December Days 2021 #27: The Arch Box
Dec. 27th, 2021 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
After my ex left, I was finally in a position to be able to make some decisions about decor, room setup, and how I was going to go about all of this new world in which my needs were not required to be subordinated to someone else's, human or nonhuman. First order of business was to finally spring my Linux hard drive from being the second hard drive in a single machine and drop it in its own box, so I could have separate machines for gaming and multimedia versus blogging, web browsing, the primary interface to the Android devices and the one that would be responsible for imaging Raspberry Pis. Turns out that a Linux box is hella handy when you have certain hobbies. And since I was depositing the whole thing into a new machine, I figured now was the time to go looking for a new distribution to try out, as Mint had, even with Debbie, become a distribution that I was not fully satisfied with. After backing up my home directory to an external drive and doing some research on what kinds of distributions were available that fit my desires, I burned an installation disc and booted into Arch to begin the setup process.
At this point, I need to put in some disclaimers.
So, having said all of that, why am I running Arch Linux on this machine? Because I am one of the people that Arch's features are, in fact, features for. Arch is a rolling-release distribution, so once installed, I can just update the system and keep it up to date without having to do a wipe and restore for each new system version. Arch has excellent documentation on their wiki, and so I can usually work my way through proper installation and some troubleshooting of various things as they happen or refuse to work properly by reading the wiki, and occasionally going to the forums if the wiki is confusing or unhelpful. And it had a regularly updated installation disc image. The other rolling release, build from source system that I was looking at was Gentoo, and even then, I think Gentoo's last snapshot tarball had been created three or more years before I was considering it for this machine.
And, despite the fact that the Arch Way is, generally speaking, pretentious and full of itself, by having to follow the aggressively hands-off stance that the Arch maintainers take about what to install and how to configure it, I have probably subtly absorbed information about how a Linux system works under the hood and learned what I need to about it when I'm trying to fix a thing or get it to work correctly in the first place. Or, in the case of accessing the Arch User Repository, where the community-maintained packages are kept, learning how packages are made for Arch and to be grateful that there are tools out there to automate that process and to update them instead of having to do it manually for every package outside the official repositories. Which, yes, I suppose that means that I have (repeatedly, now) compiled programs from someone else's source code into functional and running things. Once the inconvenience of compiling and manually installing my AUR helper is taken care of, the system is stable and runs well, and when conflicts arise, there's usually a good reason for it, and I have learned, usually, how to ditch software that relies on outdated libraries or that hasn't been updated in favor of things that are, or how to shuffle the configurations properly so that things don't cause conflicts. (And how to learn to love the open source drivers instead of the proprietary ones when the X Window System stops supporting your video card's proprietary drivers and Arch tells you to pin the version you have if you want to keep using them.)
Since Arch doesn't come with a Desktop Environment preinstalled, a user gets to choose the one they want and configure it in the way they desire. Or, in my case, to stop using KDE (because I kept having computer freezes from the need for video acceleration and the GT 710 chipset in the open source drivers had something that caused lockups from the need for acceleration) and instead take up LXDE (Lightweight X Desktop Environment) as my primary Desktop Environment (which didn't need that kind of acceleration to function.) Because Arch doesn't have a default or decided DE, all of its tools are console tools, and that included the installation process. No graphical wizards, no suggested defaults, just you and a wiki page with the instructions on how to set up your system from scratch once the base system has loaded. There's no "live" version of Arch, because a functioning live version of the distribution would involve making choices, and Arch steadfastly refuses to do that. There are other systems that base themselves in Arch that might do the dirty work of making choices and setting up defaults (the Steam Deck, for example, which hopes to be a portable version of the game delivery service, is based in Arch), but Arch itself will not do such a thing because it's not the Arch Way.
