27 Aug
2014
27 Aug
'14
3:12 a.m.
On Tue, 26 Aug 2014 23:26:04 +0200
David Adler <david.jo.adler(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 09:24:39PM +0100, Will Godfrey
wrote:
Hi David. I'm alive! ;)
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. 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