On Tuesday, 19 February 2013 at 00:53:07 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
Admittedly, most of my linux experience (an unix in general) is
Debian-derived stuff. (And a little bit of Mandrake from way
back when
it was still called Mandrake, but that's not exactly relevant
experience anymore ;) )
I was hooked on Ubuntu myself, until they began getting all
"MUST_CLONE_MACOSX", "MUST_TAKE_CONTROL_AWAY_FROM_USER" on
everyone's ass (around the versions 8/9, I think). Tried a lot of
different distros, eventually
landed with Arch. I think it's just the right mixture of
convenience and customizability.
Although I'll probably wait until the
rumblings I've heard about efforts to make it easier to set up
start
bearing fruit - I've been pretty much scarred for life on any
sort of
manual configuring of X11. ;)
I'll treat that as two seperate points :)
(1) Setup Arch from install medium to first login:
That is unpleasant work, sadly. There once was something called
AIF (Arch installation framework), which was an ncurses-graphical
installer; it was good, but old and iirc barely maintained.
Eventually they devs apparently decided to drop it and only ship
a couple of scripts, that were easier to maintain and as far as I
know they have not made any plans public where they would do more
than provide these scripts. Point being, don't expect this part
to get easier any time soon, it probably won't, so I'd suggest
not tying the trying Archlinux out part to that problem.
On the other hand the Archlinux wiki (wiki.archlinux.org) has an
excellent Beginner's guide and said scripts are fairly easy to
use and remember, so after the second time you can usually do an
Arch installation faster than the auto-installer of other distros
(only possible because the Arch base system so very small, of
course).
(2) X11 setup: Why would you want to configure X11 manually?
"sudo pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xf86-input-evdev
xorg-video-(ati/intel/nouveau)", then install your desktop
environment, e.g. "sudo pacman -S enlightenment17", copy the
skeleton xinitrc file "cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc ~/" and change the
exec line to your desktop environment, e.g. "exec
enlightenment_start". Done. Now "startx" will give you your fully
functional desktop environment, no need for any xorg.confs, X11
configures itself automatically. Usually the only reason for an
xorg.conf is when using the proprietary nvidia/ati drivers, but
the Arch wiki has lenghtly (well-written) articles regarding
those.
In any case though, there still remains the problem that
OS-level
package managers are more or less OS-specific. Something like
0install
sounds great, although I admit that I've been aware of it for
years
and still have yet to actually try it.
I'm not familiar with 0install myself and the truth is I probably
never will look at it - unless it can integrate with pacman, that
is - I've simply grown to dependent on the convenience of pacman
to try anything else :)
Anyway, I didn't want to put more oil in the fire of the
OS-specific-language-independent-package-manager vs.
language-specific-OS-independent-package manager debate (because
frankly, I can't contribute much in that area, all I want is a
package manager that simply works, be it OS or language specific,
I really don't care as long as it just gets the job done right -
one of the reasons I'm happy with pacman btw.), I just wanted to
point out that not all OS-package-managers are evil. Sorry for
dragging you slightly off-topic for so long^^
