The one place Arch still is fairly opinionated compared to Gentoo is being all-in on systemd. That's not to say you _can't_ remove/replace it, and obviously there are Arch-like distros that give other options, but my sense is that GP's comment about Gentoo's draw being completely agnostic to whatever configuration you want makes Arch having even a single strong opinion feel pretty different to users who care about that. I think you're probably right that most people probably don't need that, but then again, even as an Arch user, I think most people probably don't really need the amount of customization that Arch lets you have; I just happen to like it.
I wouldn't say systemd is the "one place" where Arch has an opinion. Quite the opposite, Arch is just as opinionated as the average distro. On Void Linux you can choose between musl and glibc, on Arch you're forced to use glibc. On Gentoo you can choose your init system, on Arch you're forced to use systems. On Debian you can have `/bin/sh` be any POSIX shell, on Arch you're forced to have it be Bash. On nixOS you can choose between rolling and normal release, on Arch there's only a rolling release. I can't really think of anything you can customize on Arch that you can't configure on most distros, but perhaps I'm missing something.
My experience using Arch has very much been "it's just like all the other distros, except now you have at least 4 package managers to go through if you want to install any particular thing and you will almost certainly need to install utilities that convert packages from other package managers over to PKGBUILD." Other than that, it's felt very similar to just using something like Debian. Which is fine, and Debian is fine, but the praise other people give it as "the modder's distro," or something like it, seems a little over zealous.
Your experience sounds weird. Reading it remind me of people who come from programming paradigm X try paradigm Y and only use methods from X only to conclude that Y sucks.
Why would you use 4 package managers to do 1 thing ? Most people who use arch use 1 and it does the job. All of them are built around pacman + smth for AUR packages. Personally I use pacui.
Why would you convert package from other distro, if another distro has it then it most certainly exists in the AUR, never once had to touch another distro's packaging.
I don't know about the "the modder's distro" part but I personally had much less headaches with it than I had with Ubuntu,fedora,debian, and CentOS.
The only thing that sucks for me (regardless of distro) is Nvidia updates.
> Why would you convert package from other distro, if another distro has it then it most certainly exists in the AUR, never once had to touch another distro's packaging.
A lot of software packages I've been using lately don't exist in the AUR. My tastes might be more niche than yours, I don't know.
> Why would you use 4 package managers to do 1 thing ?
Because all the software I'm trying to install has documentation like "install with pacman" or "install with pamac" or "install with yay" or "install from source" or "install from AUR" or... I think you get where this is going.
> Your experience sounds weird. Reading it remind me of people who come from programming paradigm X try paradigm Y and only use methods from X only to conclude that Y sucks.
Reading your rebuttal to my experience reminds me of people who answer questions on Stackoverflow like, "why would you do it this way? Your question isn't valid, your question _should have been_..." That is to say, rather than attempt to understand where I'm coming from, you thought to overwrite my experience with your own, as if yours is the truer experience to be had. My time using Arch and Arch-variant distros led me to having a seemingly fragmented experience over where to find software. That's got nothing to do with X being better than Y, it has more to do with X being mostly one or two overall places to find software, and Y being fragmented between 4-5 + conversions between apt/yum packages and PKGBUILD scripts. I'm not saying Y is inherently worse, I'm saying it's a fragmented and confusing user experience, in my humble opinion. My main dev machine still runs Manjaro because I've come to enjoy its opinionated handling of Arch, though if I were to re-image that computer I'd probably go back to either Fedora or Ubuntu.
> but I personally had much less headaches with it than I had with Ubuntu,fedora,debian, and CentOS.
Personally, I'm fine with using Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, or even Arch. I'm not saying any one of them are bad or worse than the other. I'm just saying that, to me, Arch came with some additional challenges that I don't experience from other distros, mostly revolving around how software packages are found and installed.
My bad if my response came as a rebuttal, it was more of a confusion of the circumstances that led you to do things the way you did. Was it just a lack of knowledge about arch or some esoteric setup I've never seen.
I understand that a newcomer at the beginning can be confused about the relationship between pacman, pamac, AUR, yay, etc
similar cli programs exist in other distros though are not as encouraged.
That is how I read it, but it's all good. Sorry for misreading your tone.
> I understand that a newcomer at the beginning can be confused about the relationship between pacman, pamac, AUR, yay, etc
Perhaps that's the source of my confusion. So with:
Red Hat-like distros the tools are usually dnf or yum, which are evolutions over rpm.
