy the original file to overwrite the new file.
Let's look at an example. In this instance, I'm going to assume I have two hard drives attached to my computer. One is mounted at the location /media/disk_a and the other is mounted at /media/disk_b. Using the following command, I will ask rsync to check the contents of both disks. Since I'm using the "--dry-run" flag, rsync will print out any mismatched files between the two disks, but not do anything about the files not matching. Basically, it just reports it found an issue and will not try to fix it.
rsync -av --checksum --dry-run /media/disk_a/ /media/disk_b/
Going over the flags listed here, briefly, the "-av" part means rsync should pretend it is archiving or syncing files between the two disks and print out status messages along the way. The "--checksum" flag means we want to use a checksum to verify all the files match, not just guess files match based on their size and modification times. The "--dry-run" flag tells rsync to print out the names of any mismatched files, but not take any action.
We can omit the "--dry-run" flag. This will unleash rsync to copy or overwrite any files on Drive B which do not match the contents of Drive A. In short, when rsync is done, all of the files on Drive A should be copied to (and verified on) Drive B:
rsync -av --checksum /media/disk_a/ /media/disk_b/
The "--checksum" flag, and other options the rsync command understands, are covered in detail in the rsync manual page.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Archcraft 2023.01.01
Aditya Shakya has announced the release of Archcraft 2023.01.01, a brand-new version of the project's lightweight, Arch-based Linux distribution that ships with Openbox and bspwm window managers (both highly customised) and a careful selection of lightweight applications: "January 2023 release available. You need to re-install Archcraft for this update. After that, you can update to the next release with pacman. Changelog: created the ISO image base from scratch; better network manager support, various VPN plugins; better Bluetooth support; Pipewire for sound/audio (systemwide, Bluetooth, jack); better printer support; almost all audio, video and image codecs; better file manager functionality (mounting, networking, archiving); better multi-monitor support; CJK fonts pre-installed; new themes for both Openbox and bspwm; creating user themes is super easy now; many minor changes." Here is the brief release announcement.
Archcraft 2023.01.01 -- Greeted by the welcome screen
(full image size: 3.0MB, resolution: 3840x2400 pixels)
DragonFly BSD 6.4.0
The DragonFly BSD project has published a new release, version 6.4.0, which provides the latest evolution of the 6.x series. The release announcement highlights some of the key features, particularly advancements made to the operating system's drivers. "DragonFly version 6.4 is the next step in the 6.x release series. This version has hardware support for type-2 hypervisors with NVMM, an amdgpu driver, the experimental ability to remote-mount HAMMER2 volumes, and many other changes. The details of all commits between the 6.2 and 6.4 releases are available in the associated commit messages for 6.4.0. Changes: recommend updating all systems, a locally-exploitable kernel vulnerability was fixed for this release; fix execvPe()s environment passing; fix ktrace's handling of 'long' system call return values; fix a sysv semaphore panic related to an exit race; fix a namecache bloating issue related to dead entries that could slow systems down over time...." Additional details can be found in the project's release notes for DragonFly BSD 6.4.0.
Nitrux d5c7cdff
Nitrux is a Linux distribution based on Debian's Unstable (sid) branch with additional packages pulled in from Ubuntu repositories. The distribution's latest release (which is alternatively labelled "2.6.0", "ff", and "d5c7cdff") includes version 6.1.0 of the Linux kernel, KDE Plasma 5.26.4, Pipewire, and includes Wayland as a session option. "We've updated the following components of the distribution. For other information, see Notes. KDE Plasma to version 5.26.4, KDE Frameworks to version 5.101.0, and KDE Gear to version 22.12.0. Firefox to version 108.0.1. We've updated MESA to version 23.0git. Disclaimer: We do not develop or package MESA. To file bugs against MESA, please use their bug tracker. We've added PipeWire and Wayland by default. Plasma (Wayland) is available to select from SDDM. Important: If using an NVIDIA GPU, check the KDE Wiki instructions here to use the Plasma (Wayland) session, YMMV. Disclaimer: We do not develop KWin, Wayland, Plasma Wayland or the NVIDIA proprietary driver. For the best experience using the Plasma (Wayland) session, use a Linux-friendly GPU and driver such as Intel or AMD. The Plasma (Wayland) session is not the default; the Plasma (X11) session is still the default." Additional information is provided in the release announcement.
OpenMandriva Lx 23.01 "ROME"
OpenMandriva's grand entry to the world of "rolling-release" distributions comes to fruition today with the initial release the project's "ROME" edition. It aims to continually provide the most up-to-date software packages without compromising the system stability. "To make sure you do not fall behind, we are announcing a new way to keep you up to date - ROME, the OpenMandriva rolling edition. ROME is the rolling release, designed for individual users; it will receive the most up-to-date packages, including recent security and bug-fix updates. A lot of interesting things have happened in the rolling branch since the traditional point release. Among others, KDE Frameworks 5.101, Plasma Desktop 5.26.4, KDE Applications 22.12.0 are in, and everything has been rebuilt with the Clang 15.06 compiler. Linux kernel 6.1.1 (Clang-compiled kernel as default, with the option to install GCC-compiled kernel easily from the om-welcome module)." See the release announcement and the release notes for further information.
Nobara Project 37
Nobara Project is a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it. The distribution comes with certain features that do not ship with the regular Fedora, such as WINE dependencies, OBS Studio, 3rd party codec packages for GStreamer, NVIDIA drivers, and some package fixes. Nobara's latest release is based on Fedora 37: "Nobara packages rebased on top of Fedora 37. Notable package updates: Linux kernel updated to 6.0.16, all previous patches included, gamescope HDR patches added; glibc updated to 2.36 (still includes all previous fixes); GameScope updated to latest git; MangoHud updated to 0.6.8; GOverlay updated to 0.9.1; Blender updated to 3.4.1; ROCM OpenCL/HIP packages updated to 5.4.1; Steam Tinker Launch updated to 12.0 and re-added to Base OS; vkBasalt updated to 0.3.2.8; supergfxctl updated to 5.0.1 (removes broken/invalid 'dedicated' mode); asusctl updated to 4.5.8; AppArmor dnsmasq profile updated to allow WayDroid...." Here is the complete changelog.
Nobara Project 37 -- Exploring the application menu
(full image size: 7.9MB, resolution: 3840x2400 pixels)
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,815
- Total data uploaded: 42.7TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Arch Linux and its children
We began this week's Weekly newsletter with a discussion on Arch Linux, a popular rolling release distribution which has become an increasingly popular parent distribution in recent years. There are a lot of child distributions which use Arch as a base along with the Calamares system installer and a pre-configured desktop environment.
