Arch Linux

I've been thinking about my re-entry into the GNU/Linux world recently. I've been yearning for a *nix workstation, and I've been debating whether to go for Linux or FreeBSD. It's been a year and a half since I last used Linux. In the mean time, I've grown more comfortable with FreeBSD.

I love the FreeBSD system. However, I decided to go for Linux on my workstation because:

1) FreeBSD is moving to version 5.3, and the ports tree has been frozen. That means that there is no xorg 6.8 and no Gnome 2.8 in the ports tree yet. And I've been meaning to try these. I could wait for a few weeks till this happens, but then there's also issue number 2.

2) Even though FreeBSD also has binary package management, it is really more source-based. For servers, source-based package management is great: you need a lot of flexibility and you often need to define compile time arguments. However, for a workstation, binaries are fine. And I'm sick of waiting for hours while my software compiles. For what? A 2% performance gain? Not worth the agravation.

So I decided to go with Arch Linux. I briefly considered gentoo. But like I said, I'm getting sick of waiting for my software to compile. But I still wanted to be able to install bleeding edge packages, and Arch seems flexible enough for that. Plus I've heard good things about it.

So I installed Arch today. There's not much hand-holding during the installation and initial system configuration, but it's pretty straight forward. The manual is light years behind FreeBSD's, but it gets the job done. The installation is ncurses-based, like FreeBSD's. However, it's not as polished as the latter (which isn't that polished either, with x-server configuration issues). But then you only install an OS once in a blue moon anyway. My initial encounter with pacman (the package management system) was positive. It seems to work as advertised. And it's definitely much faster to install binaries than to compile from source.

However, I've hit a snag with Gnome. There seems to be a problem with libcroco. This isn't too encouraging. Gnome is partially fubar as a result. Don't these people test packages before making them available to pacman? It seems that Arch's QA isn't up to par with FreeBSD. Very disapointing. I guess I've been spoiled by FreeBSD's stability and maturity.

My initial impression of Arch is mixed. It's austere, a bit like FreeBSD, and I like it that way. I like pacman in principle. However, I'm not convinced that updating will be painless if Arch's QA let's it down. I'll give it a few weeks, then decide whether Arch is worth my time or not. I'm keeping an open mind.