I think I might have had to reinstall Arch once in the many years I've had the machine, and that was mostly to get rid of some cruft and a situation where I got caught in a weird and unresolvable contradiction and I couldn't get out of it. Even then, it was still mostly a measure of backing up my home directory and then restoring it after all the packages I needed had been reinstalled (and I had to do the thing to get my AUR helper back again.) It's a terrifying amount of power to have at my fingertips, actually, and the ability to rework the system into a new configuration without necessarily having to reinstall from scratch, should I desire it, is actually pretty much what I want in a Linux system. If it stays stable, and I can just shuffle into a new DE if I ever need to, then that's pretty awesome. It may not be True Nerdery status ever achieved, since in still probably not going to spend a lot of time writing code and creating projects and contributing to open source by anything more than using things and filling the occasional bug report, but I know enough about the thing and how to use and administer it that I can properly evangelize the good word of Linux, probably on an inexpensive SBC hooked up to a TV where people can play and experiment to their heart's content and find out that the more mature distributions can usually do all the things people want them to do right out of the box (or with only a few clicks afterward).
But seriously, if you're thinking about trying out Linux, don't use Arch. Use something that actually cares about the user experience and that has made good starting decisions for you, like Zorin or elementaryOS or Mint or the Raspberry Pi OS, so that you can experience a system and figure out what you do or don't like about it with things mostly looking and acting like the system you're coming from. And if you want to stay with those systems, that's great. It means good things to the developers of those distributions, that they're doing something correctly for their users. Just because I have three different distributions around my house's non-Android devices and one more at work does not mean you have to do the same. And no, I don't think that's True Nerdery, either, even if it might make a newcomer look askance at me for saying so. Watch the goalposts move merrily along.
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @ 2.93 GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: nVidia GeForce GT 710 chipset, max resolution 1920x1080
- Sound: Stereo output sound through HDMI (GT 710) or 3.5" jack (onboard)
- Inputs/Peripherals: Keyboard/Mouse (USB), CMTECK microphone (USB), Gigabit Ethernet, LG Blu-Ray RW drive
- Storage: 1 TB SATA internal hard drive
- OS: Arch Linux
After my ex left, I was finally in a position to be able to make some decisions about decor, room setup, and how I was going to go about all of this new world in which my needs were not required to be subordinated to someone else's, human or nonhuman. First order of business was to finally spring my Linux hard drive from being the second hard drive in a single machine and drop it in its own box, so I could have separate machines for gaming and multimedia versus blogging, web browsing, the primary interface to the Android devices and the one that would be responsible for imaging Raspberry Pis. Turns out that a Linux box is hella handy when you have certain hobbies. And since I was depositing the whole thing into a new machine, I figured now was the time to go looking for a new distribution to try out, as Mint had, even with Debbie, become a distribution that I was not fully satisfied with. After backing up my home directory to an external drive and doing some research on what kinds of distributions were available that fit my desires, I burned an installation disc and booted into Arch to begin the setup process.
At this point, I need to put in some disclaimers.
- Arch is user-unfriendly, and is not for beginners or newcomers to Linux.
- Do not use Arch if you don't like opinionated distributions. Arch's opinions on Linux can be summarized as "a distribution with its head so far up its own ass that it can't conceive of doing things any other way than The Arch Way."
- Do not use Arch if you don't want to make every single fucking decision for yourself on how to set up and use your Linux machine.
- Do not use Arch if you don't like reading documentation.
- Do not use Arch if you hate a community that expects you to do everything you can think of, and then prove to them you've done everything that they've thought of, before they will deign to help you.
- Seriously, if you like any other distribution of Linux more than Arch, use that distribution instead.
So, having said all of that, why am I running Arch Linux on this machine? Because I am one of the people that Arch's features are, in fact, features for. Arch is a rolling-release distribution, so once installed, I can just update the system and keep it up to date without having to do a wipe and restore for each new system version. Arch has excellent documentation on their wiki, and so I can usually work my way through proper installation and some troubleshooting of various things as they happen or refuse to work properly by reading the wiki, and occasionally going to the forums if the wiki is confusing or unhelpful. And it had a regularly updated installation disc image. The other rolling release, build from source system that I was looking at was Gentoo, and even then, I think Gentoo's last snapshot tarball had been created three or more years before I was considering it for this machine.
