Re: [LAD] (Somewhat OT) Advice needed on distro choice

On Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:49:33 +0200 Fons Adriaensen <fons(a)kokkinizita.net> wrote: There is a buildscript for one as well as a separate binary repository including a binary rt kernel. Currently it's already .31-rt that's being tested. I do have consolekit here tough. The beauty of Arch Linux is: - Emphasis on simplicity, don't hide how stuff works, etc. see: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way - The base system is minimal - Official binary repositories are available, including most popular applications - Applications in the repositories are very recent versions due to a rolling release model - Everything in the official repositories can be rebuilt easily, using the same scripts that were used to build the official package (ABS). Very useful if you want to have other compiletime options or do optimisations (everything is compiled for i686/x86_64 by default). - Almost anything that's not in the official repositories can be found in a user maintained buildscript repository (AUR). - There's a growing external buildscript/binary repository for audio applications (archaudio.org) Sure there are drawbacks - Arch patches as little as possible, there are no security updates unless upstream fixes it and provides a new version - Rolling release model can break stuff - very recent versions of software can break stuff I hope I didn't forget anything important. The arch wiki is an o.k. resource to get an overview and general information, or just ask here or on an Arch Linux mailinglist. Regards, Philipp