I love Arch. Best distribution by far in my opinion. Sadly, I had huge problems one week ago when I did a full system upgrade (took me 2 days to fix everything that was corrupted and lost lots of money because of it) but then it was my fault. (Never use --force with a system upgrade!) To be fair, there should be a warning when you try to execute the command as it's probably not what a user would want to do.
Arch rules. It is literally just what I wanted from a Linux distro: the dead simplicity and austere Unix-ness of Slackware combined with the up-to-the-minute-ness and easy source package integration of Gentoo. A true gem and reminder of what Linux is and can be, when Ubuntu makes it seem like we've lost our way...
Congratulations to all those past and present involved with Arch. Over the past few years Arch has become my favourite personal distro due to how much control it gives me over my system without being _too_ complicated.<p>Here is to another amazing 10 years for Arch as well as everyone working on other Linux distros. You are all pretty damn amazing in my opinion. Thank you for all you do and please don't stop =D
Happy birthday! And...<p>A question for people using arch: If I install arch correctly and study the basics, will I need to spend time maintaining it? I like the idea of having a distro I can customize and play with to really learn how linux works, but when I want to stop messing about and get work done, it would be nice for it to be as stable as OSX. Unrealistic?
What I don't like about Arch is that it doesn't provide debug symbol packages, which makes it useless for providing crash bug reports for programs written in compiled languages unless the user is willing to recompile them. IMHO general-purpose distros have moral (or at least pragmatic) imperative to support the development of the software that they ship, and making sure users can file decent bug reports easily is an important part of that.<p>Meanwhile, other distros have gotten to the point of automatically installing the right debug symbol packages right from the crash reporter built into app suites like KDE's to generate useful backtraces.
After experimenting with countless distros over the years, Arch is by far my favorite. It combines the customizability of Gentoo with the simplicity of Slackware. Long live Arch!
It's a couple days too late to wish Arch happy birthday, but if you're very quick, you can still wish Albert Einstein happy birthday. He'd be 133 today. Unfortunately there's no real location of his corpse that you can visit as he was cremated, but last I heard, his eyes are kept in a safe deposit box somewhere in New York, there's a couple slides of his brain at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and the majority of his brain is somewhere in Princeton.
3 machines running on Arch Linux and no major issues up to now.<p>It's just perfect for me. I love how easy it is to quickly build a new package (not that I need to write PKGBUILDS myself often, most things are available in the AUR)<p>Happy Birthday!
I'm not sure exactly when I moved over to Arch from Crux, I'm sure the distribution was at least a few months old by then, but it's been a great distribution as long as I've known it.<p>It does suffer the occasional dip into making things more complicated than they need to be, some element of the distribution straying towards the "SysV" darkside and away from the "BSD" ideal, or an upstream's configuration system just getting too insane to work around any longer, but everything always works back to some sense of balance after a few years. And it does feel like upstreams come around to the Arch way of thinking more often that the other way around.<p>I do wish it was a bit easier to automatically build or just download pre-made packages with some of the more popular compile flag variants, ports- or portage-style, but not so much that it casts a shadow on all the other benefits of Arch.<p>Still, it would be nice to be able to install a console vim with python and ruby interpreter support without having to install gnome too, or being able to install java on a headless server without having to stick half of X11 on there, or not having to install Apache because you want to change nginx's modules. It's always possible to change the PKGBUILD and recompile, but it seems like just changing one enable/disable switch to ./configure should be easier than it often is (vim is especially a pain to keep a custom PKGBUILD of, the ABS PKGBUILD seems to undergo massive revisions every few months).<p>But really the distribution is just great, the best out there. It lets you use pure Linux and avoid all the hoop jumping other distributions make you do in order to keep their package managers happy, while still giving you all the benefits you want from a distribution like automatic pre-compiled upgrades. And that's enough to make it the best balance of a distribution out there for me.
Arch is what I have been running (since around 2006). I love the simplicity. When things do break, there is an amazing community waiting to provide support. The Arch community rules! I think Arch is quickly becoming what Gentoo was...(hopefully I dont start a war!).
Like others, I also love Arch and have been using it since 2007. Although I started with Slackware, I find myself using Arch as my primary Linux distribution these days because I feel it is the best of Slackware, Crux, FreeBSD and maybe Gentoo to an extent. As power users, I'm sure we can all appreciate Arch for what it has become. I look forward to using Arch in the coming years.<p>Happy Birthday Arch Linux!!
I'm using Arch on the desktop lately and liking the bleeding edge updates and simplicity however I'm still loving Gentoo more on the servers, the portage system forces you to build everything just according to your needs where by default with Arch I'm getting pre-compiled stuff.<p>Anyone running Arch on servers, how does it compare to Gentoo in your opinion?
It's the community that really makes Arch a great distro in my opinion. Because of them we have an excellent well-moderated forum with technically competent and helpful members, an outstanding wiki and a huge amount of software available in the AUR.
Happy birthday, my beautiful Arch! I've only been a devotee since October, 2010, and I don't know how I got along without it. While others are fighting with old. outdated bugs, I get to fight only the newest, shiniest bugs.
wow, 10 years. I've been using it for a couple of years now.<p>But I do occasionally find it hard/difficult (from a mental POV), and I fall back on Fedora. I'll be a true *nix guy when I can stop doing that. :)