Debian-like distros the tools are usually apt or apt-get (which are more or less the exact same thing), which are evolutions over dpkg.
With Arch, I kind of assumed that pamac and pacman are similar things, no idea if yay is related to anything else though. And I think pamac actually can install things from the AUR. My confusion definitely stems from loading up documentation from every different piece of software I tend to install, and each one of them listing a different utility for installing their package. If these are all the same thing with different UIs, installing packages from the same repositories, then that's definitely where I got lost.
And then I'd often be further annoyed to find out that the software vendor doesn't have a package for Arch, and nobody put one in the AUR yet, so I'd take the deb pkg and run it through debtap to get a PKGBUILD script. Doing which has netted me varied results.
Definitely a lot of crossover. However, there are several things that make Arch unusable for me. The #1 thing is that Arch only officially supports AMD64. Additionally, while I find Arch’s documentation better than most, it’s hard to understate how amazing the Gentoo wiki is. Lastly, I prefer portage overlays (like Guru) over the AUR. Bigger !== better. Again, the beauty of Linux is choice. Nothing but love for my Arch neighbors!
Also a die-hard Gentoo fan (daily driver for 20+ years).
I tried Arch and what astounded me the most is that the docs didn't seem as good as Gentoo's. That surprised me because I end up looking at Arch's docs all the time and it's all of a very high quality.
But the Gentoo Handbook is really a masterpiece. I've never read a clearer explanation of how to go from unformatted disks to a working system.
I used to use Gentoo 20+ years ago; installing it was eye-opening. It helped me enormously to understand how Linux works.
I then moved to debian/ubuntu and recently switched my main server to Arch. And you are right - I got back this feeling of having all my 10 fingers in the system and living on the bleeding edge.
Now: this was probably not the brightest choice, as this server rund my docker containers and basically nothing more so it should have been Debian(a fire-and-forget OS)
> I used to use Gentoo 20+ years ago; installing it was eye-opening. It helped me enormously to understand how Linux works.
Same!
Starting with a Stage 1 install was what got me (with some guidance of a friend and the perfect Gentoo Wiki) into Linux circa 2004 (IIRC).
Now, some 20 years later, i much prefer to have not to deal with something as... dare i say.. fragile... anymore.
Yes, much of the breakage i dealt with was probably self-inflicted but always a good learning experience - but most of the time not at the most convenient time :(
Arch is literally the easiest thing to maintain. I've been running it for over fifteen years, update maybe once a year at most and 99% of the time it's a case of running pacdiff and updating a handful of config files.
In 1998, Debian was a great option for SPARC and Alpha, and that’s really where I cut my teeth with Linux.
Around 2004, I was building Gentoo up from stage1 just like many other commenters.
For 2024 and personal stuff I’m back on Debian and it’s safe enough I pull security updates daily - entirely automated and no review on my part. It essentially never causes a problem. Updating once a year sounds terrifying to me given the rate of vulnerability discoveries of late.
As ever your mileage may vary and your systems aren’t my systems, but Debian truly is a wonderful OSS project and as of August 2023 it celebrated its 30th anniversary!
Gentoo going binary feels weird :) I’ve still got a soft spot for Gentoo and what it enabled me to do 15 years ago when I had more time for personal hacks.
I did the hardcore path of Linux From Scratch and then discovered Gentoo which was a (very welcome) step down for customizability :) Highly recommend LFS for anyone who has a couple of hours per day to waste (i.e. young with no responsibilities)
> Now: this was probably not the brightest choice, as this server rund my docker containers and basically nothing more so it should have been Debian(a fire-and-forget OS)
I dunno, there's a fair amount to be said for having an up-to-date kernel, systemd, and Docker. :)
It depends on the kind of "up-to-datism", at least for me. Security - yes. Features - for docker yes, the rest not really.
The main problem is that if I provide a specific repo for docker (to keep a fresh version) it can request some dependencies and bam! I have a Debian-Turend-Arch system to maintain :)
I mostly included syetemd due to the shiny new feature where you can enable kernel samepage merging for arbitrary applications. Could be very useful for certain use cases.
Exactly my case. Used to use Gentoo, got tired of every other update breaking the system, was told on IRC that if I didn't like "free" updates (because apparently my time and serenity have no value) perpetually breaking the system I could go use something else, and that's exactly what I did. Arch is solid.
Yes, but it's a shame. Especially now Gentoo has these binary packages there's really no reason to choose arch. Arch is like "choose any system you want, as long as it's x86-64, systemd etc"
