Ubuntu VS Arch

[Gandalf]

Hello,

I just wanted to know everyone's opinion on Ubuntu and Arch, and before anyone ask Arch is not Newbie dedicated distro

Ok i will begin describing what ive experienced (me and another one, he knows himself )

I'm using ubuntu since Warty release and i like it a lot, it is user friendly, easy to install, easy to update/upgrade, nothing more to say, talking about ubuntu VS some others, they aren't even compared (hey! am talking about RPM based distro a.k.a FC/Mandriva)

But allow me now to compare 1 year Ubuntu VS 1 week Arch
Ubuntu is user friendly or may i say Newbie dedicated distribution, it's a very cool envirement to learn linux, to work, to play games. Arch is a bit more experienced user distro, for example, When u boot boot with installation cd into you will get into a console where u will launch installer manually, partiton manually with cfdisk, select packages, configure grub/rc.conf etc.. so the installer is not fancy, as well as installing xorg, u have to configure it urself (as usual having ubuntu's xorg.conf will save time on it ). For now u may think that Ubuntu is much more better than arch, but my answer is NO! why? well leave installation behind coz following an installer questions is like following a good installation guide

Now you are wondering why did i say No!, well because of the below reasons:

• Arch is 3 / 4 (maybe more) faster than Ubuntu, when i installed it, i couldn't beleive it, i felt i was using FreeBSD (yes i tried freeBSD its cool, but package system sucks)
• It has a very good package manager, similar to apt-get didn't find any difference till now except the easy way to create a binary package for it (look below) also it's easy to use ( pacman -Syu = apt-get update && apt-get upgrade )
• Packaging creation is very easy for example newton wasn't in the repo (it ain't in ubuntu as well), I wanted to install it, so i have created a binary package out of sources in a Very Easy way, I just get one file called PKGBUILD specially for it and running makepkg will create a package similar to .deb instaling it would be with pacman -A ( = dpkg -i )
• The most important point is that Arch is heavly up to date, let's see umm for example Thunderbird 1.5 was released Jan 12th 2006, it was in Arch official Repo Jan 13th 2006 ( http://www.archlinux.org/packages.php?id=4237 ) While ubuntu is not in that case (even dapper hasn't got TB 1.5 till now )
• Rebuilding packages is Very easy, it is called abs which is similar to portsnap in FreeBSD

I guess above reasons are enough to show why i liked Arch more than ubuntu but remember Going with Arch means saying good bye to GUI apps, No update manager, no users management manager etc... (though everything can be installed from AUR

Please note also that i posted this topic with no offence intended to anyone, I just want to know everyone's opinion, even if u can't try it i guess i've gave a good point of view between ubuntu/arch, if u want to give it a try follow this to get an up & running system and im sure that if u don't care about being forced to use Terminal, u will like it

[Perfect Storm]

You forgot to mention that arch is i686 optimized

Arch is a very cool distro and very fast. But as you said it's more for experience users who aren't afraid using commands.

[kairu0]

After hearing positive comments about Arch, I downloaded it and gave it a try.

My trial stopped abruptly when the CD wouldn't boot on my PC with both "arch" and "arch-noscsi" parameters. Yes, the CD passed the MD5 checksum.

[Gandalf]

You forgot to mention that arch is i686 optimized

Arch is a very cool distro and very fast. But as you said it's more for experience users who aren't afraid using commands.

Yea I forgot to mention that

After hearing positive comments about Arch, I downloaded it and gave it a try.

My trial stopped abruptly when the CD wouldn't boot on my PC with both "arch" and "arch-noscsi" parameters. Yes, the CD passed the MD5 checksum.

hmm haven't u tried to ask their forum support, guys there are advanced and helpfull

[BSDFreak]

Arch is 3 / 4 (maybe more) faster than Ubuntu, when i installed it, i couldn't beleive it, i felt i was using FreeBSD (yes i tried freeBSD its cool, but package system sucks)

The ports system sucks or the pkg system sucks and why do you believe it sucks (it's generally thought of as the best system available bar none when it comes to availability and ease of use).

Regarding Arch, personally i thought that the lack of applications coupled with stability issues made it unusable, i returned to slackware after about a month of using it (and it's nowhere near FreeBSD 6/7 when it comes to speed).

[Gandalf]

The ports system sucks or the pkg system sucks and why do you believe it sucks (it's generally thought of as the best system available bar none when it comes to availability and ease of use).

Well Just a hint, upgrade to GNOME 2.12 Took 13 hours on a fresh install (Tried it two times)

Regarding Arch, personally i thought that the lack of applications coupled with stability issues made it unusable, i returned to slackware after about a month of using it (and it's nowhere near FreeBSD 6/7 when it comes to speed).

I did use FreeBSD6, I'm using Arch right now (replaced ubuntu) and I feel they are pretty much the same speed, maybe not as fast as FreeBSD is ( Unix in general is faster than Linux system) But beleive me it's pretty much the same!

[DaMasta]

Thanks for this post. I was planning on giving Arch a try and now I'm a little more prepared.

[BSDFreak]

Well Just a hint, upgrade to GNOME 2.12 Took 13 hours on a fresh install (Tried it two times)

I assume you used the ports system to do that then. You can install via pkg instead, it's as fast as apt. It's still amazing though, i updated my entire machine from 5.3 to current via cvsup buildworld, buildkernel and then portupgrade -af, that rebuilds every installed package, including an upgrade of every KDE, XFCE, xorg and so on and it didn't take much more than 13 hours on an Athlon-XP 2300 with 1 gig of ram. Sounds like something went wrong for you.

I did use FreeBSD6, I'm using Arch right now (replaced ubuntu) and I feel they are pretty much the same speed, maybe not as fast as FreeBSD is ( Unix in general is faster than Linux system) But beleive me it's pretty much the same!

Well then they must have done something with it because when i tried Arch (about six months ago) it was considerably slower than FreeBSD and not really much faster than Slackware (i ran them all on the same machine).

Did you use the stable branch? If not, a recompile is almost mandatory to get rid of all the debugging, it slows it down to a crawl.

Anyway, this is my opinion, that's all, i prefer BSD.

[Buffalo Soldier]

downloading arch iso now.

[WildTangent]

I was considering giving this a try last night after bored2k spoke so highly of it in #ubuntuforums on IRC, but now I REALLY want to try it out Perhaps if I have time on the weekend...

-Wild