Arch Linux
After Gentoo Linux system breakage on my laptop due to the fact that i’ve been fooling around with the impossible (forcing multilib applications on a no-mulilib profile), i descided to try Arch Linux.
Now, i’ve only been using Arch Linux for 3 days, there’s allready quite some stuff that gives me the creeps. And offcourse, this sort-of-review (a full review may happen) is coming from the eye of a Gentoo user. I’ve allways been a perfectionist, which is my itch i can’t help, and Gentoo has been fitting there.
Arch Linux is a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.. As they say ‘Simple’, in this context, shall mean ‘without unnecessary additions, modifications, or complications’. I get the feeling this is just marketing-talk.
Arch Linux has a package manager called “pacman”. Package repositories core, extra, community, testing, and unstable should fill your needs. But do they?
I wanted to install the 32bit flash plugin in 64bit firefox. If that wouldn’t work.. understandable. But nothing there.. Skype, so i can VOIP my gilfriend.. nothing. The graphical pacman frontend.. nothing. Cedega since there’s one game i’ll keep playing no matter what.. nothing.
These results are from every repository except unstable and testing. Even the community repository doesn’t have these! Nooo, instead, you have to download the source of each package, officially provided by the creators, and a PKGBUILD file, made by an Arch user. And be sure to check the comments, cause even these tiny simple PKGBUILD textfiles simply containing the deps needed and how the source gets build, still now and then require you to correct or modify them.
Boils down to you, still building stuff from source. Hooray for a package repository.
I’m not used to binary repositories. Not at all. Well, i wouldn’t mind if i could just minimize the dependancies with source alternatives from the package manager.. and from whatever Arch Linux tells you, you’d expect that. But nope, if you want to do that, it again boils down to you, creating your own PKGBUILD, and configuring and building by hand.
So, lets install Banshee. Heard it’s an awesome mediaplayer.
Now i know Banshee minimally requires Mono, Gtk#, HAL, D-Bus, GStreamer, libmusicbrainz, libnautilus-burn, GTK+ and sqlite3. And they in turn require stuff again. And no choice. Heya, 277 MB for a mediaplayer! Oh, probably a bad example. Lets see a better one.. Mplayer.
Now, i don’t want sdl since i use alsa for that, i never watch divx or xvid movies, i never use sasl, i’m never somewhere which requires me to use ldap (and why would i want that in my mplayer anyway), i will not use samba cause i have no Windows boxes, i don’t watch movies transformed to ASCII-art, i simply don’t use jack, i have no remote control, and i don’t wanna use the dejavu fonts for subtitles.
Mplayer itself according to pacman, is 20MB once installed. Feel the 47 MB of useless stuff slowly sliding down your throat, it beeing 235% of what you need on top of it.
Quite some negativity, lets say it’s cause i’m simply not used to the fact i’m getting it all. Lets clean orphaned deps!
Goodbye Xorg, pacman thinks i don’t need a graphical interface, even though i have openbox and applications like Mozilla Firefox, GMPC, GTKPod, and The Gimp installed.
Oh, i just gave up and installed Gentoo again. It just works, as long as i don’t do things they told me not to do heh.