[GLLUG] Arch Tribulations

[Chick Tower]

I decided to install Arch Linux (as well as Slackware and Bodhi) on a
"new" laptop I bought on Craigslist.  Arch has changed some since the
last time I installed it, before systemd existed.  If anyone else wants
to try Arch, I would suggest you try one of the derivatives of it, such
as Bridge, ArchBang, or Manjaro (you can find others by searching on
Distrowatch) and avoid most of the pain of setting it up from scratch.

The first thing that annoyed me was the installation.  You download a
680MB ISO image and it doesn't even have the installation files on it.
You have to do a network install.  Other distros manage to put a live
GUI version and the basic installation files on a CD, so what the heck
is Arch's problem?  All it has is a live, command-line version of Arch.
  Granted, it has all the tools you need to prepare for and conduct the
installation, but just not the packages that will actually be installed.
  This aggravation was just the warm-up.

The installation went fine.  I added extra programs just fine, including
X and my preferred window manager, Fluxbox.  Then getting Arch
configured was a largely undocumented horror.  Sure, they have a wiki
page that suggests things, with links to how to configure them, but a
lot of things are scattered all over their wiki without links.  I wanted
to boot to a command line and then run startx when I wanted Fluxbox to
run.  Oh, startx is in another package that has yet to be installed.
And you have to create your own .xinitrc, or find one that works.  No
virtual terminals are installed by the xorg-server metapackage, not even
xterm, so that's something else you have to figure out on your own.
Luckily, I had already installed another terminal emulator, but I was
surprised to not find the ubiquitous xterm installed.

I never knew that wireless chips could be blocked both by hardware (via
a button on the PC) and by software.  I've never before had a laptop
with a wireless on/off button.  No other distro I've installed has
soft-blocked the wireless hardware, but Arch does on my laptop.  At
least the error message tells you that you need rfkill to unblock it,
but God forbid the developers actually script Arch to run this for you.
  Arch also gives the wireless and Ethernet interfaces odd names.  Ben 
Chavez would have really unusual network interface names every time he 
installed Arch, and I could never figure out how he did that.  I didn't 
when I installed Arch years ago, or with any other distro I've tried. 
It turns out the kernel comes up with those names, maybe by querying the 
chips that provide the networking interfaces.  You need some udev rules 
to change the interface names to the more-familiar wlanX and ethX, and 
every distro but Arch seems to handle that automatically.

I wanted a firewall and Privoxy.  Sure, they install easily enough, but
they aren't "enabled" in systemd, so they don't run until you learn you
have to enable them.  Who in their right mind installs something as
critical as a firewall but does not want it to run?  Sure, you want to
make sure it's configured the way you want it, and then have it start up 
on the next reboot.  Not even a warning during installation that it 
won't run until you issue some command, which Debian and its derivatives 
do warn you about, although it's a completely different command.  At 
least I don't have to wrestle with firewalld...yet.

Arch developers have really drunk deeply from the systemd Kool-Aid
pitcher.  They don't even include cron, because systemd has timers, none
of which are set up for you, of course.  Not that there are any logs to
rotate, as by default there are none, everything goes into the systemd
journal.  I've read somewhere else that there's a way to make systemd
create the usual text logs of the past, but I have to wonder if there's
a way to remove old log information in the systemd journal to keep it
from filling the hard drive partition.  I assume there is, but that
entails reading even more about systemd.  I had not thought systemd was
a PITA in any of the distros I've tried before that used it, but Arch
has made a believer out of me.

You might think I dislike Arch.  I don't, but I dislike the pain of
configuring it after installation, and which is greater than I remember.
  I know that once I get it right it should be stable and fast and
easily updated, or stable until the Arch developers decide to make
changes in how the system works yet again.  I just think they could make
the configuration less painful without compromising their goal of
letting users make Arch serve whatever purpose users want it to.  I just
wanted to vent here, but be glad I waited until I got it mostly
configured and didn't make this a daily rant.
:)

Please don't suggest I try some user-friendly distro, like those named
after candy or an African word.  I want something lean and mean on my
old laptops without the continual compilation of Gentoo, the relentless
austerity of suckless.org's stali Linux, or the
interesting-but-not-grown-up Puppy.
-- 

                                Chick