We'd like to hear how many of our readers use Arch or one of Arch's children. Let us know your reasons for choosing a member of the Arch Linux family in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on the number of partitions on our readers' hard drives in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Are you running Arch?
| I am running Arch Linux: | 433 (17%) |
| I run a child of Arch Linux: | 773 (30%) |
| I do not run a member of the Arch family: | 1407 (54%) |
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| Website News |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 16 January 2023. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Weekly Archive and Article Search pages. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Arch EndeavourOS (by Tim Maskell on 2023-01-09 01:09:44 GMT from Norway)
Running Arch or EnveavourOS for quite some time.Years actually. Great distros.
2 • tamed ARCH (by every-other-?nix on 2023-01-09 02:45:58 GMT from New Zealand)
Running RebornOS (main) and Manjaro (faster, newer machine), both with Cinnamon desktop. The newer machine is to replace the main one as its a 14 yo HP dv7 (i7, 8GB). Let's say it has been a multi month process and nowhere near completed. :) Doesn;t help to be semi-retired and so days turn to weeks...
3 • The Arch Club (by 8ight.bit.al on 2023-01-09 02:46:58 GMT from United States)
Arch Linux seems to me like learning a martial art. One has to pay the dues; put in the work and take the lumps. Tends to keep out the also-rans. When mastered, it's a skill to be proud of.
I got tired of the constant updates, wondering if this was the one that broke things. I don't want to work that hard for my computer; I want my computer to work hard for me.
Eagerly await every issue of DW; Thanks for everyone's many fine efforts.
May I suggest the new Salix release for a review. The last DW review was August 2013.
4 • Arch (by furby on 2023-01-09 02:50:06 GMT from United States)
I like arch, and the AUR, but do not usually run it.
If I did, I would use a downstream version. I just don't want to spend a lot of time setting up any Linux. I wanna do my work.
Another problem for me is the frequency and size of updates. If I could find a more fixed release Arch with some updates, I might try it (and yes, I've tried Manaro and have other problems with it).
I also don't get part of the Arch way, that users should have to do the command line install because they have to learn at least some Linux to do it. I have installed Arch from scratch, and find many of those things to be Arch-specific. Yes, users do have to know some Linux, but I think an automated install outweighs this.
5 • Arch (by DaveB on 2023-01-09 03:09:45 GMT from Australia)
I have set up Arch - it was a fun challenge. However I only did it once. I have tried multiple distros over the years, but these days stick with Arch derivatives - simply as they are easier to install.
One thing about Arch - you learn the basics, and if you break something, it can be repaired in the CLI. This encourages skills useful for those supporting any distro.
Also the doco is excellent. Even before I first installed Arch, I often found myself looking at the Arch doco to solve an issue. Today if assisting with something else, the Arch doco is where I often start.
I'm looking at this week's poll. I find it interesting that only 54% of respondents do not run a form of Arch (but only 155 people have responded so far).
Have a good day :0)
6 • Arch allegedly making things unnecessarily difficult (by Josh Smith on 2023-01-09 03:15:26 GMT from Australia)
I have not found Arch unnecessarily difficult like you seem to think, Jesse. In fact, I've found it a lot easier to use long-term than any other distribution (and like you, I'm a distro-hopper, and have tried close to a hundred different distributions). Sure, the initial set up can be unnecessarily challenging for newcomers, but once you've done it a few times it's a cakewalk. In fact, I could probably do it from memory despite last installing Arch years ago.
Its approach to package management in particular is easier, in my experience, than any other distros. Since starting using Linux, I've found myself frequently needing to build my own packages due to no distribution having all the packages I want. With Gentoo I find myself always having to look up EAPI standards and ebuild functions (the documentation for which I have found difficult to find in the past and difficult to understand) in order to build my own package, with distributions using the RPM package manager you need to understand the macros used and with Debian packages you need to understand the make-like syntax of the packaging files (which I've found quite challenging). As for Arch Linux, you merely need to understand shell script (the language of the Linux command-line) in order to be able to build your own packages. Creating my own Arch package takes me mere minutes to achieve, whilst with other distros it would likely take me hours.
I also like how any query I have about my Arch system is likely to be answerable in mere minutes by looking it up on the Arch Wiki. Plus Arch's repositories, if you include the AUR, are some of the vastest of any distribution, so it's less frequent that I even need to package for it than I do with other distros like Fedora and openSUSE. I will admit that pacman's syntax is less intuitive than that of most Linux package mangers (e.g. pacman -S package is how you install a package, versus apt install package for APT), but with enough experience with it this becomes an insignificant detail as you'll eventually have all the commands you need memorized.
7 • Arch Linux and children (by mnrv-ovrf-year-c on 2023-01-09 03:21:07 GMT from Puerto Rico)
Before spring last year I knew nothing, but *nothing* about Arch Linux. Didn't know there was a distro which was 3/5 of the name of the tallest mountain in Africa, didn't know another was named after a British warship, and a bunch of others were named "Arc-something" without a lot of imagination. Didn't know darned good Linux distros came from the Low Countries.
Welp, today I'm full of Manjaro, EndeavourOS and ArcoLinux. Firstly many thanks to the people at Arch Linux after 20 years of pushing the envelope of technology everyday. Many thanks to the developers and contributors of the "children" distros for making it possible for somebody who *doesn't* want to say, "BTW I use Arch!" Manjaro good, EndeavourOS is the best and Messeman has the most moves. Period.
8 • Arch guided installer (by R Hoagland on 2023-01-09 03:42:41 GMT from United States)
Installing the "Arch way*" is definitely a learning experience and worth doing once, but I'm a little surprised Jesse didn't try the guided installer that's been included in Arch for quite a while now.
9 • no Arch for me. (by Bobbie Sellers on 2023-01-09 05:47:54 GMT from United States)
I have avoided Arch and learned about at least 16 years ago. If I was 20 years younger and in good health I might try it just to learn about this sort of computing. I came from the Amiga GUI OS to Mandriva Linux and on to PCLinuxOS 64. All I have to say is hurray for Gael Duval who created the interactive GUI installer for Mandrake. When I started with 2006 Mandriva it came on 6 CDs and the installer included prompts for the next disk. The best use for Windows XP that I ever found was copying the 6 iso files and making them into bootable disks for use.
Thanks for the Newsletter.
The new file system for Slax sounds interesting but is this for the Ubuntu or the Slackware based Slax?
