Arch Linux
Earned its official stamp of approval today. My machine at work was originally an Ubuntu box; I believe the initial install was 6.10 (Edgy Eft). Over time the box has passed from person to person, and having not had the time or inclination to rebuild it, its simply been upgraded - all the way to Hardy Heron. In terms of functionality, it cranked along OK, but it’s been brutally slow the past few weeks. It would take somewhere in the order of a minute to open a tab in gnome-terminal; switching to my ‘work’ desktop (read: email client + terminals) would almost warrant a coffee break. The machine itself isn’t too slow (2.8GHz P4, 2GiB RAM) - it’s not the fastest box out, but for work it’s perfectly capable… so the source of these speed issues baffled me.
Figuring it was time, I stuck around late last night and began a rebuild. I’m a huge fan of Gentoo (my server at home has been running it now for years); emerge is possibly the best package management tool I’ve used and I’m not averse to digging in to fix things, but the unfortunate fact is that I can’t take the week of downtime it’d take to install Gentoo on the work PC - or the occasional stints to rebuild the system. So I took a swing at Arch Linux, a distribution which features a rolling release schedule (ie. there are no discrete releases, other than occasionally taking a snapshot to rebuild the installation CD) and a minimal outlook on initial installation size. Plus, the current release CD is called Overlord, which is pretty fucking sweet.
Anyway, long story short, I stuck around until late to finish building the box last night, and kept building it today - I’m pretty much done now. Overall, I’d rank Arch pretty highly as a distribution. While you can choose to go the manual route, the installer on the LiveCD got me up and running in a basic environment in very short amount of time, and pacman (the package manager) was extremely easy to learn and use. I’ve now got a box that’s a shittonne faster than the old Ubuntu setup, substantially lighter running (having switched to XMonad), and that I better understand. I’m sure noone really cares, but for anyone reading this blog and wondering which distribution deserves some time on their box: go Arch. I couldn’t recommend it for a server, but as a workstation distribution it’s fantastic.
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