And, despite the fact that the Arch Way is, generally speaking, pretentious and full of itself, by having to follow the aggressively hands-off stance that the Arch maintainers take about what to install and how to configure it, I have probably subtly absorbed information about how a Linux system works under the hood and learned what I need to about it when I'm trying to fix a thing or get it to work correctly in the first place. Or, in the case of accessing the Arch User Repository, where the community-maintained packages are kept, learning how packages are made for Arch and to be grateful that there are tools out there to automate that process and to update them instead of having to do it manually for every package outside the official repositories. Which, yes, I suppose that means that I have (repeatedly, now) compiled programs from someone else's source code into functional and running things. Once the inconvenience of compiling and manually installing my AUR helper is taken care of, the system is stable and runs well, and when conflicts arise, there's usually a good reason for it, and I have learned, usually, how to ditch software that relies on outdated libraries or that hasn't been updated in favor of things that are, or how to shuffle the configurations properly so that things don't cause conflicts. (And how to learn to love the open source drivers instead of the proprietary ones when the X Window System stops supporting your video card's proprietary drivers and Arch tells you to pin the version you have if you want to keep using them.)
Since Arch doesn't come with a Desktop Environment preinstalled, a user gets to choose the one they want and configure it in the way they desire. Or, in my case, to stop using KDE (because I kept having computer freezes from the need for video acceleration and the GT 710 chipset in the open source drivers had something that caused lockups from the need for acceleration) and instead take up LXDE (Lightweight X Desktop Environment) as my primary Desktop Environment (which didn't need that kind of acceleration to function.) Because Arch doesn't have a default or decided DE, all of its tools are console tools, and that included the installation process. No graphical wizards, no suggested defaults, just you and a wiki page with the instructions on how to set up your system from scratch once the base system has loaded. There's no "live" version of Arch, because a functioning live version of the distribution would involve making choices, and Arch steadfastly refuses to do that. There are other systems that base themselves in Arch that might do the dirty work of making choices and setting up defaults (the Steam Deck, for example, which hopes to be a portable version of the game delivery service, is based in Arch), but Arch itself will not do such a thing because it's not the Arch Way.
I think I might have had to reinstall Arch once in the many years I've had the machine, and that was mostly to get rid of some cruft and a situation where I got caught in a weird and unresolvable contradiction and I couldn't get out of it. Even then, it was still mostly a measure of backing up my home directory and then restoring it after all the packages I needed had been reinstalled (and I had to do the thing to get my AUR helper back again.) It's a terrifying amount of power to have at my fingertips, actually, and the ability to rework the system into a new configuration without necessarily having to reinstall from scratch, should I desire it, is actually pretty much what I want in a Linux system. If it stays stable, and I can just shuffle into a new DE if I ever need to, then that's pretty awesome. It may not be True Nerdery status ever achieved, since in still probably not going to spend a lot of time writing code and creating projects and contributing to open source by anything more than using things and filling the occasional bug report, but I know enough about the thing and how to use and administer it that I can properly evangelize the good word of Linux, probably on an inexpensive SBC hooked up to a TV where people can play and experiment to their heart's content and find out that the more mature distributions can usually do all the things people want them to do right out of the box (or with only a few clicks afterward).
But seriously, if you're thinking about trying out Linux, don't use Arch. Use something that actually cares about the user experience and that has made good starting decisions for you, like Zorin or elementaryOS or Mint or the Raspberry Pi OS, so that you can experience a system and figure out what you do or don't like about it with things mostly looking and acting like the system you're coming from. And if you want to stay with those systems, that's great. It means good things to the developers of those distributions, that they're doing something correctly for their users. Just because I have three different distributions around my house's non-Android devices and one more at work does not mean you have to do the same. And no, I don't think that's True Nerdery, either, even if it might make a newcomer look askance at me for saying so. Watch the goalposts move merrily along.
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Date: 2021-12-28 08:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-28 03:11 pm (UTC)