10 • Arch or Arch-based - not for end users (by LInux Refugee on 2023-01-09 06:14:41 GMT from United States)
I've been using Arch for 4-5 years. I haven't found it a challenge, but have seen significant counts of users hitting issues and not being able to resolve them when something goes wrong within the packages. Grub Aug 2022 is a prime example.
AUR isn't supported, and it's on users to understand what's going on. Yet youtubers keep touting AUR as a benefit.
I do like Reborn and EndeavourOS. These (and other Arch-based distros) are doing quite noble work in bringing Arch to the masses.
Jesse's writeup is good and fairly done, while raising some distinct questions users should think about. The time commitment and ability to resolve problems are critical to success with this distro.
11 • Arch Installers (by Sidney Skinner on 2023-01-09 06:36:41 GMT from Barbados)
Besides children of Arch they are several Arch Installers. These are not distributions, therefore should not be included in Distrowatch, just installers. They install stock Arch. Calam-Arch-Installer.iso https://sourceforge.net/projects/blue-arch-installer/
Arch Linux GUI https://archlinuxgui.in/
Anarchy Installer This is in Distrowatch but should not be as all it installs is stock Arch.
Zen Installer https://github.com/spookykidmm/zen_installer
There are several others. The one I use is just a personal project of the author and per author's request I will not name it here but can be found via an internet search of Vanilla Arch installers
12 • Arch guided installer (by Roger Brown on 2023-01-09 06:44:34 GMT from Australia)
@8 Unfortunately the Archlinux guided installer has been malfunctioning for quite a few months - it's clearly not well supported by the Archlinux devs. In fact they have removed reference to it in recent Archlinux iso releases.
However in the January 2023 release Archinstall is back working - hopefully for good.
I've been running Arch for some years now - it's a great distro and once installed is simple to maintain. And as already mentioned the documentation is unrivalled.
13 • Arch Install (by Kerry Kappell on 2023-01-09 06:45:04 GMT from United States)
The official installation guide doesn't tell you that there is a menu driven CLI install script (or it's just hard to find). Boot up the install media and type: archinstall. It can set up the network, xorg, server or desktop configuration easily.
14 • Arch installers (by Roger Brown on 2023-01-09 06:54:03 GMT from Australia)
@11 The only installer of those you mention that is still current is Calam-Arch (first on your list) - still being updated monthly and works quite well. The online installer at https://endeavouros.com/ is similar.
AFAIK those are the two best installers providing a near pristine online installation.
15 • Arch, Manjaro, rsync (by Guido on 2023-01-09 07:15:32 GMT from Philippines)
I use an Arch derivative on my machines, Manjaro. It is very easy to install and upgrades are stable as all Arch packages are first extensively tested before going into Manjaro's stable branch.
Pacman is extremely quick to use with a few helpers. Arch has fewer packages than Debian because Debian has many programs broken into several smaller packages. Most of the time you have to install them all anyway.
Note: There is an interface for rsync called Grsync.
16 • Everyone who is famous has fame (by Trihexagonal on 2023-01-09 07:19:21 GMT from United States)
But not everyone who is famous has infamy. And when it comes to discos, Kali is famous for its infamy, That makes it notorious.
People who don't use it are the ones compelled to espouse "Buyer Beware" to those who do, in my notoriety
I've never used Arch, but I like what I'm hearing as far as no hand holding or dumbing down of the userbase.
BTW, I use FreeBSD, too.
17 • Arch (by Matthew on 2023-01-09 07:30:30 GMT from United Kingdom)
Contrary to Jesse's experience I find that it takes more time and effort to strip out the bloat from a "user friendly" distribution than it takes to install and configure Arch how I like it. YMMV.
18 • Installing Arch (by jesuiswiizzz on 2023-01-09 08:19:48 GMT from Belgium)
After installing Arch manually for a few times, I finally decided to use archfi/archdi, and I've never had any problem ever since. I know it prevents me from asking questions in the official forum, but since I've never had the faintest (real) issue in several years and I've always found solutions in the forum or somewhere else, I don't mind. If working a little helps me have the system that I want, and nothing else, it's OK for me.
19 • arch (by babu on 2023-01-09 08:34:51 GMT from Belgium)
Thank you for reviewing Arch.
Only disagree with Mr Jesse Smith on 'archinstall'. My experience is that this script is not too complicated and does a very good job.
Maybe the simplest way to install Arch is to install ArchBang, the arch 'child', provided by Mr Green. The installer is very simple and you can afterwards replace i3 easily by any desktop environment you like.
Of course there are many more 'children' you might try.
20 • Arch (by Benoitghar on 2023-01-09 08:38:54 GMT from Australia)
Arch was the very first Linux distro I installed - the instructions in the wiki are (or were) easy to follow and I've never got the aura around the installation process - seems a bit of the "look at me" factor rather than a rite of passage.
I don't believe the process taught me anything about Linux except maybe the internals of installers - basically anyone capable of reading instructions should be able to do it.
I liked the system and it worked well but over time I just found it didn't have the software I wanted (I am not prepared to trust the AUR and I've never liked flatpaks) so I moved on to MX where I get all that I want from the Debian repos without third party involvement - a reason I moved to Linux in the first place.
21 • Arch again (by Dr.J on 2023-01-09 09:37:45 GMT from Germany)
Maybe it's a generational thing. I started with computers in the 80s and in those days we had to start by finding the right driver for the built-in hard drive before we could even install an operating system. The whole process usually ended with the printer installation, which took a good half day. Compared to that, I didn't find my first Arch installation very complicated, because many things have to be done manually (language settings, harddisk partitioning, creating the fstab etc.), but are solved very comfortably, for example the internet connection via dhcp. But my impression is that today we live in a world where the graphical user interface, language commands and plug'n'play have become the standard. A good example is Mabox as one of the archchildren providing graphical user interfaces for the Openbox-WM and for Conky. Say goodbye to "${color gray30}${swapbar}${color}${color #61c4bc" and welcome to the 21st century. In this respect Arch is perhaps one of the last dinosaurs...
22 • Arch: the Arch-wiki (by JeffC on 2023-01-09 11:35:11 GMT from United States)
The Arch wiki was great back 10 to 15 years ago.
Then it would give instructions on digging into the internal workings of a Linux based OS.
Now? No digging into the configuration and learning the inner workings.
It seems to all just be:
sudo systemd fix-it-for-me
23 • Arch (by fox on 2023-01-09 12:19:38 GMT from Canada)
I had an installation of Arch installed on my laptop, and ran it as an occasional distro for two years without any problems. I installed it as a challenge - the installation was presented in my local Linux club, and I thought it would be fun to try it. I definitely learned more about the command line from doing the installation, and was pleased that I could make it work. I also filled it in with applications from AUR so as to have a distro that I could use all the time if I ever wanted to.
