My thoughts (and yours too!) about Arch (I'm in love already!)

Question

Hello all!  I suppose I would be called a newbie to Arch, but certainly not to Linux.  I've been running Gentoo for five months.  If I were running, say, Ubuntu for five months, I would probably still be considered a newbie, but five months of Gentoo has made me pretty proficient at Linux.
I (if you haven't guessed yet) am a Gentoo user , and it seems like there are a lot of Gentoo users who go to Arch.  That's how I heard about it, through the Gentoo forums.  I am currently looking for backups in case Gentoo comes crashing to the ground.  I was perfectly content in my little bubble of happy compiling until I learned about the unrest inside of the Gentoo community.  I never realized that things were in such bad shape... like a downward spiral.  The result cannot be good.  I feel like I'm on a sinking ship and am praying for my life here.  I've seen a lot of threads at the forums lately like "If Drobbins fork Gentoo, will you follow him?" and "Will you stay with Gentoo if the Foundation is handed over to a 3rd party?"  I find these a little unsettling!  I understand that the Foundation is a terrible state right now, and the founder's attempt to get it back has failed, so now I don't things are going to head up.  So I've started to face facts, that I better have some backup plans so that I'm not starting over from square 1 when this all burns to the ground (hopefully if, not when, because I like Gentoo and really don't want to have to give it up).  Now I admit that I don't like EVERYTHING about Gentoo, but I like almost everything, and Arch seems to be like Gentoo in many respects.
Some of my personal desires in a distro:
1.Bleeding edge with rolling updates (and thus no need to ever reinstall the distribution)
2. A large repository for the package manager
3. Not a newbie distro... a distro for those who like the command line and to do things themselves
4. Good community
5. Customizable
6. The ability to choose between a stable and unstable package on a per-package basis
7. Install from source
Arch seems to satisfy 1,3, 4, and 5 correct?  And pretty well satisfies 2, though I can see its package manager is not as big as Gentoo (though bigger than like Slackware).
I guess for the most part it doesn't satisfy 6 and 7 though, right?  I realize that AUR is source-based, but on the whole, Arch is binary, so I'm referring to the overall tendency of the distribution. 
Is there the ability to choose between stable and unstable packages though, to be as bleeding-edge as possible? (I'm thinking no but thought I'd ask)
Many other distributions such as Ubuntu probably wouldn't meet my needs at all.  They seem to have a great repository and community, but I just don't want a GUI-based distro.  The truth is, I want to feel like my computer needs me.  It's my baby.  XDDDD  Okay, that's pretty sad, especially because it's a Pentium II (I can't WAIT to get my new laptop!!!!!!!!!!!), but I appreciate my Gentoo box way more than our Windows box upstairs, a lot of that having to do with the work I had to put into it to get it working correctly, and all that I had to learn.  It makes me appreciate it a lot more, and it makes me a lot better at solving problems.  (If it ain't broken, why not break it so you can fix it? XD)I don't want a distro that does everything for me; I won't feel needed anymore.  Plus, I'm addicted to the command line.  I have a window manager, sure (Thunar with Xfce), but I mostly still use the command line to view my files.  Sometimes I don't even start up X (I never start it up by default) and am just as efficient as when I have it open.  I insist on knowing how to do everything manually... when I wanted to make keyboard shortcuts for X, I chose to use xbindkeys rather than use the GUI with Xfce, so I could do it manually and still have it working if I ever switched desktop managers.  I manually edit pretty much ALL my config files and, like  I said, I am just as efficient without the GUI as I am with it.  I can't go five minutes in GUI without having a virtual terminal open.    So I think, in these respects, Arch would meed my needs quite well, just as Gentoo does now.  I have deiced to try out Arch now anyway, regardless of the state of Gentoo, because you know, i might just like Arch better.  I know a lot of Gentoo users have said they've gone to Arch.    I'm trying to get my friend Evan to let me use his 8 gb hdd to try it on, because my current 6 gig drive for Gentoo is like... 99 percent full (I swear, I'm not kidding, I have 100 mg left, I REALLY have to prune XD), so once I get it, I'm going to install Arch (after unhooking my /home hard drive because I only have two slots for hard drives, and they're both already filled!  I will probably end up moving the /home directory onto that 8 gig drive anyway.  I realize it's hard to share things between distros, but I will at least be able to have a place to put files for both distros in the same place and would probably end up symlinking some same location to my desktop for both distros
Okay, now I'm just ranting.  Back to point!  I'm definitely going to try out Arch, and so far I like what I see. I even recommended it to a friend who is also thinking of leaving Gentoo (for Ubuntu, so he can support his amd64 processor).  I pointed out Arch64 and he's considering it. I don't think he'd like Ubuntu any more than I.  He originally used Slack and only switched to Gentoo because Slack really doesn't have a good package manager.  I think he'd like Arch as well.
I've also done research on other distributions someone like me might like (especially coming from Gentoo).
This is my current list:
Arch Linux
Frugalware (based on Arch, right?)
Zen Walk
Vector Linux
CRUX (I'm leaning away from this one, as of now)
Lunar
Source Mage
Sorcerer
FreeBSD (but I've decided not to go with FreeBSD, as much as I like installing from source, because their philosophy of stability over currentness (like not having flash 9 because it's not "stable") just doesn't fly with me.. Linux is better for me, I think)
LFS.. okay, not really, but if I ever have a weekend when I'm REALLY bored.........
I've used Slack before but I would prefer to have a package manager, so I'm steering away from that direction, as much as I liked Slack.
Have I missed any other distros people in this sort of mindset like us might like?  ^_^ 
My primary focus right now is Arch, and it's definitely my first preference as far as switching goes.
I think my biggest problem with Arch is that I REALLY like to compile everything from source (or at least, have Portage do it for me :-p), so I"d miss that.  Especially USE flags.  However,  Source Mge/Lunar/Sorcerer don't sound as good as Arch, and FreeBSD just... isn't my thing.  Their package manger seems great, it's their overall philosophy I disagree with.
This post really isn't asking for help with anything, but isn't that fine?  This is just the Arch Linux General Forums, right?  I just wanna talk about Arch as compared to other distros.  I've wiki-ed it some, but I just think it's a fun thing to discuss.
So what things do you guys like better about Arch, and what things do you like better about Gentoo, or maybe about some other good distros?
I can't wait to try out Arch; I'm so excited!  No Xubuntu for me! ^___________^ (Gnome and ESPECIALLY KDE would lag far too much for this computer)
-Megan M-

