I'm new and I think I like it.

Question

This is an unproductive fanboy-message (=spam), but I thought I could post it anyways
I didn't post this to "Arch is best" since I wouldn't say that Arch is the best. I just like it a lot, and wanted to share that
The point is: I like Arch.
My real Linux age started about 4 years ago with Gentoo. I used Mandrake and SuSE before Gentoo, but I don't count  that. With Gentoo, I started to understand operating systems in general, and it was the first time I ever had fun setting up and using an OS. I learned a bunch of things from that, Gentoo has real superb documentation after all. Back then, we guys doing stage 1 installs from a text-only live cd were considered "cool", today the Gentoo community considers us "ricers" or something.
I didn't do that for any speed benefit. I never felt any recognisable hyper speed with Gentoo in any way - I just liked the way you install it. Starting with the very base and then get everything you need.
Stage 1 in Gentoo meant that you even built the base system and the build tools yourself - this isn't supported anymore today. It didn't make much sense back then, but I found it totally cool to have my computer working on something real big while I'm at school.
Well, Gentoo had and has many benefits, but after 4 years, it lost it's "charm" for me. You have a LiveCD GUI installer, the packages aren't as up to date as they used to and I'm sort of sick of compiling something like KDE, which just takes too much time.
I'm not a student anymore, I am a programmer since two years and I need systems that does a job fast and reliable, since I have like a 12 hour day and there is certainly something better to do at home than to stare at compiler output.
One week ago, an old friend told me about Arch and I thought that I could give it a try. I'm just stunned. It brings back the Gentoo feeling of the old days and I feel like 17 again
The installation rocks - the guide is good and the whole process is very easy. The best thing is package configuration. Base only contains few and one can really pick only what he needs. The first thing I dropped was lilo along with wireless and pcmcia tools. I don't know how many of you guys have ever installed a debian and did the manual package selection. Remember dselect? After going through that, even a programmer would consider buying a mac. Archs ncurses selection is just good.
Okay, 20 minutes have passed and the system is installed. I booted.
Was a good feeling. A nice marked up sysvinit greeted me that bootet incredibly fast (like 10 seconds) and I had my login prompt. Now I was stuck - there was no greeting message pointing out some further documentation, and I didn't install links so I couldn't look up how to use pacman.
I have very bad experiences with man pages other than those of category 3 - totally bloated with useless GNU --something-nobody-will-ever-need-number-three options and impossible to extract information from when not unemployed. Info pages are even worse. I love Arch for not providing them. This is the worst idea GNU people have ever had.
But I had no choice other than rebooting Gentoo, and I dislike giving up. So I read the pacman manpage (the old friend told me it's name - otherwise I would have been stuck) - and I was surprised. It was really understandeable. So I fired it up, so see that the program even explains itself in a wonderful way.
So it was no problem to install links. I went to the wiki and followed the X11 howto.
Long speech short sense - I had X, windowmaker and firefox all in some minutes ready to go.
So I started reading the wiki with firefox in X. The next adventure would be to install KDE.
I've been using fvmw2 and fluxbox for the last three years, then went to gnome and began to hate it. Though KDE looks like kindergarten, I gave it another try and after some hours of kde-look.org browsing, I had it actually good looking. I love the playful cleverness you see everywhere. You can directly use kde-look.org as wallpapers from within the wallpaper selection dialog. KDE just has everything I need (and way more, but that can happily be deactivated ).
Okay, now I was frightened. Since KDE has so many components, I had a quick look for meta packages to make everything easier. I noticed that there are only the usual bundle packages, but no split ones. I was very happy when Gentoo introduced the KDE split ebuilds, but I don't care for arch not having them. Arch has no useflags, so I didn't care. I also don't care about 10 MB of disk "wasteage" with programs I will probably not use.
So I just got myself kdebase and startx'd it.
First thing to notice: Wow, this looks clean.
