Is Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 02:05:55PM -0300, Marcelo Cavalcante wrote:
> Well.. I do respect your opinion..
> But the principle of Arch isn't only to make it difficult to install..
> 
> As I told on my last speech in FLISOL ( Latin American Free Software
> Instalation Festival )... Arch is a great Linux School. For people who
> whanna learn Linux it's good choice. I don't mean people should stay the
> whole life using Arch. But, you'll have to agree that in one installation of
> Arch you'll learn more about linux than in 10 installations of Ubuntu, for
> example. I'm not saying that one is better than the other... I'm just saying
> that Arch's installation isn't very easy because of that. To instigate
> people to navigate, search, study, etc..

The thing is that I don't believe being forced to deal with all the
details up front is a good way to learn.  In fact I think it just puts
most people off.  It also doesn't show you how things could be done better
(by in fact automating things).  How is leraning good design practices
not a good thing?  A simplestic system doesn't teach you that.

The assumption that making the user do everything (often following a
written set of instructions) somehow teaches them something beneficial
is highly suspect.  I don't buy it.  Sure some people feel that by doing
a thousand steps, they must have done something complicated themselves,
rather than just clicking a button that did all those steps for them.
It doesn't mean they actually learned anything.  It does mean they just
spent a lot of time doing a thousand steps.

So I do in fact consider designs like Arch Linux harmful.  Gentoo too.
I am not quite sure about Linux From Scratch yet.  It seems to have
different goals than actually being a distribution.

> As I told you before.. I'm a big fan of Debian. Is my favorite distro for
> servers.. but in my laptop I do still prefer Arch.
> 
> The installation isn't so simple like other distros.. you're right.. But,
> after the whole system is done.. you'll realize the differences between Arch
> and other distros. A great example of this is the AUR (aur.archlinux.org). A
> community repo where everyone can put their own packages for everyone who
> wants to try.

Anyone that wants to can put up a web site with packages for debian or
ubuntu as well (many people have).  Sure it isn't a single community site.
Of course Debian is a community with thousands of developers putting up
packages, so to some extent it doesn't need a seperate site for that.

Also a community package site could be done on any distribution, so it
isn't as such a feature of the distribution.  It is a feature of the
community.  You can have a great community around a crappy distribution.
Doesn't make the distribution good, just makes the community good (even
if one might think they are a bit misguided spending their effort on
such a distribution).

> Anyway.. as I told you before.. I didn't want to start a flamewar... I'll
> never say that distro X is better than distro Y..

I will say that.  I don't consider that a flamewar, given I present what
I consider facts for why one is better than another.  I won't just
start writing in all caps that one sucks and the other is awesome.
That would be a flamewar.

> The best distro, in my opinion, is the one you uses and solve your problems.

Well not necesarily.  You may just not have switched to the best one yet.
Or perhaps you are being forced to use an inferior distribution by
someone else who has strange priorities that don't align with reality.
That seems to happen a lot.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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