[LAU] Noo 'pooter :)

[Philipp Überbacher]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2014 23:26:04 +0200
David Adler <david.jo.adler at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 09:24:39PM +0100, Will Godfrey wrote:
> 
> > As this will be a clean install, I'm wondering what people might
> > suggest as for best distro to make full use of it - all my other
> > machines have had a progression of debian upgrades so are probably
> > full of crud.
> 
> Use Arch. It might sound counter-intuitive but despite (or because
> of(?)) the rolling release model it requires very little maintenance. 

Hi David. I'm alive! ;)

> The regular glimpse on the homepage's news feed is recommended but
> it's been a long time since anything popped up there that actually
> required manual intervention. If this happens, the instructions have
> proven to be adequate. Other than that, occasionally configuration
> files suffixed *.pacnew/*.pacsave need to be merged and voilà, you
> have a crud-free up-to-date system that won't send you to dependency
> hell when attempting to install recent software.

Agreed, there is the occasional message on the front page, but it's
about once a month or even more seldom. Usually I notice that something
changed after I run 'pacman -Syu' but before actually going through
with it. Renaming of packages and the likes are a good indicator for
bigger changes. No real problems with that so far. I update very
frequently though, so if there is a problem, which happens but happens
rarely, I know where it comes from and can fix it right away.
I don't completely agree on crud-free. If you install software, run it
and it creates files in your home directory, then delete the software
the crud in your home will stick around, but I guess this is the same
with almost every distro. There might be some system level crud over
the years, I'm not sure, it didn't cause any problems yet.
Merging the occasional .pacnew file takes maybe five minutes and the
most frequent candidate is /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist with a hand ful of
changes, so not terribly important.

> The above might sound a bit like over-optimistic marketing speak but
> it reflects my experience and from what I've heard it's not just me. 
> 
> That said, Debian testing didn't exactly give me headaches -- it'd be
> my second choice for audio -- but my experiences with Arch (quite a
> few years now, no re-installation) are plainly positive.
> 
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_system_maintenance
> 
> 
> greetz,
>  -d

AUR could use a going-over though, there's quite some audio stuff there
that's not building, no longer available or whatever. Even if
someone takes the time it's still somewhat difficult though since speps
still sits on most audio packages like a hen.

Regards,
Philipp