Overcoming your terror of Arch Linux

[crosscourt]

More here, www.linuxinsider.com/story/overcoming-y ... 85666.html

[tlmiller]

1. "It's hard to install."

I'll disagree with this, AND with the author. It's COMPLICATED to install. It's not actually hard if you have a second machine online to read the instructions. That said, I'll agree the install is sucktastic and utterly unusable due to how slow it is. But that's why there's anarchy linux...Arch with a super super super awesome scripted installer that just works and can get your entire system installed and running fully updated in like 15 minutes!!

2. "The rolling releases are unstable."

To an extent, I'm going to agree with the writer. I haven't seen any system-wide instability in several YEARS in Arch. But individual application breakage due to the rolling release nature? Oh yeah, in fact right now the Atheros firmware is broken in the latest firmware-linux (or linux-firmware) package and I've been forced to hold it.

3. "I don't want to have to roll back packages."

Sorry, but the author couldn't be more wrong. If you're not regularly rolling back packages, you must use only a WM and a console, as you obviously don't use many applications.

4. "It doesn't have as many packages," and "I heard the AUR is scary."

Here again, I'm agreeing with the author. If you can read (and do read), you can usually see that aur build scripts are safe. You don't even have to know most of what it's doing, just be able to read basic things of where it's getting the source, what it's doing with said source. If you see that it's getting the source from hackersrus.com/spysoftware/whatever, you know not to trust that build. Takes longer than Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, or the like, but it's fairly easy, and makes Arch so that it's repos are second only to Debian in pure size.