Is Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu?

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Marcelo Cavalcante
<kalibslack-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Not what I mean...
> You're not forced to do anything...

If you choose to use the distribution, then you have accepted whatever
hoops it puts in front of you.

But to reword that "it forces you to do A, B, and C" isn't an
unreasonable thing to do.

> Come on.. We're using Linux.. We can have a lot of distros.. hundreds.. a
> lot of options..
> So, you're not "forcing anyone to deal with all the details". We're just
> giving an option for those who want to have this kind of experience.
> Understand?
> For example.. Let's suppose that someone already knows a lot of Linux but
> doesn't want to spend a lot of time installing a linux distro dealing with
> all these details. But, the person is interested on try Arch Linux system,
> pacman package manager, etc.. The Arch Way... Well.. If you wanna try Arch,
> but doesn't wanna deal with all the details like you said, we won't force
> you to do it. You can try Chackra Linux (http://chakra-project.org/).
> Chackra is a live cd using Arch Linux with kde packages. You'll have a
> simple installation system (simpler than Ubuntu, in my opinion, by the way).
> ;]

Once upon a time, I upgraded Slackware from one binary format to
another.  There was a certain amount of educational value in that, in
that:
a) Nobody had come up with a way to automate the change, and
b) It taught me some things about differences between binary formats
and versions of libc.

Of course, the grander lesson that I learned from it was that the
result was rather fragile, and that it seemed a better idea to move to
a distribution that didn't force me into that kind of process.  At the
time, I migrated from Slackware to Red Hat, which was a considerable
improvement in how system management processes could be automated.

I subsequently found that Debian took that a number of steps further,
and the sorts of processes that Lennart describes have, over the
years, tended to be elaborated on rather than being diminished.

I see little value in people continuing to recreate system management
"wheels" in more primitive fashions.

It seems to me that if the Slackware folks had decided to adopt BSD
Ports as a build process, that would have provided a meaningful (and
distinctly different) approach to systematic system management that
would have been an interesting alternative to Debian.  Unfortunately,
the nearest thing that happened was that Gentoo emerged, and
popularized twiddling with optimizer flags as indicating that you
"understand your system."

I'd love to see a system that tried using system management tools like
cfengine and puppet to manage lots of aspects of the system; *that*
would be worth tearing things down a bit to build up something new.

But I'm mostly with Lennart - most of the distributions are
inefficient wastes of time, and the typical "distribution of the week"
*should* die quickly.
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