The two biggest problems I had with Arch were the huge updates and the time it took to build some programs when installed or updated. Eventually I removed the distro; I wasn't really using it anyway. Presently I have Manjaro running as a secondary distro. Like Arch, it is very responsive in comparison to my main distro, Ubuntu. But also like Arch, the updates are huge. I have had it for about two years and it has never broken. Because of its responsiveness, I enjoy using it more than Ubuntu, but I wouldn't trust any rolling release distro as my main driver.
24 • Openmandriva rolling (by EireLinux on 2023-01-09 12:37:32 GMT from Ireland)
Congratulations to Openmandriva for entering the rolling world. Since I use only rolling distros and I like "keep it complicated" philosophy, to me another distro like this is a huge benefit.
Especially rolling distro with a bunch of configuration tools and KDE desktop, which is only good looking and flexible desktop for Linux/Unix today.
Speaking of which, porting KDE to OpenBSD is a great news, as soon it is implemented fully, gonna try OpenBSD.
25 • Arch (by Fabio on 2023-01-09 12:57:07 GMT from Italy)
I have never used Arch and i shalll not use in the future, because i prefer
stable distributions as like Debian, Mint, etc,
but I have to say that the web site ArchWiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/) is
one of the best with very good documentation generally valid for each
linux distribution. For example, try to search "systemd" in this site and you will
find a nice collected source of information on this item.
26 • Arch (by rich on 2023-01-09 13:17:56 GMT from United States)
I prefer using disttro's that take a lot of the leg work out for you. I don't use Arch but do use Endeavour OS Linux and Manjaro. I used Manjaro for a couple years and find that Endeavour is also excellent and up to speed with it's package management. Updating is time consuming but that's fine for me as I like the latest improved versions of the software as it comes out. I also use AUR repository and have about a dozen packages from there running on my computer also. But you might run into issues with some of the software not working or compiling right. All in all I'm glad I got away from the Debian, Ubuntu, Mint arena and also stop using Fedora and it's workings. Endeavour is pretty smooth and works well for me. I'm happy it works well and support forums are typically 'very good'.
Rich ;)
27 • Arch Linux (by dah on 2023-01-09 13:19:57 GMT from United States)
Several years ago, I went through the long Arch Linux install process. I learned quite a bit and used it as my preferred distro for a couple of years. After a couple more installs (with a new desktop and a laptop), however, I decided to try some of the "Arch children" (Antergos, Manjaro, etc.) that came with installers. After trying several, I settled on Artix and have been using it ever since.
I agree that Arch Linux itself seems to be made more difficult than it has to be on purpose. On the Arch forums, if you ask a question on something, more often than not you'll get a snotty response telling you that you obviously didn't read the documentation and that you don't know what you're doing. Very annoying.
The folks at Arch like to say that you can you can build your Arch system the way you want it with your choice of applications, yet they don't give you a choice on the init software. With Arch, it's systemd or else. That is a direct contradiction of the "Arch way." Artix gives you alternatives. I started with OpenRC and have recently switched to dinit.
Arch is a solid base, but it's derivatives are better than the original.
28 • No rolling releases for me (by Zed on 2023-01-09 13:28:33 GMT from Italy)
The "rolling release" distros are for a very small audience of users: at any moment you can have a problem with an application or with the entire operating system. The only model that has a future is the LTS one: an "enterprise distro" with support for 10 years + an experimental distribution every 6-12 months (with at least 2 months of testing behind).
29 • Arch (by The Amnesiac Philosopher on 2023-01-09 14:03:54 GMT from United States)
I appreciate Jesse explaining what Arch means by following the KISS philosophy, because, I've always thought it meant that it referred to something completely different.
Several years ago (around 2016 ???)...when Arch had really blown up in popularity and after hearing how it would only install the packages that you need...back before "By the way" had become such a meme...I tested building an Openbox system from the ground up on Arch, Debian, and Ubuntu. Back then, if I could "eek out" some more resource savings on my old hardware, that's what I was looking for.
I was used to building my own system from a Debian netinstall, so I had a list of packages to install so that the test would be as close as possible for each of the 3 builds. Granted, I had to use pacman to find the names of some packages since their naming convention is different on Arch...
My results were surprising to me...
Lowest RAM usage/2nd highest Disc space usage: Ubuntu
Lowest Disc space usage/2nd highest RAM usage: Debian
Highest RAM and Disc space usage: Arch
I haven't tried this type of test again since then, and it probably would have been better to use another distribution; such as, Fedora (or whatever) back then.
Anwho...no hate towards Arch. It's fun to use, but I'm an old-fogey and prefer a stable distro.
30 • @28 WHAT?? (by Reinaldo Fernandez on 2023-01-09 14:10:50 GMT from Venezuela)
Rolling release is for a very small audience? What? Are you one of those people that think that when others like something that you don't, they must be a very small group because you are the center of the universe? By the way, I have been using Debian Testing for years and no real big issues, and also Sid on one machine and no issues, both are rolling
31 • @28: (by dragonmouth on 2023-01-09 14:46:32 GMT from United States)
Each to his own.
LTS in an enterprise environment, yes. When you have thousands of workstations to update, LTS is the only way to go. On an individual desktop, it's ridiculous. One day you wake up and your LTS distro is 4-5 years behind.
I have used PCLinuxOS (rolling) for more than 6 years, 3-5 updates per week. Never had a glitch or a hiccup. Actually, I don't give a rat's behind how many others use rolling distros. It works for me.
32 • @#3 I got tired of the constant updates, (by Jeffersonian-1789 on 2023-01-09 15:00:31 GMT from Poland)
Hello #3:
I understand, I actually stop using (deleted it!) Windows 10, because updates were a mess, slow and increasingly bulky... and not even "good" (often buggy).
I use Fedora, and in the package control configuration file (/etc/dnf/dnf.conf), I usually (manually) deactivate the update of large bulky packages like Firefox, etc... and only do an update once a month by removing the "#" on the exclude line like this:
#exclude=FlightGear-data
I like Fedora for many reasons, one is that the RPM package system is more ad advanced than the old Debian packages used on many distros.
I find it ridiculous that the many Linux distros use (pretty much) the same unified kernel, but so many package management systems: it was great to experiment, now, very much like for LSB (linux Standard Base) it is time to unify Linuxes around a single package system, and outside of religious wars, nothing prevents this... and to continue experimental better thing !
Note that even RPM's are not fully unified : many RPM packages for OpenSuse just don't worlk out of the box on Fedora (latest: 37), for example try "Sigil"...
