Arch vs. Gentoo?

violagirl · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Mar 2007 Posts: 102

Well, I gave Gentoo a shot and I guess I'm not going to stick with it afterall. Yes, it's another one of those kinds of posts. :roll:

I did not leave Gentoo because of large criticisms of it, however, but rather because I found something better. I think Gentoo has a lot of strong points, that you can compile packages with exactly the options you want, etc.
However, I have switched to Arch Linux. Arch Linux is everything I could have ever wanted. I got tired of Gentoo because I felt like many packages in Portage were outdated or not working, or even some packages were missing (of course, this is bound to happen in any distro!), but I couldn't do anything about it. I like Arch because I CAN do something about it. The AUR has been one of the biggest reasons why Arch ended up winning me over. By having a place that is for any packages not in the official repos that anyone can contribute to is wonderful. Obviously it makes it more risky, but this allows Arch to have just as much software as other distros, even though it has so few developers. If a package is not in Arch and one wants it in Arch, they just have to make a PKGBUILD for it and submit it to the AUR and then it is there for anyone with Arch to enjoy. I have already made a PKGBUILD for PyMTP and put it into the AUR. I never felt like I had this freedom in Gentoo, like Portage was a wall that no regular users could penetrate. This is why I have gone to Arch over Gentoo... why it made the difference to me.
Also, I think pacman is much better than Gentoo when it comes to dependencies. It has reverse dependency checking, and the equivalent of emerge --sync, pacman -Sy, takes almost no time, because it only updates the packages out of date. I feel like the whole system is a lot neater than on Gentoo, and I am able to keep up-to-date a lot more because of it.
HOWEVER, I have really come to miss the fact that Gentoo has multiple versions of most packages in the repos. Arch only keeps one at a time, and it is a really good feature that Gentoo had that Arch does not. I guess they both have their good and bad points, but Arch finally won me over. Being a rolling-release distro like Gentoo and yet somehow neater-feeling and with an easy way for ANY user to contribute to the repos, it seemed like the best choice for me.
Well, that's just my two cents. I still like Gentoo and its flexibility and may come back to it someday (though I admit I kind of like having the luxury of having more binary packages). But for now, Arch it is! Thank you all for always supporting me whenever I had questions. I really appreciated it.

desultory · Bodhisattva Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 9410

The advantages you cite regarding accessibility to contributors seem to be those provided by the Sunrise overlay.

Merged the above post.

violagirl · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Mar 2007 Posts: 102

Not so. Just by reading this:
http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/sunrise/wiki/HowToCommit
one can see that submitting packages to the Sunrise overlay is far more complex and takes longer than with the AUR. Thus it feels like much more of a barrier. It is also less advertised on the Gentoo website itself, and little emphasis seems to be placed on it. With the AUR, all packages can be voted on, with the most popular becoming part of community in the official repos. I would argue that the Sunrise overlay and the AUR are actually quite different.

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 8:04 am Post subject:

I left Arch and returned to Gentoo because of the insane package load on the Arch developers. They have way too many packages in their tree for the number of devs that they have to maintain them. It is difficult for them to keep up with security updates in the core packages, let alone all the rest. If and/or when Arch grows to have a decent number of devs, or a dedicated security team, then I would consider using it again. Until then, I'll stick with Gentoo.

d2_racing · Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 11:40 am Post subject:

desultory · Bodhisattva Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 9410

Split off topic "Comparing the merits of package managers.".

aidanjt · Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 2:09 pm Post subject:

desultory · Bodhisattva Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 9410

aidanjt · Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 1:58 am Post subject:

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

lcidw · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Oct 2004 Posts: 77

After my no-multilib Gentoo system broke cause of a glibc update, or cause i forced multilib applications into it (teh fun

), i descided that instead of reinstalling Gentoo, i'd give Arch a spin. Now, i've allways had the "tick" to be a perfectionist, and minimalist. So, binary packages with all those totally unneeded deps pulled in.. dunno if i could get used to that. But after using Arch for a few days, i allready ran into some weird stuff.

Having Arch64, i got the core, extra, and community repos open. I wanted to install the 32bit flash plugin in 64bit firefox. If that wouldn’t work.. understandable. But nothing there.. Skype, so i can VOIP my gilfriend.. nothing. The graphical pacman frontend.. nothing. Cedega since there’s one game i’ll keep playing no matter what.. nothing.

http://onedot.nl/images/4.png

So, the solution seemed to be that i needed to download the source of the packages and the PKGBUILD from the AUR. And there i am, simply building source stuff by hand. Weird.
So, lets install Banshee i thought. Heard it’s an awesome mediaplayer. Now i know Banshee minimally requires Mono, Gtk#, HAL, D-Bus, GStreamer, libmusicbrainz, libnautilus-burn, GTK+ and sqlite3. And they in turn require stuff again.

http://onedot.nl/images/5.png

Heya, 277 MB for a mediaplayer! Oh, probably a bad example. Lets see a better one.. Mplayer.

http://onedot.nl/images/6.png

Now, i don’t want sdl since i use alsa for that, i never watch divx or xvid movies, i never use sasl, i’m never somewhere which requires me to use ldap (and why would i want that in my mplayer anyway), i will not use samba cause i have no Windows boxes, i don’t watch movies transformed to ASCII-art, i simply don’t use jack, i have no remote control, and i don’t wanna use the dejavu fonts for subtitles.

