Everyone who uses Arch seems to love it, and everyone who doesn't seems to respect it. So congratulations on sustaining a well-loved project with a reputation for technical excellence, for 20 years!
I think the great thing about Arch is that, despite the hype, there is nothing special about it.
In other words, Arch is mostly Linux From Scratch plus a binary package manager with dependencies and standard choices for everything (tooling written in C, standard kernel, GNU libc, SystemD, etc). Plus a great wiki.
Arch sits at a local maximum in terms of design, right next to Alpine and a few other distributions with similar design choices. In my opinion, the other interesting local maximum is where NixOS and GuixSD sit. It's almost the other extreme, declarative vs imperative.
Indeed! Arch is really a great success story of the "KISS" principle. Just enough complexity, and nothing more.
Non-rolling releases by necessity add a lot more complexity, and those distribution maintainers have to consider many trade-offs in managing the "waterfall" approach.
Arch (mostly) assumes that 1) upstream knows what they're doing and 2) individual users are better able to make choices about which software to install and how to deviate from its default configuration.
Exactly my thoughts! I installed Arch a while back but it was taking too long to boot up (I use a pretty ancient laptop). So I went back to good ol' Debian.
Whenever a google search shows up an Arch Linux wiki page I know the contents are going to be detailed and technical. I don't use the distribution itself, however this level of excellence has given it a place in my heart. Thank you to all the contributors :-)
My Arch Linux installation is roughly 15 years old, rsynced from machine to machine over the years: make partitions, rsync, grub-install, rinse, repeat.
Holy wow — mine's 7 years old and I thought it was crazy.
I still have the pacman logs from the first package installed. It has traveled to three different machines, three filesystems (ext4, btrfs, xfs), two boot loaders (grub, efi) and two desktop envs (gnome2, mate+compiz).
I really can't imagine using anything else. AUR along with simplicity of the package source format and cleanliness of everything in general, makes this the perfect OS for a pragmalist like myself.
Depends because the partition and directory structure has changed over the years, but it generally boils down to rsync -avP6AHXx --numeric-ids src dest.
It requires some fiddling afterwards (not only grub-install: adjusting fstab UUIDs, adapt network interface changes, etc) but it's generally pretty painless.
I almost posted earlier about the after-adjustments. I have 5 and 8-year installs, but I've never bothered to migrate across machines thinking it'd be too much of a hassle.
Ah thanks - my go to rsync flags are -hvrtP which seems like it's quite similar. Still curious about what you rsync? Presumably this is within chroot during installation?
Arch Linux was the distro that helped me get familiar with Linux tools and some basic sysadmin. To this day I haven't seen any other project with as comprehensive documentation as the arch wiki.
I don't run Arch anymore but I will always have a soft spot for the distro
I love arch, and used msys2 on Windows (very arch inspired) since university.
Lately I've started playing with ubuntu, but if I try linux baremetal again, it'll be with arch: yes the install might be more complicated, but the degree of control makes it a "learning experience".
The archwiki is where the output of all this learning goes, and even when I'm not using arch, I use it as my #1 source for knowledge.
I find Arch is very good for pets, but not cattle. I use it for my own desktop and laptop, but found using it for servers and non-techie family PCs creates something of a rod for my own back.
I use Ubuntu LTS (and lots of Ansible) for servers. Use to also do the same for non-techie PCs but tried Mint recently for a new PC for my Dad and found it excellent for that purpose.
This should in no way be seen as a slight against Arch. I absolutely love using it for my own computers. The rolling-release means it has been years since I've ever had to suffer through a version update that left things weird and leading to a, "Stuff it, gonna do a clean install and rebuild everything from scratch," weekend. Rolling releases and being reasonably close to the bleeding edge were the first things that attracted me to Arch.
The Wiki, the AUR and many other things have been pure gravy since then.
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(I don't use Arch btw)