And yes, a "unified " Linux package management system, would allow to create simple GUI on many Desktops too, now it is too complicated, so there is a link Desktop Packages
JF-1789
33 • Running Arch Linux (by TimC on 2023-01-09 15:11:55 GMT from United States)
I have run Arch Linux on my main host since 2014. I think people who say it is subject to "frequent breakage" are doing something wrong.
But yes, I agree with the reviewer's comment about it appealing to those who want to read all the docs and do everything "hands on". I was an administrator of many systems from the late 70s until 2009, from IBM mainframes to big Sun Solaris systems. With hundreds or even thousands of users depending on my systems being correct and reliable, I had to know what to do and how to do it when things went haywire. So, "hands on" is in my nature.
34 • Gentoo (by MJ on 2023-01-09 15:42:16 GMT from United States)
I remember running Arch back in 2008-2010 as a secondary to Slackware, which was my preference at the time. I've since moved to Gentoo and have been quite content. Gentoo and Arch both have had great documentation over the years. I've preferred portage over pacman/AUR. If you're interested in something that gives you more control both are great options.
35 • Verifying a disk's contents was copied properly (by Mark on 2023-01-09 15:50:41 GMT from Austria)
It's worth mentioning that:
1. Clonezilla has the option to check the checksums of all files after cloning drive A to drive B
2. There is a GUI tool FreeFileSync which can conveniently check files in two directories using binary comparison.
Cheers!
36 • @33: I must be doing something wrong (by Matt on 2023-01-09 15:59:39 GMT from United States)
I'm a fairly experienced linux user (started back in 2001). Over that time I have tried every major distribution and many minor ones. Arch broke for me after about one week while updating daily, and I would not recommend Arch for that reason.
The emphasis of Arch on updating everything constantly comes at the expense of stability. Debian testing/unstable is a rolling release with better quality control.
37 • Arch review (by Dasherpack on 2023-01-09 16:28:32 GMT from Spain)
I feel this review was one of the best in this site in the last three months, mainly because it is a review that is very useful to users. I think that reviewing the top 52 distros every week would be way more useful to users than choosing weird distros nobody has heard about.
However, I will still read them, because your reviews are one of the bestin the Linux community.
38 • Arch inspired distros (by Otis on 2023-01-09 17:02:41 GMT from United States)
They seem snappy, crisp, and easy to set up and use. But... love getting away from systemd.. so.. MX helps with that choice and behaves quite the same for me.
39 • Manjaro & Chakra (by Fred on 2023-01-09 17:16:25 GMT from United States)
I've been running Manjaro for about a year now. I really liked Chakra, another Arch child, but it gave up the ship. I tried Kubuntu and it was okay, but I missed not having an up to date OS. Then they started to use Snap which I found a bit clunky. So now I'm with Manjaro. Haven't had any issues.
40 • arch (by thym on 2023-01-09 17:30:35 GMT from Greece)
There is not a pefect distro. the best distro, a distro for all. Everyone chooses and sticks to something more according to his needs, preferences or by luck. I think this review succeds to this: describing some type users that is most probable to find Arch their distro to go.
Personally, i was running arch (10-11 years before, towards the end of the /etc/rc.conf era). I used to update it, three or more times a week, by following these steps: check for announcements, warnings, tips in the official site, check the forum to see if an update had caused any problems, then perform the upgrade by applying manual intervention if instructed so. Sometimes, i had to fix something, usually minor, afterwards,
To be honest, i do not have the time anymore for all this staff.
Bleeding edge distros usually demanding more time for administration: the advantages for most users are questionable.
About the installer, all that typing for me is no. I prefer to perform an installation without reading and copying staff. Graphical or ncurses tools are okay. I do not mind to edit text files -on the contrary, i like it- but i prefer to do this after the installation.
Finally, aur may have 1 billion programs but i do not 1 billion programs.
41 • Arch (by Robert on 2023-01-09 17:39:06 GMT from United States)
I've run Arch for many years off and on.
Every now and then something breaks badly enough to send me off to another distro. And while I will be happy with the user-facing simplicity of other distros for a while, eventually their automation and configuration management just gets in my way and sends me back to Arch, where the system will always do what I tell it to do.
Even the manual setup process, while more work than necessary in most cases, can be a plus if, say, I don't want to use GRUB or want something specific from my filesystems.
42 • Arch or what else? (by Risto on 2023-01-09 17:51:28 GMT from Finland)
I have to confess: I have never thought of running Arch. I consider myself as a USER, I use a computer to do things. I'm not a Linux enthusiast, interested in setting up a Linux system from CLI, when there are other distros I can use after a minimal set up time. The usual: time, language, personal accounts etc and you are USING the system. I admit, as a Windows refugee, my only interface to my system is GUI.
43 • @32: (by dragonmouth on 2023-01-09 18:42:58 GMT from United States)
I wholeheartedly agree with you but the Balkanization of Linux is another topic that is better not broached. (just like systemd vs. sysVinit). Any Tom, Dick or Harry can make a few cosmetic changes in a distro and come out with a new one. How many of the 1,000+ distros actually introduce a novel idea?
There used to be a Universal Distro Updater called AppImage. But that was not good enough for RedHat and Canonical. They invented their own Universal programs. So now we have three Universal Updaters. And that is the Achilles' Heel of Linux. Everybody wants to dictate the standards to the rest of us.
44 • Balkanization is good (by Matt on 2023-01-09 18:59:20 GMT from United States)
I think Balkanization is good. Linux doesn't put up barriers to changing anything. You can create a new package manager, desktop environment, init system, or pretty much anything else you want to try. If it turns out to be a bad idea, it will wither and die. If it is a good idea, it will grow and people will improve upon it. This type of innovation Linux allows is the exact opposite of Windows or macOS.
45 • endeavourOS (by phil on 2023-01-09 20:59:33 GMT from Netherlands)
I am using EndeavourOs now for 8 months and everything work perfectly ... I used before Linuxmint (cinnamon or Xfce) and now I prefer EndeavourOS for its reactivity . I have discovered and installed some new applications that Mint does not offer and no need to search for a PPA or anything .... everything is included in Endeavour (Arch) ... That makes the difference . Appimages and Flatpaks are available too, that makes a great and wide choice
46 • dircmp (by Will on 2023-01-09 21:57:56 GMT from United States)
I got sick of trying to figure out rsync for comparisons of directories and wrote a python script to do the job. I like it when I'm trying to figure out how to sync two directories or see if there are dupes in one dir. It will do a fast check (digest parts of files) or slow check (full digest), it doesn't use dates at all. The basic output shows:
files only in one dir
files with same name but different digest
files in both with same digest (identical)
files with same name but different digest
etc.