Mplayer itself according to pacman, is 20MB once installed.47 MB of useless stuff, it beeing 235% of what you need on top of it.

Quite some negativity, lets say it’s cause i’m simply not used to the fact i’m getting it all. Remember, i'm that perfectionist/minimalist. Lets clean orphaned deps!

http://onedot.nl/images/7.png

Goodbye Xorg, pacman thinks i don’t need a graphical interface, even though i have openbox and applications like Mozilla Firefox, GMPC, GTKPod, and The Gimp installed.

Oh boy. I'm gonna get hit now cause of my negativity :roll:

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I haven't had the timer to further investigate the good stuff about Arch. I bet Arch rocks for people who don't really care about what gets installed along. I'm wondering why you wouldn't just go Ubuntu instead. But then again, i'm afraid that it doesn't matter for me, cause i'm probably installing Gentoo again in a few days. Sorry Arch, for not giving Arch some more time :oops:

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Ernetas · Apprentice Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 159 Location: China

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

danvari · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 04 Apr 2008 Posts: 131

i used gentoo for many years (since gentoo version 1.2)..it was my first linux system...but now i am using archlinux....why? same reasons as violagirl mentioned. i have a very minimal system just with openbox, thunar, mpd and so on. it is right that the same configuration needs much less packages on a gentoo, BUT a gentoo needs MUCH more space than a archlinux. why that?
a) portage
b) there was a portage feature that name i cannot remember, it was a tool to speed up compilation times in the future...damn it was near 2 gib fat!

perormance: i think archlinux is slightly faster than a gentoo, when it goes to booting times.

i think gentoo developers are some kind of "weak", in the past (some years ago) i had about 10 packages to update every day (also a minimal system) and now there are about 10 packages per week. many packages are outdated, sometimes ubuntu is more up-to-date (ok it is not everytime a pro).

i am still jumping from arch to gentoo, but at the moment arch satisfied me and i see no reason why i have to change back..

Ernetas · Apprentice Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 159 Location: China

I've been working with ArchLinux some time. It's very good distro. Anyway, after kernel upgrade to 2.4.25 it didn't find modules. Because there weren't any at /lib/modules. So I moved /lib/modules/2.6.24 or smth. like that to /lin/modules/2.6.25. For some time it worked. But after few months it didn't liked my modules again. And then there weren't any kernel upgrades. Even people from FreeNode IRC network #archlinux couldn't help. By the way, before that when I was working with ArchLinux 0.x I saw few things: sometimes it get's stuck with glibc and other important packages. But now in 2008.06 everything works fine, except that kernel upgrade...
But one more thing I didn't liked in ArchLinux: it doesn't have as many as Portage has packages.

Yes, Gentoo needs a lot more space than other distributions. Ubuntu takes 2 GB with out of box installation with everything you need, while Gentoo with stage3 takes 2 GB and there aren't any X servers and etc. Anyway, Gentoo isn't slow and that's why I don't care about that 2 GB.
By the way, ArchLinux is faster booting up than Gentoo just few seconds.

Something is wrong with your distro, danvari. My Gentoo system is upgrading every week about 20 packages. But that doesn't mean that Gentoo servers are not very often updated. The point is that almost all software is newest. Tell me which package is out of date.

neonl · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 2:39 pm Post subject:

Arch was my distro for ~5 months. I really enjoyed using and i learned a lot with it. I had a small knowledge in GNU/Linux systems (i had only used Ubuntu for a few months) but with Arch i was able to actually learn something and obtain a reasonable base of knowing.

Arch was getting annoyingly slow to update stuff (as far as i heard some devs got into the thing and now it has improved

) and i decided it was the time to get into deepper waters so i switched to gentoo and i'm liking it.

If you need a binary distro i'd say Arch is the best, though.

herwig · n00b Joined: 03 Apr 2007 Posts: 55 Location: /home/herwig

I had used Arch für some months secondary to Gentoo and I have to say that I really disregarded my Gentoo in that time. I enjoyed pacman as a simple package manager. But when it comes to broken links and incompatible packages it's still more curious to fix compared to Portage.
So I stopped working with Arch and came back to Gentoo. I never had the mind to directly compare Arch to Gentoo.
It's simply a great distro and it would be my choice if I want a binary distro again.

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2613

d2_racing · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:31 am Post subject:

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2613

Those are certainly good points d2. The reason I would choose Arch is that it still lets me have some control over things. For instance, PCLOS doesn't get really happy when you change your kernel to remove bloat. I guess Vector might be another choice, but to me Arch seems to be the closest thing available for a binary distro.
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d2_racing · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:56 pm Post subject:

@Kalos, did you ever try Slackware or FreeBSD ? I know that they seem to be very good and they are like the Gentoo Spirit.

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2613

d2_racing · Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2008 5:11 pm Post subject:

If you install FreeBSD, you may feel like home...portage is from the ports

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2613

vampirex · n00b Joined: 01 Jul 2008 Posts: 28 Location: Transilvania