This is a review-like story about my experiences with the Archlinux Linux distribution. I’ve been using Arch for half an year now and I’ve been quite impressed with it. Before I start, I should mention something about my previous experiments with different Linux distributions.

Nine months ago I installed PCLinuxOS as my Linux first distribution. Back then I didn’t have any idea about the Linux’s filesystems, package management or any other features either. I had been using Windows all my life, so I was a complete newbie. To put the long story short: the installation went well, I got to install most of the applications I wanted, but there were few drawbacks. I couldn’t get my soundcard working and I couldn’t write to my NTFS partitions at all. When googling information to solve my problems I constantly ran into Archlinux’s wiki pages. Of course, it didn’t help me much since I wasn’t using the Archlinux at the time. After weeks of googling, I gave up and decided to install Archlinux.

As I already mentioned, Archlinux has awesome wiki pages full of information. And the “Beginner’s Guide” is top-notch as well. I read through the pages and downloaded the installation media and booted it up. The installer is text-based and has quite some options in it. It seemed a bit scary at first, but thanks to excellent documentation, the installation process was a success. The Arch’s base installation is very minimal, it includes the basic tools, such as the package manager, Pacman and the basic commandline tools. When you first boot to your installation, you’ll see just a bash shell.

That’s part of the Arch’s KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy. This gives you a complete control over your system, you can choose what desktop environment to use and what software to install. Arch is a rolling distribution with very bleeding edge software. For example, I installed KDE 4.1 on the same day it was released. Arch uses also the latest stable releases for the kernel, Xorg, GCC and other major parts of the system.

One of the greatest things in Arch is it’s package manager, Pacman. It’s a command line utility, but its commands are very simle and it doesn’t need a lot of learning. Arch also has an utility called ABS (Arch Build System) which allows you to build you packages from the sources. This way you can use your custom compiler flags to optimize the packages. There is also ArchLinux User-community Repository (AUR) which contains more packages and usually development versions of various programs.

System configuration is also done by editing the configuration files. For example, in order to get write support for my NTFS partitions, I just had to edit the relevant lines in the fstab file. If something went wrong, at least I knew where to start solving the problem. This was the problem in the PCLinuxOS, when the GUI configuration failed, I had no idea where to start fixing the problem. Of course, the Arch way requires quite a lot of learning, but eventually it’s worth it.

As a conclusion, I should answer my initial question – is Archlinux more trouble than it’s worth? Well, some times when thing break completely, it feels like it’s more trouble but usually things go smoothly and then it’s definitely worth the effort. I hear people talking that Archlinux is too hard for newbies, but I have to disagree with that. I think the main “showstopper” is the lack of patience. One must also have the will to learn new things. It may not be the distro for everyone, but if you want a decent bleeding edge distro, give it a try!