I will eventually tweak it to show sync plans and execute those plans, but it works as a lister, now.
https://github.com/decuser/decuser_python_playground
future direction
https://decuser.github.io/unix/python/2022/12/15/dircmp.py-improvements.html
47 • @32 (by Panther on 2023-01-09 23:12:35 GMT from United States)
That is a good question, why is there not a universal package management tool across all distros?
You can google search this question and there a a bunch of explanations but they basically come down to a few factors:
1. There is no standardised organisation to the file system followed by all distros, the locations of files / libs / configuration files varies.
2. Naming conventions vary across distros, not every library has the same name on each distro.
3. Dependencies also vary across distros. A distro such as Debian may have one large package with more files / libs whild a distro such as arch or gentoo may break them down into several smaller packages.
4. The security model (if any) of the distro. For example your universal package would have to have selinux and apparmor rules (at least).
5. Licensing. The various distros have different policies and approaches to what can be packaged .
6. Fractured community standards. Some people would view speed as the most important feature, ohters would object to big borther dictating how to package, etc.
This is why flatpack or snap are the current model, but they require each package to contain all the libs / dependencies.
48 • @#27 Arch, Debian. . . (by rich on 2023-01-09 23:59:32 GMT from United States)
quote. . . "I agree that Arch Linux itself seems to be made more difficult than it has to be on purpose. On the Arch forums, if you ask a question on something, more often than not you'll get a snotty response telling you that you obviously didn't read the documentation and that you don't know what you're doing. Very annoying."
I had a similar experience about 14 years ago with Debian. . . . Some of us don't aspire to become software programmers or hardware engineers. I was the target of 'righteous' indignation for asking a 'quote' stupid question in the Debian forums and the responses I received were far from moderated. That's was a wake up call to me about the types of people out there who think everyone who doesn't ascribe to their learning behaviors or standards are just plain stupid. Albeit we're not all rocket scientists.
I just want to use my computer for my needs without 'Bill Gates' and his monolithic capitalistic reach on me or the government prying into my computer. The capitalist greed is 'good' analogy is everywhere I look and quite frankly has put most of us in a downward spiral today. I don't like Windows (stopped using it with 'Windows ME' and that's when I went to Linux route. Yes, I have learned much more than I can relate but the indignation is what turned me off. I can only say that it's good most 'Forums' are moderated with 'decent' people who willing to give you a learning hand.
End of Rant. . . .
Rich;)
49 • Arch love (by Francois on 2023-01-10 00:21:17 GMT from France)
When I started using Linux seriously, Ubuntu was the rising star, and soon after appeared many Ubuntu derived distributions, very popular at that time.
I enjoyed more Debian derived distros like MEPIS (now MX Linux) and SIDUX (now siduction). The latter introduced me in the world of the rolling release distributions: a blessing, especially if you need to reinstall few weeks before an official release.
But the Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora world has too many patches on the same release of the software, while the original programmers are advancing to new, updated, fixed, feature rich versions of their softwares.
In this domain Archlinux has no equal, having the stable version of each software when their developers consider it stable, and after few of consistency tests of the Arch developers. These reasons make Arch the base distribution of choice of a lot of new Arch derived distros that nowadays have taken the place in the past used by Ubuntu and Debian derived distros. It's flexibility and versatility permit them to provide amazing projects like Xerolinux, EndeavourOS, Garuda, Manjaro...
I use Arch since 2010. I install on my family's computers Kubuntu LTS, but I still care for having the latest release of stable software. As many of you said, the responsiveness of pure Arch derived distros is without equal. And you can have every day the last stable release of everything by simply writing: sudo pacman -Syu
50 • Arch classic (by Gunslinger on 2023-01-10 00:24:08 GMT from United States)
Been running Arch going on 8 years. Enjoy looking at the others out there, but for me they fall short.
Enjoy what ever you like
51 • Arch love II (by Francis on 2023-01-10 00:55:58 GMT from France)
The current situation of the Linux lovers is that the distribution is no more at the centre of the attention because you can have similar experiences with many distributions.
Too many non enterprise developers are busy with patches, refinement, esthetics, ... and too few maintain core packages or advance useful tools.
But it is an amatorial world where everybody decide where to spend his time despite missing the whole picture.
52 • ARCH Linux (by Rodrigo on 2023-01-10 01:01:46 GMT from Spain)
I find installing Arch a waste of time, as Jesse explained in the article, you have lots of options to get the same in less time (and with fewer headaches). Having said that, we say in Spain that, "para gustos los colores", this is why I respect people who have hobbies I find weird like spending their spare time installing Linux systems from scratch just for fun... but, please, don't tell that this hobby is "simple".
53 • Hyperbola (by Andy Prough on 2023-01-10 01:19:49 GMT from United States)
My one Arch-based distro that I'm using is called Hyperbola, which has no systemd, no dbus, uses xenocara for its video server, sndio for its sound server, doas instead of sudo, and in a lot of ways emulates BSD. I've really enjoyed my time with it, especially because the developers are so completely committed to only using software with completely free licenses.
54 • Arch (by penguinx86 on 2023-01-10 02:06:41 GMT from United States)
I tried Arch Linux when I constantly distro hopped 10-12 years ago. It's been a while since I used it. I can't remember much about it. Most likely, I quit using it because it was incompatible with the Wifi adapter in my laptop.
55 • Arch (by Tran Older on 2023-01-10 03:20:30 GMT from Vietnam)
I remember when Arch was young
We all techies had so much fun
Holding hands and days were done
Had an old good lappy and a place of our own
But the biggest kick I ever got
Was setting up a thing called the Openbox
While the other kids watch soccer 'round the clock
We were glueing our eyes to the Openbox.
Well, Arch coding is something shocking
When your fingers just can't keep still.
I never knew me a better time, and I guess I never will
Oh, lawdy mama, those weekend nights ...
56 • Arch learning experience (by FriarTux on 2023-01-10 08:44:33 GMT from Australia)
I've used arch since it came on the scene. Learn Arch and you will learn just about all Linux distros. The archinstaller is buggy. All you do is answer alot of questions. The real learning comes from installing arch the arch. I have learned more from arch than any other distro. Its a great learning experience and am glad to have tackled it 100's of times.