Second thing to notice: This sucks.
There were absolutely no programs in the K menu and clicking the home icon asked what application to start it with.
After a short board search, I found someone who had this problem some time ago.
He reinstalled kdebase - so did it.
Relogin - everything works.
And THIS was clean. I just love the default K menu. I love the branding. I love everything about this. Have been using Kubuntu at work, but it just sucked. The Arch KDE is the most wonderful default KDE I've ever seen, so I didn't bother theming it for the first three days.
Beeing busy with desktop environments, I installed the newest nvidia driver and beryl. After deactivating some KDE effects, beryl works like a charm. NEVER did together with KDE with (K)Ubuntu or Gentoo on that box. Stunned. Happy. Okay, one bad thing: I don't see the logout screen - but since I use startx, there's only one option anyways.
Now it was time for the usual 64-bit multimedia trouble.
After adding the community repository, I looked up how to do it. My first mission was to view my favorite trailer (QuickTime mov). On the board, I saw that people use to install "codecs" for that, but I'm 64 bit, so I was unsure if it would work. Just installed kmplayer and codecs. It works. Wonderful. After that, I had to view youtube movies - another quest.
So it was time to finally use makepkg. I heard of it, I heard it was like Ports and I LOVE Ports. It really is like Ports. It is in a wonderful clever way very understandeable. Not comparable to the complicated ebuilds installing 20 patches at a time. I found the AUR page and all the two packages I needed for my flash nsplugin. Was easy to do. Works.
Now it was time to do the most distusting thing: view my favorite rmvb movies. rmvb sucks, I wasn't able to view it with something other than helix realplayer, and I never liked that software for not beeing able to use alsa. But I had to. It was relatively easy to locate realplayer for 64 bit in AUR. But there were dependencies having dependencies all only available via makepgk. So I had to download like 8 packages and figure out in what order to build and install them.
The last package - realplayer itself - had a problem. Helix changed their link. I manually downloaded realplayer and slightely changed the src= association in the PKGBUILD.
After that, I was able to compile and install it.
Starting it was a sad experienced - all the fonts where missing. Luckily, I knew how to control it blind. So disabling arts along with everything else that does sound made my new baked realplayer worked.
Okay, now I had everything I need and wanted to test the system for usability.
Setting up my design, manually branding my favorite icon theme for Arch. Setting everything up. I used konqueror to browse for my files and despite all my other kde experiences, the file associations are just what I expect. kmplayer opens all types of videos. During clicking all of my different video types, I accidentaly clicked one rmvb and kmplayer opened up.
What can I say - it WORKS! I don't know whether this is because mplayer can use original realplayers codec or because the codecs package has rmvb support, but I love it. Now I can view them with a good player.
You are doing a great job out there. Arch is what it should be: Light and clever wherever you look.
It was a very good idea to create pacman instead of using dpkg or rpm with all it's medievality.
You don't need a GUI installer, Arch is after all supposed for people who know a little UNIX.
You don't need to gain popularity - your community is great, the system is great.
In general, I feel like using a binary lfs here. This is a great feeling, it's the first time in a while that Linux meant fun to me.
Please do me one favor and stay how you are
This was probably the longest post in my live. I don't say Arch is best. There are some things I dislike. Some things I like more about other distros. Nothing is perfect - Arch is very close to that though. I just felt the need to thank you for that.

Answer 1

Mikko777 wrote:So what is the best?
I wouldn't judge. I've been to Arch for a week, you know? But as said, it's VERY close to it.
What I dislike after a week is makepkg not handling dependencies automatically (which would be overhead, so probably not appropriate).
Mikko777 wrote:Also theres KDEmod for modular kde, dunno if its for 64 bits tho.
Don't actually need that as said ... I see no real benefit of having that other than not beeing a KDE user or having Gentoos useflags.
Mikko777 wrote:PS:You produce a lot of text and welcome smile
Yeah. Wonder why I'm still employed? So do I ...