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I remember hearing Pat rave about this distro a couple years back and I have no idea why I didn't try it sooner. It feels like Slackware mixed with the best aspects of Gentoo, minus the tedious compiling.

Basically, Arch is a rolling release distro, meaning that you just continually update it over the internet, and you don't need to re-install every 6 months. It's binary based, so updates are nice and quick. The installer will give you a very basic system with a shell prompt after doing a successful installation. This is both good and bad. Good for the people like me who don't mind building a system from the ground up to get a slim and optimized system without tons of unneeded libraries and software. Arch is kind of like the opposite of most user-friendly distros these days. It's bad for people who just want to do a quick install and have a system up and running. But all in all doesn't take all that long to set up. It's far from doing a Gentoo install.

Arch is:

Super fast. My system boots in under 10 seconds.
It has a great package manager in Pacman
Lots of packages available
Great Wiki
Friendly community

I definitely recommend this to Gentoo and Slackware users. I feel it offers the best of both worlds.

Glad you're enjoying your time with Arch. It really is an awesome little distro. The breakages that would occur a few years back have really subsided as more stringent testing has been done prior to updates. Arch definitely hits that sweet spot between Debian, Slackware and Gentoo.

I never quite understood the term "rolling distro" because any distro can be updated. I installed Debian testing before it became etch, i kept it stable for a few months and then changed the sources.list to add the testing (lenny) and have ran apt-get dist-upgrade ever since. I will most likely keep stable for a months as the testing tree tends to change rapidly the first few months and then change the sources.list file and apply apt-get dist-upgrade. How is that not a "rolling distro" ?

In fact ubuntu (via testing) , fedora( few rawhide) ,slackware (i started with 10.1 and went to 10.2 via -current a few years ago) are all "rolling distros" in my opinion.

allix wrote:I never quite understood the term "rolling distro" because any distro can be updated. I installed Debian testing before it became etch, i kept it stable for a few months and then changed the sources.list to add the testing (lenny) and have ran apt-get dist-upgrade ever since. I will most likely keep stable for a months as the testing tree tends to change rapidly the first few months and then change the sources.list file and apply apt-get dist-upgrade. How is that not a "rolling distro" ?

In fact ubuntu (via testing) , fedora( few rawhide) ,slackware (i started with 10.1 and went to 10.2 via -current a few years ago) are all "rolling distros" in my opinion.

Well almost all distros have bleeding edge versions that you can run and continually update at your own risk. Slackware has -current, Debian has unstable, and Fedora and Ubuntu have similar development branches like you mentioned. But their official releases only get security patches, and if you want newer features and bug fixes, you need to upgrade to a new release, either by doing an upgrade or a clean install. I think there is a clear distinction between how Gentoo or Arch operates, and how Debian and Slackware work.

allix wrote:In fact ubuntu (via testing) , fedora( few rawhide) ,slackware (i started with 10.1 and went to 10.2 via -current a few years ago) are all "rolling distros" in my opinion.

Um... You've apparently never tried to upgrade Fedora, then.

The Fedora project supports upgrading to the next release, but they recommend a fresh install (every freakin' 6 months!). In my experience, about 1 out of 3 upgrades fails catastrophically and sometimes breaks the system to where I can't even roll back (like deleting all the kernels from the previous install).

It's possible to do a rolling upgrade on Fedora, but it's not supported and will eventually break your system. It's also a pain to do.

Patrick wrote:Glad you're enjoying your time with Arch. It really is an awesome little distro. The breakages that would occur a few years back have really subsided as more stringent testing has been done prior to updates.

Glad to hear arch has fixed their quality problems. I found the installer to be too minimal, and upgrading the system broke it completely. If they've fixed that, it should be a nice distro.

Not enough to move me off Debian, but worth another look.

Gomer_X wrote:

allix wrote: The Fedora project supports upgrading to the next release, but they recommend a fresh install (every freakin' 6 months!). In my experience, about 1 out of 3 upgrades fails catastrophically and sometimes breaks the system to where I can't even roll back (like deleting all the kernels from the previous install).

It's possible to do a rolling upgrade on Fedora, but it's not supported and will eventually break your system. It's also a pain to do.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PreUpgrade

Summary

Allow users to easily download all the files needed to upgrade their distro, and then reboot into the installer without burning media.

This was in fedora 9, I have not tried it, as i am still using fedora 8 on a laptop, when 10 jumps out the door , i will be trying it.