57 • Arch Linux Review (by Otis on 2023-01-10 14:46:47 GMT from United States)
Reviewing from the standpoint of being highly technically savvy around Linux and coding in general lends to a bit of reported disappointment marbled through the review itself, for the reason that what needs to be done with Arch is within the know-how grasp of the reviewer and deemed not necessary in the face of so many distros out there that have installers, most notably Arch based distros. "
There are many posts in here, not just today but through the years of Distrowatch history, expressing notions of Arch (and sometimes Gentoo) being a very good way to learn Linux in general just by working through installation and configuration to the user's liking. Those comments are being made by not just beginners in the world of Linux, but also by those who've been using Linux for some time but likely started right off on their Linux journey looking for an easy to install and configure distro that "just works."
That, "...I often get the impression Arch Linux is trying to make things harder just for the sake of making things harder" surprised me. The box of Legos is not trying to make things harder to build a toy house or battle tank or windmill, it's just saying build what you want no matter what it is, here are the pieces for that anything.
58 • Riding the Arch Wave (by Kyle K on 2023-01-10 15:42:42 GMT from United States)
I discovered Arch Linux on the early part of that popularity wave that @29 mentioned, and that couldn't have come at a better time for me. I was still in school, and computers were still something that I worked on as a hobby, so I had the time, patience, and motivation to learn how to use it. The Arch ecosystem really "clicked" with me. The ability to build a system from the ground up combined with the excellent documentation was a breath of fresh air compared to my prior experience in mostly Ubuntu-based distros, where it always felt like I was fighting the maintainers' will when making my (probably ill-advised) system-level customizations.
When I decided to make Linux my daily driver system during college, Arch was the natural choice due to my familiarity with it. And I continue to use it to this day, on both my personal and work systems. I have had Ubuntu, Mint, and OpenSUSE installations that all bricked themselves during upgrades, but the Arch system that I installed on my college laptop back in 2017 is still going strong. And as a software engineer, the Arch Build System is an absolute godsend for installing obscure and/or custom software. (The AUR may get all of the attention, but I consider the ABS to be the unsung hero of the Arch platform.)
Having said all of that, I absolutely agree that Arch Linux is not the right choice for everyone. It requires a certain amount of patience and effort that most users either do not have or do not want to spend on maintaining their computer. I know that my own success with Arch has been built on my ability and willingness to take an active role during system upgrades, both in researching potential issues beforehand and in troubleshooting issues that arise afterward. Maybe one day I will lose my drive to perform so much manual intervention. Luckily, there are plenty of good Arch derivatives out there; Manjaro is already a vastly more approachable system than its parent, and I sometimes find myself using Artix images when I want to quickly get an Arch system up and running with a graphical desktop. Until then, though...
I use Arch, by the way.
59 • The Review Itself (by Saul on 2023-01-10 16:45:17 GMT from United States)
Awesome review of Arch ! Best review I've read of any distro.
60 • Arch (by Simon on 2023-01-10 21:50:05 GMT from New Zealand)
Wow, I'm astonished to see that roughly half of Distrowatch poll respondents are using Arch or an Arch derivative... I had no idea it was so popular, and to be honest I struggle to understand why. Slackware is a cleaner, simpler, more "pure" environment for a really hands-on build-from-upstream-source approach; at the other extreme, Gentoo is vastly more powerful and sophisticated than Arch, if you're wanting your customizations to apply to everything you're building and to be carried forward with the rolling release model... and, as Jesse said, most popular distros provide much better out-of-the-box experiences than Arch, both in terms of ease of setup and in terms of integration and polish. Arch seems like a kind of compromise between Slackware and Gentoo, with some of Slackware's simplicity (yet far more unnecessary complexity than Slackware), and some of Gentoo's flexibility (yet far less flexibility than Gentoo): it's never appealed to me because it doesn't excel at either of the qualities for which it's known. If you want tidy simplicity, Slackware knocks Arch out of the park, and if you want powerful flexibility, Gentoo knocks Arch out of the park. I guess if you want a bit of a taste of both, Arch is a reasonable compromise... but I don't know why people like it so much. I've tried it several times over the years since it emerged, and have never liked it enough to deploy the systems I'd put together with it. It feels to me like a weird hybrid that's a bit worse at both its aims in order to try for both at once... basically the spork of distros. The one thing I do admire about it is its community documentation: the Arch wiki is outstandingly good. Well... that and its logo. Maybe the real reason it's so popular among Linux nerds is that its logo reminds them of the starfleet insignia from Star Trek.
61 • Arch - installing and updating on ARM 32-bit (by TheTKS on 2023-01-10 23:14:16 GMT from Canada)
Congratulations and thanks for 20 years of Distrowatch. I've been using Linux for a bit over 6 years, but occasionally read articles that were published long before that and I find still helpful.
TL;DR: After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I got a 32-bit ARM Arch/ChromeOS hybrid installed on a Chromebook with just the packages I want. It now runs and updates stably (no more wailing and gnashing.)
Arch is working fine, but I still like Slackware the best.
The Long Version
ArchLinuxARM with Xfce on a 32-bit Chromebook here, for a bit over half a year. I installed it rather than another Linux because the instructions for installing on this hardware were the clearest and closest to a complete recipe that I found. This was my first ArchLinux installation.
It was an ordeal to install, but that was because of the specific steps to install it on this challenging hardware, not because Arch itself is hard to install - time-consuming, but not hard for someone with some Linux command line experience.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
The Good: I have a usable Linux that has only the packages I want. Even a web browser (Firefox) is fast enough to be usable on this low spec hardware. The Arch wiki is far from perfect but was more than helpful, it was essential.
The Bad: I ran into several roadblocks while installing and breaks during the first few updates (more on that below), to the point that I started calling this installation One-Thing-After-Another Linux. There remains a need to manually maintain a workaround to a couple of systemd module issues (maybe that belongs in The Ugly.)
The Ugly: The first stage was installing a Frankenstein Arch-on-ChromeOS-kernel. With that said, the installation recipe gives instructions for installing a mainline Arch kernel (but also says some hardware may not be supported, so maybe that's ugly, too.)
To address a few complaints about Arch:
Breaks: I haven't run into any in months. After working through the first few post-update breaks, I started looking at the Arch and Arch ARM website news sections, package update notices and forums to keep watch for possible update problems, and pay close attention to the pacman update messages. It now runs and updates stably, so I stopped calling it One-Thing-After-Another Linux.
Updating, all that updating!: I update once a week, but don't have a lot of packages installed and don't use Arch daily. I would rather do update only when any package has an identified as a security fix, but I haven't found a quick way to find that. Updating weekly or upon security fix notice won't work for everybody, but does for me.
