is arch really the best?

>>61641004
I use it and like it. Never gives me any problems, and the package manager is God tier.
There's no objective "best" distro though.
Inb4
>[distro I use] is objectively best

>>61641946
Gentoo is objectively best.

I am contemplating Void linux. How much will it suck to not have the AUR?

Should I just Majaro w/ OpenRC instead?

>>61642039
>How much will it suck to not have the AUR?
Very.

Arch is good for beginners. I'd switch to Void if I weren't such a brainlet.

>>61642129
kek

>>61641004
I'd say Parabola is even better than Arch because it is fully free, but I'm a paranoical neckbeard meme so don't listen to what I say.

The best distro:
The one I use

The worst distro:
The one you use

>>61641004
depends on your criteria.
if it's "shipped with less useless packages" then yes
if it's "do the devs make my life easy?" then no

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>>61642522
But what if we use the same distro?

>>61641004
Depends what your use case is. I love it personally but there's still cases I wouldn't use it in. Honestly distros are almost all the same, the differences are just convenience in a bottle type changes.

It's not an out of the box distro though, if you're not willing to take a week playing with it (unless you're already a 'pro') don't bother.

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>>61641004
arch is the greatest

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>>61642039
void is garbage.

>>61642765
Who's the non-pig girl?

>>61641004
No it's still Linux. It's all still fucking Linux. There's no god damn fucking difference between any of the god damn Linux distros besides whatever selection of crapware is bundled by default when you install it.
>b-but m-muh package managers

ALL THE SAME FUCKING SHIT. It's no difference if I have to type apt-get install or pacman -S or emerge or whatever. It's still the same fucking Linux.

>>61642814
Why are there so many distros if it's literally just the same shit but choice between dpkg, rpm, or pacman..... ?

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>>61641004
Of course goyim

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>>61641004
Fuck arch. Solus is the best. Look how comfy that is.

>>61642814
You're misinformed, please educate yourself. There are MAJOR differences.

>>61642982
No, your packages being out of date or not isn't really a big difference.

>>61643013
Again, please educate yourself on a topic before posting.

>>61642814
many distros even use their own (slightly) modified kernels.

this means many distros have actually forked the standard linux kernel and tweaked it for their own uses.

You argument is like saying it doesnt matter what tire you buy for your car, their all the same.

They may all be tires, but different tires have different qualities, they are all manufactured in different processes, but yes, to the uneducated plebeian who doesnt drive a car, they all just look round and black

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>>61642978
gonna have to agree with Kevin on this one

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>>61642978
At least use a recent photo of what it currently looks like. It looks way better than what you posted.

>>61642978
Solus has nothing to do with Budgie. You can install Budgie on any fucking distro you want.

>>61642834
that's something many people wonder about and nobody has an answer to that isn't "muh philosophy"

>>61643090
Please learn how to take photos. Then learn how to use maim.

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>>61643090
Motherfucker why is my photo sideways reee

>>61643090
at least take a screenshot other Kevin

>>61643090
>sideways
>vertical photo
dumb phoneposter

I really don't give a shit about whatever the latest meme distro may be.
I'm using Arch because it justwerks for me, dammit.

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>>61641004

>>61641957
this

>>61641004
After years of distrohopping I came to Arch and stayed there. Been using it for ~3 years and will never get to anything different. Pacman is the shit, and there are exactly the repos (Archstrike, Archattack, etc.) that I need.

I use Manjaro, quite happy with it.
Although used Arch before as well.

Sorry to say, there is no best distro. There are distros best for specific uses.
I use Arch on my main laptop because of the AUR, rolling release updates and pacman is a fantastic package manager. Especially easy to reverse a shit update.
Would never use Arch on my servers tho.

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>>61643120
There
>>61643111
I don't know what maim is
>>61643130
I'm on my laptop

>>61643247
>I don't know what maim is
A screenshotting tool, you do have internet access right?

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>>61643247
>mac

>>61641957
this

>>61641957
that

>>61641957
the other thing

>>61641957
this, that, can't flim-flam the zimm-zamm

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>fontconfig not working properly again
>try sudo pacman -Rdd fontconfig and make install instead
>everything stops working
>arch stuck on boot
such is the linux life

>>61643343
You sound retarded. How was fontconfig not working? Why did you run a dangerous operation?

>>61643343
Wtf did you do.

>>61643386
He installed something from the AUR

>>61643386
I dont know, I think it was after a recent version of libass where fontconfig just couldnt do anything right anymore. When I watch anime the font that is embeded in the mkv doesnt load and icons in some programs fail to show up. I remember force removing it then doing a make install and after that reinstalling with pacman it seemed stupid but it worked now after a pacman -syu fontconfig stopped working again and I failed at fixing it this time

>>61642765
compared to alpine?

>>61641004
No. Arch is pretty bad, it's package manager has a shit syntax and is slower than apt. The arch wiki is actually pretty good though.

>>61643839
>it's package manager has a shit syntax
How is it shit?
>slower than apt
Not really, it isn't.

Arch with i3

I don't see any reason to switch to another distro. Arch package respository is great and I really love the simplicity of i3. I can't go back to the cluttered feeling of other desktops now.

>>61643343
Manually installing compiling and installing something without the package manager being involved. Anon, that is a dumb thing to do on almost every modern Linux distro (unless you really know what you're doing and you know exactly what is installing where).

It's fixable but you're probably better off re-installing Arch. It will be a lot faster and easier.

