new hotness?

[Nathan England]

On Thursday 19 February 2009 18:12:00 Francis Earl wrote:
> > My personal list of Distributions i have spent some real quality time
> > with
> >
> > Ubuntu/Debian
> > Fedora/Red Hat new and old/Centos
> > Suse/Opensuse
> > Gentoo
>
> You should take some time to look at Arch. While it isn't particularly
> new (2002 first release) it is basically the ideal distro.
>
> Packaging extremely easy to get your head around, and they have source
> and binary mechanisms for package management to cater to any needs you
> might have. They also tend to avoid patching upstream code, believing
> that the authors of the software probably know their code better than a
> packager.
>
> makepkg is their source package manager, this handles source dependency
> resolution etc etc... abs also provides you with a source tree similar
> to /usr/portage ... while there are no use flags, you can edit the
> PKGBUILD yourself. It also has a file to edit build optimizations and
> the like.
>
> pacman is their binary package manager, it is very well featured, and
> supports most of what you'd likely expect. It doesn't replace config
> files though, which you'll be familiar with via Gentoo. I think the tool
> is called the same thing as Gentoo, but for some reason I can't remember
> the name of it atm (using a different distro for beta testing atm)
>
> It is a relatively small group of developers, but they are very active.
> The community is also growing speedily and their wiki is very
> informative. They do not however believe in things like marketing, they
> aim to KISS and technical merits... not doing what it takes to gain
> users.
>
> You should definitely give it a trial run of maybe a week or so... I
> think that is all it'll take to fall in love. I've been away from it for
> only 3 days and miss it  :(
>
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I have used Slackware since its inception and played with every new distro 
that came out, and after only a few hours would decide that slackware was th 
best there is.

In 2002 a gentoo buddy of mine said he was dumping gentoo for Arch. I tried it 
and never looked back. Somedays I get nostalgic and would like to install 
Slackware, but I have not bothered. I would agree, Arch is one of the best 
there is. I will not deny its influence on PaysonLinux, but I left it for 
several reasons, and probably will never go back.

nathan