I want my, I want my, I want my systemd (with apologies to Mark Knopfler and Sting): or if not, systemd-less children are easy to find on Distrowatch x86_64. The few times I have had to interact directly with systemd, I haven't enjoyed it, so I would rather have installed a systemd-less 32-bit ARM child, but didn't find one.
TKS
62 • BTW (by Jay on 2023-01-11 01:36:54 GMT from Germany)
I looked at all available distro lines before I jumped to Arch and settled on a second-generation adaptation, part of the Manjaro branch.
I've been using Arch for some years now but I can't remember exactly when that began because it seemed so natural. Arch gave me current apps that just worked, so there was never any issue with my switchover.
To not have to waste hours deleting all the cruft one finds on most mainstream distros and to get current versions of apps I actually wanted made switching over a delight and the Arch documentation is excellent - it reminds me of Gentoo's.
I keep my workstation as uncluttered as possible and perhaps that's why I've never seen an update kill it. I've seen an improperly packaged app (with a missing library dependency) that annoyed me, but I rebuilt it from sources and never looked back.
I have no brand loyalty; I think the 'best' Linux is the one that best fits the task - and Arch meets my desktop requirements in a way nothing else has.
63 • @60 Archery (by crackers on 2023-01-11 02:43:20 GMT from Australia)
@60 Simon you are spot on in my view - I never found Arch, which I used for about a year, could hold a candle to Slackware for simplicity.
All said and done I've found the Ubuntu family (and some Debian derivatives) almost perfectly optimised for any hardware I've thrown at them and Arch, with which I agree with Jesse is more a toolkit or something than a distro, was a distance behind. To me there's no contest in what I would choose first.
However that's my view and like Simon I don't know why people like it so much - Arch has many defenders on forums who get very prickly about the slightest hint of criticism of The One True Way and more than a few come across to me as seeking to justify the time they put into it, just human nature I guess.
64 • DebiArch (by Crackly Dan on 2023-01-11 03:43:19 GMT from Canada)
I'm a long time Debian user. When I need help with a feature I look in /usr/share/doc first, then the Debian wiki second, and if those don't have the answer, I head over to the excellent Arch wiki. I've never tried Arch as it seems geared toward the DIY crowd, and their excellent documentation proves it!
65 • Re Previous Comments (by New User on 2023-01-11 08:43:39 GMT from Canada)
@60 Simon and @63 Crackers - Fully agree with your comments on Slackware versus Arch.
Not to be overly critical of Arch. Have found their documentation great, but not always applicable.
Jesse did a great review this week and saved me trying Arch again. Have already achieved Nirvana with Slackware (and Salix); and MX for an effortless Debian base.
For those of us who just want to get work done, and no longer want to spend our lives experimenting to see if a distro might serve our needs, Distrowatch has been invaluable.
Also, Distrowatch has been a great resource for following where efforts (such as EasyOS) are headed.
Correction re comment #2 in Distrowatch Weekly 1000: The reference there to comments 7 & 15 should have referred to Distrowatch Weekly 994 and not 944.
66 • Why I use Arch (by Antonio on 2023-01-11 08:48:29 GMT from Italy)
I decided to try Arch, after spending some time with Ubuntu and derivatives, because everytime I ran into trouble with thos distros, I often ended up finding the solution in the Arch wiki. If the documentation is that good, I thought ...
I also used Arch on my main work system for a couple of years and, yes, I had trouble with rolling updates but not more frequently than with Windows, so what?
Now Linux is no longer my work daily driver, but I still have Arch on my main home computer and that is a 10 years old installation I have moved through different PCs in this time frame. Wanted to try it in the beginning, used daily, had troubles, solved them, learned a lot in the process. Not bad
67 • By coders, for coders? (by Mu on 2023-01-13 01:32:38 GMT from Germany)
That snotty attitude some folks are getting feels to me like "coder gatekeeping" that ironically is at odds with the whole notion of Linux being ready for the desktop. IMO, it isn't and it never was. By its very nature, you have to dig into text configs and use sensitive console commands where a misplaced slash or any small error may spell the difference between success or nuking something important. It has always been a "bare to the metal" kind of OS, and that's also what's cool about it.
Seasoned Linux users tend to favor distros that "just work" for what they're trying to do. That's because always having to tinker to make stuff run properly gets old real quick. I really enjoyed Arch back when it still had install scripts. They stopped offering that at some point, and I stopped using it. Now there's a text installer again. It all just feels like an excuse for the devs not to put in a proper solution. There is NO excuse for buggy Linux installers as this is the first and most crucial interaction with the future OS, and yet even Calamares and others are easy enough to crash into a wall just by picking non-defaults.
Once you have it running, Arch is a fine system. I like Debian/Armbian for servers personally. I had real ugly breakage with Manjaro before so I would stick to plain Arch instead, and check the news for breaking changes.
68 • Use Arch or not (by Eric Leung on 2023-01-13 02:15:43 GMT from Hong Kong)
Personally I agree that Arch or EndeadourOS is a very solid distribution. And I have funs to play with either of these.
However, people would prefer to use Debian for production machine. Therefore, it requires lot of time and earn enough reputation.
69 • tried Arch but use Debian (by peer on 2023-01-13 08:34:44 GMT from Netherlands)
I installed and tried Arch several times.I also tried Endeavour. I used Manjaro kde for about a half year. But I went back to Debian. Not because it is better (I do not know which is better) but because I just feel at home with Debian .
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| • Issue 1049 (2023-12-11): Lernstick 12, alternatives to WINE, openSUSE updates its branding, Mint unveils new features, Lubuntu team plans for 24.04 |
| • Issue 1048 (2023-12-04): openSUSE MicroOS, the transition from X11 to Wayland, Red Hat phasing out X11 packages, UBports making mobile development easier |
| • Issue 1047 (2023-11-27): GhostBSD 23.10.1, Why Linux uses swap when memory is free, Ubuntu Budgie may benefit from Wayland work in Xfce, early issues with FreeBSD 14.0 |
| • Issue 1046 (2023-11-20): Slackel 7.7 "Openbox", restricting CPU usage, Haiku improves font handling and software centre performance, Canonical launches MicroCloud |
| • Issue 1045 (2023-11-13): Fedora 39, how to trust software packages, ReactOS booting with UEFI, elementary OS plans to default to Wayland, Mir gaining ability to split work across video cards |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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| Random Distribution | 
Freespire
Freespire was once a community-run Linux distribution sponsored by Linspire. Freespire was discontinued in 2008. Starting in 2017 Freespire became a free operating system based on Ubuntu and run by PC/OpenSystems LLC. Freespire features the Xfce desktop environment.
Status: Active
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| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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