Arch Linux: The Best Linux Distro Ever.
I’m using Linux since 2007. I’ve been on many distros (in order): Mandriva, Ubuntu, openSuSE, Fedora, and only in VirtualBox: Debian and Linux Mint. But since two months there is another distro in both lists (I tested it out on VirtualBox and then set it up on the actual machine): Arch Linux.
Arch Linux is a Linux distribution by Judd Vinet and Aaron Griffin, existing since 2002, intended to be simple, elegant, versatile and expedient (See Reason #3). It uses pacman as the package manager. It’s a rolling-release distro, that means there are only new CD images released, you get updates even if you’ve installed Arch Linux v0.1.
What makes it so awesome?
There are six things that makes it the best distro:
Reason 1. ArchWiki
The Arch Wiki is an awesome place. You can find many useful things about Arch. In this article you can find 9 links to articles in the wiki (plus two doubled).
## Reason 2. Pacman and the AUR
The package manager is pacman. It has a specific syntax. The Arch User Repository is a place, where you can find PKGBUILDs (build instructions, which help you make a package) for more packages than contents of the default repositioriies — [core], [extra] and [community] (which consists of binary packages that began their life in AUR) Read the ArchWiki Pacman and AUR articles for details.
Reason 3. The Arch Way
The distro is intended to be simple, elegant, versatile and expedient, as The Arch Way v2.0 states.
Reason 4. /etc/rc.conf
/etc/rc.conf is the main configuration file. Or at least it was when I
wrote this post.
systemd replaced it. And boy is it awesome. It’s much more friendly than
/etc/rc.conf ever was.
Reason 5. The community: IRC, Forums, Mailing Lists
Arch Linux has a strong community: there are many people on the IRC channel, Forums and Mailing Lists. They are here to help you.
Reason 6. The rolling-release model
Arch uses an rolling-release model: there are only new CD images released, and you get updates even if you’ve installed Arch Linux v0.1.