Answer 1

Well, I technically have 14 gigs... I have the 6 gig and a 4 gig which has /usr/portage (the portage tree probably takes up so much space it would outweigh any space saved through USE flags XD) and /var/tmp, since that can get huge while compiling and I don't have space on the 6 gig for the fluctuations in space... I had to install the binary for OpenOffice just because the temporary space required to compile it was bigger than the space I had on my hard drive!!!!and I actually have so little space left I am permanently using a ext3 formatted flash drive as my ~/Desktop (it's in my fstab and everything XD!)  This gives me 4 extra gigs for all my stuff.
But anyway, just you people answering this thread so nicely confirms my feelings about the Arch community.  I can easily see a thread like this simply being ignored on the Gentoo forums, or just merged with other threads.  >.<
Actually, to be honest, most pakcages I am running unstable on Gentoo had to do with compile errors and such, or some feature not working correctly in the older version.  The only ones that I just wanted to run unstable are.. lemme check my /etc/portage/package.keywords... Skype and Pidgin.  And possibly Mplayer too, I was thinking of.  Everything else was either because of problems or of it being in the Sunrise overlay (everything in there is masked as unstable since it's not an official part of the Portage tree).
How easy is it to get an older version of a package?  I ask because I want Flash 9.0.48.0-r1, NOT 9.0.115.0.  The newer one made my Firefox commit suicide and just close with an error when I viewed certain pages (youtube, etc. was fine, but even going to www.adobe.com made it crash *irony*).  Gentoo forum users told me that then newer one was unmasked because of a security flaw found in the older one, but for me, I'd rather take my chances with the hole than have firefox crash every five minutes!!!!  Is there any way to specify not to update a package either, for when you do a world update (or whatever they are called in Arch)?  This also has to do with Flash... I'll give the newer one a try... maybe it was just a Gentoo issue... but if not, I'm DEFINITELY downgrading!
I like how easy it seems for Arch users to add packages to AUR so they are available to others... this is harder to do on Gentoo, despite that everything is source-based.  It's most like there is a wall between the users and the developers that cannot be broken easily.  This seems like a good way to let users have a little fun in the developer's world without *being* one.
One last question while I'm here.. my other friend who I sugested Arch to... I just want to confirm that Arch would support his CPU.  He said to me:
"Oh, and my CPU arch is amd64 / x86-64 / emt64-t
thechnically its em64t since its an intel CPU but i am running a k8 optimized system (because I used to have a opteron)"
^_^
PS: Your forums may be smaller than those of Gentoo, but that is not necessarily a disadvantage.  There is like a perfect size, I think.  You can be too small OR too big... with bigger forums, it is so much easier for a thread to just get buried if no one can answer it right away, even though someone else might be able to but will never see it because it's already buried.  This happened to me in the Ubuntu forums.  I obviously do not run Ubuntu but posted a question there regarding mtpfs with a particular MP3 player, because I figured the forums were large enough that I'd get at least a few people with the same mp3 player and they could tell me their experiences with the program.  HA!  Instead, I just got 0 replies and it was simply buried.  With forums, bigger isn't *always* better, imo.
PPS: What is your policy on patching the source code?  For example, GTK+ recently deprecated a few features that TiLP(1 and 2) depends on.  The source code will now not compile.  I made a patch for it to fix it (I was supposed to submit that ebuild two days ago... grah, I really should do it tomorrow!), for otherwise it just gives errors.  If it is TiLp2 you have in the repository, it is literally as simple as adding one line in the source code (and is the fix the developer himself recommended), but Gentoo did not even notice and kept the source code in the tree the same even though it would no longer compile! @_@  This kind of ticked me off, personally, which is why I have to submit that patch tomorrow!  ha ha
Last edited by violagirl23 (2008-01-24 06:00:10)