Saturday, May 17, 2008

Strange impressions about Arch...

Ok, so I managed to instal Arch Linux on my main box... I now have a multi-boot with Ubuntu 8.04, Slackware 12.1 and Arch... All are 32 bit version, despite my cpu being a 64bit Sempron... So far I feel better with a 32bit distro...

So I made it... I basically followed the Arch Beginners Guide...

It wasn't that hard since the guide is well done. I understood that I had to set my eth0 to DHCP to connect. That was the mistake that stopped me last week, when I first tried... (and failed).

So now I have a nice Gnome desktop, with mostly exactly the same apps that I use in Debian and Ubuntu... I only changed 2 of my usual regulars: Thunderbird instead of Evolution, and Exaile instead of Rhythmbox... But that was only a fantasy...

It seems to work well... I must admit that I cheated for one thing during the install: Since my xorg.conf file didn't seem to give me the proper res' at my first gui boot, I booted back in Slackware, and copied my Slack's xorg.conf to Arch... Booted back to Arch, and it worked great ! That is one of the beauty of the multiboot...

Also I need to precise that each distro has its own /home partition... I didn't try to have them all share the same one... Easier...

But now, here comes my greatest impression: I don't really see any difference in speed between Arch, Slackware and Ubuntu ! Now, I must tell you that I have been performing any type of exact measure... But the "human" feeling is that they all "work" at the same rhythm...

Furthermore, I would say that (it seems to me...) Ubuntu boots much faster than both Slack & Arch... Strange... I was expecting a "Ferrari" after all those years reading comments on how fast Arch was...

At the end of the day, I am only a "soho user", but apart from the educational factor and the "rolling release" factor, I don't see the big advantage of using Arch over Debian (or Ubuntu)...

I will however keep both Arch & Slack partition and update them often, to see if I missed something, to learn more...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

> I was expecting a "Ferrari" after all those years reading comments on how fast Arch was...

Despite being somehow like Slackware (when comes to some manual configuration), Arch is in other regards like Ubuntu: it has a lot of very vocal fans. You shouldn't always believe all those praises.

As for the "Ferrari": I've found Sidux as surprisingly fast... for a KDE distro ;-)

Tropical Swim said...

-Do you actually use Sidux ?

Every time I try KDE, I end up with a strange dislike for it, and feel so relieved to go back to Gnome...

Actually I had Sidux installed for a couple of days on a secondary box... I used it mostly with Fluxbox... It was fast indeed... Specially the install !!!

Anonymous said...

For arch you can divide boot time by 2 by editing rc.conf and adding @ in front of your daemons; see http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Daemons