In the future:
>Create or modify a pkgbuild if you're compiling from source (i.e. create a pacman package). This way pacman will keep track of the files if you need to uninstall it later and it will ensure there are no conflicts when you install it (or when you install other things). Not to mention it will be easy to re-compile later if you need to upgrade said package.
>Don't be dumb about how you use -Rdd
>Follow this guide for font rendering and look up how to activate sub-pixel hinting. https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5671

>>61642978
How does it compare to Mint?

>>61643343
>Arch can be bricked so easily
Gentoo doesn't have this problem.
You can literally unmerge (force uninstall) critical system packages and have the system still work.

>>61644577
I know it was dumb but it worked for me before thankfully I was able to still log in root now and installed fontconfig again so I'm back where I left off

>>61645049
It's probably because of that time that "worked" that it's totally fucked now.

>>61644934
That's not what happened and you can uninstall Arch packages without breaking it. Moreover you can always boot in with a livedisk and do stuff with the package manager to fix things.

What anon did however was entirely bypass the package manager and install things manually without knowing what he was doing. Obviously that shit broke as soon as he did a system upgrade and his solution was to try that monkey shit again.

In Arch you can manually install things without using the package manager if you know what you're doing. You can even use several different package managers on Arch side-by-side.

>>61644882
don't use mint, install cinnamon on something else

>>61644577
>Manually installing compiling and installing something without the package manager being involved.

How do I do it any other way?

$ git clone aurShit.git
$ cd aurShit/bin
$ makepkg aurShit -sic
???

>>61641004
no

>>61645172
I'm not sure what else to do since fontconfig just doesnt work properly when installing it through pacman. Damn this is aggrivating

>>61645238

All Arch packages are created with a pkgbuild (a special script containing said instructions). The pkgbuild script gives version information, says where to download source code from (eg. git repo) , contains configuration and build instructions, lists dependencies and conflicts, etc... Once you have a pkgbuild file you can use makepkg to turn it into an Arch package which you can then install with Pacman.

All of the packages in the official repositories are created this way and you can even view the original pkgbuild file. For instance here's the one for fontconfig:
https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/fontconfig
To view it go to the package page and click Source Files on the right.
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/fontconfig/

The Arch User Repository really just contains a ton of pkgbuilds (occasionally with some extra files or scripts bundled together with the pkgbuild). Here is the AUR page for a fontconfig pkgbuild that installs from git (current git source will be pulled the moment you use said pkgbuild to create a package).
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fontconfig-git/

Since AUR can't be queried through Pacman directly and it's kind of tedious to create packages manually through makepkg a lot of people tend to use special Pacman wrappers (like Yaourt and Pacaur) that include have Pacman-like functionality for the AUR (eg. they 'pacaur -S fontconfig-git' will automatically grab the pkgbuild, create a package, and install the package through Pacman).

General info on pkgbuilds
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD

All of that said, the first things you should've tried would've probably been to either install the fontconfig-git AUR package or to downgrade fontconfig (by default Arch stores a copy of every package you've ever installed in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ there are also settings and pacman options to wipe the directory if you don't like the functionality).

>>61645189
You aren't bypassing the package manager this way. The -s option on makepkag creates a package from the pkgbuild, the -i option installs it using pacman -U [package], and the -c option cleans up the directory.

By the way, at some point you should actually take a look inside an Arch package (it's just a tar.gz archive). Each one contains a directory tree showing the files as they will be installed in your filesystem so you can easily see what it will add and where.

What anon did was straight up use make install which compiles the source code and then copies the files somewhere into your filesystem (depending on the .configure settings). If you do things this way then Pacman won't have any idea a package was installed and you'll have no way of uninstalling it.

>>61645616
Thanks for the explanation. I did some more reading and remembered that `make install` is still a command.

>>61642632
> Not coding your own Linux distro by hand in Go

>>61642834
Autism

Been using Arch for ~7 years now. Threw Ubuntu 16.04 on an old notebook last week, and can say all Linuxes are the same in 2017. The meme's over.

>>61646795
How much memory does Ubuntu use with just a terminal open? How many packages does a clean install of Ubuntu have?

>>61646829
>How many packages
How is your autism doing?

>>61646864
It's perfectly valid not to care, but I like starting out with a lean system. My memory query is valid, though, and it was an honest question, since I'm not sure how much an Ubuntu install uses.

>>61641004

Arch would probably be the best if it didn't fail to install on my machine

>>61646829
Dunno im laying in bed now. No doubt more stock, but removing the bluetooth daemon and related would drop it.
Packages are semi valid. Arch has larger packages though as their -dev counterparts are bundled.

Now that everything is built on top of systemd, all the flavors are starting to taste the same.

>>61647037
the ubuntu and arch bases are both about 1 gb, package count is another weird epeen stat archists latched onto like minor kernel versions

>>61644158
I recently benchmarked a couple distros using time. I tested Arch, Debian 9, Fedora 26 and OpenSUSE 42.2. I cached then installed emacs (and its data packages) libotf, libm17n and m17n-db (emacs dependencies) on all of them. To cache the packages (so time wouldn't be affected by mirror speed) on arch and debian I just installed then removed the packages, and on fedora and opensuse I used the --downloadonly flag (-d on opensuse). Here are the results:
Distro Time (s)
Arch 2.766
Debian 9 2.283
Fedora 26 6.498
OpenSUSE 42.2 4.191
RPM based distros are pretty slow. apt is a tiny bit faster than pacman though.

>>61641004
no (3 years arch user, still using it)