Thinking of diving in ....

Question

Greetings Arch:
Been with Linux for over a year now, most of that time with Mint, since it's the first thing I got working the way I like.  But it's time to go a little deeper with a distro that is a bit more 'manual'.  I've narrowed it down to Salix and Arch.  I joined the Salix forum and asked those guys how they'd rate their distro vs. Arch and almost every reply I got spoke very highly of Arch except that many of them complained about unstable upgrades.  I love the idea of configuring things from scratch or at least being *able* to do that, although I have no problem with a distro  that WROOTB, just so long as I can re-configure things to my liking latter.  But I don't have time right now to deal with a system that's made unstable constantly by bleeding edge upgrades.  So what say you?  Will Arch demand more time than I have to give to it, or can I expect a stable system?   Question:  Why don't you guys do like Debian and have both Testing and Stable versions?
BTW, it seems to be universally agreed that Arch docs are second to none.  And the 'Arch Way' is the One True Religion.  But it hasta be stable for me, at least at this time of year.
Regards,

Answer 1

Again, so many answers!  You guys do understand that I'm just feeling you all out.  This is mostly 'conversation' to test the spirit of  the community.  So far, no other forum has come close to giving so much time to someone who has not even started to use the product.  But it will pay off--I intend to make a contribution and to give more than I take.
hadrons123:
To have something as stable as debian stable/RHEL you need man power(devs/testing guys)  or simply larger user/production community.
<That I can understand, there's just not enough man power.
Arch user base and market share in community and enterprise is really small compared to those big guys(RHEL/Debian), although you can't really measure the market share with the current scenario.
<I wonder if anyone has an estimate of the current user base of Arch?  Anyway, it is growing fast, that is for sure.
Arch basically doesn't intend to be like Debian stable is what I learnt here.
<Of course every distro has it's own goals, and these probably don't change.  Still, I can't help but speculate.  Debian is old and feels tired and slow, yet people use it because it is at least stable. Arch feels young and vigorous horny, yet many people stay away because of this stability issue.  If, besides the normal repos,  there was a 'stable' repo for packages that have been absolutely tested, then maybe Arch would grow faster.  OTOH, maybe that is not even desired!
If you take the forums, there is definitely less noise/signal ratio than anyother linux/BSD forums, So you could get more relevant and useful info than anywhere else.(kudos to mods)
<Yes.
Zancarius:
What ultimately sold me on Arch was the community; the fact that tons of edge-case Google searches for various odds and ends invariably lead you to the Arch forums
>How true that is.  From my first day with Linux, just Googling around for answers to whatever question, so often the answer is found at Arch.  The Arch mods and writers are heroes, they take first place in  helping the whole Linux world, not just their own distro.  I find much of the writing in the Linux world to be just abominably bad.  Arch is the huge exception.
was just icing on the cake. The mods do an exceptional work of policing the forums, so it's unlikely that noisy posts will persist more than a day or so before being moved or otherwise corrected. It also helps that many of the people who post have at least some motivation to do the Right Thing, so I believe in that regard that the Arch community puts forward some measure of effort in policing itself. Consequently, you won't often see the same newbie-esque questions posted over and over again, so most of the people who have problems and post about it are genuinely having curious difficulties. You learn a lot from watching many of these exchanges, too. Indeed, I think I've learned an awful lot more about desktop-specific use cases for Linux (in general, Arch in particular), software, and various hardware issues than I have in the many years of using other systems. I'd highly recommend spending some time lurking about and reading the odd thread here and there. It'll be educational, and even if you don't stick with Arch, it'll be something you can take with you in life. Knowledge is never wasted.
<Very well said.
As you spend time on the forums, you might stumble across some posts by the regulars that sound a little strongly worded. It isn't intended to be offensive (though a very small number of people have undoubtedly taken it as such); rather, everyone here--as hadrons123 said--tries to keep the signal-to-noise ratio as low as possible. Also, it probably doesn't help (maybe it does?) that I'm sure a disproportionate number of contributors (myself included) are INTJs/INTPs.
<Signal/Noise ratio is not a small problem.  We now live in a world where most of what is written on the internet will end up being saved forever (even this ;-) and added to Google's data base.  But since so little attention is paid to S/N, eventually what we end up with is the Library of Babel.  No!  We need to pay vigorous attention to the *quality* of writing; the *quantity* of writing is a curse.  Those who understand that are my brothers.
DSpider:
Read the FAQ: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ
<I read it long before this, however there is no substitute for getting some personal comments.
Last edited by rayandrews (2012-06-30 14:18:40)