[GLLUG] Arch Tribulations

[Richard Houser]

Chick, unfortunately about half of what you just wrote about is ultimately systemd specific or the way it's developers do things.  At it's core, it violates the Unix way of doing things and its developers have actively resisted attempts to provide stable APIs so there are options.  As sad as it currently is, I expect things to be mostly stable again on that front after a few more years, just like the initial PulseAudio implementation mess from the same individuals.

Even on Mageia, which was forced to switch three years ago, about half of the major problems I encounter are systemd related (the largest of which are a few complete boot failures and PID 1 100% CPU usage, probably after installing patches).

A lot of this comes down to RedHat pushing these changes for political reasons in spite of the technical problems.  Unfortunately, RedHat was just to big of a player and got their way after a long fight from much of the community.

With most the other distros ultimately falling over to systems, a fair number of users made the jump to BSD.  With how you tend to use your machines and the general age of the hardware involved, perhaps BSD is actually a better fit for you.  Have you looked into it lately?  Most the user space is the same.

The other issue, 680MB for a text installer without local packages is a joke.  Mageia's GUI installer for x86_64 or i586 came out about 80MB last I used it.  I normally just do a network boot or install from DVD, though.

On January 30, 2016 1:55:20 PM EST, Chick Tower <c.e.tower at gmail.com> wrote:
>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
>
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-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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