[Oni]

Once past the initial setup:

Code:

pacman -Syyu

That's literally the only thing I've been doing for months to "maintain" my system. Could you elaborate on that as I'm not sure what you mean. I'm just wondering what exactly you had trouble with as I have not experienced any issues in my half a year of usage regarding "maintaining my system" or buggy "untested" packages (although I do not know of any vendors that don't throughly test their product before releasing an official update). You guys are making it seem like the official arch repos are being populated with alpha and beta versions of products, and thats just not true for the overwhelming majority of available packages. When an update is released, it's simply made available.


Several hours? Are you using a toaster? Updating my kernel takes me 5 minutes tops.

For some reason, I'm led to believe you're being less than honest about issues you may have ran into. As an operating system, it's not reasonable to deploy in a timely manner. There's a reason a larger majority of websites run Debian or Ubuntu (eww). I'm not saying people should need to know next to nothing to deploy an operating system, but I am suggesting they should be deployed in a timely manner. Without the creation of scripts, the deploying of Arch isn't exactly a simple process. A complex system doesn't need a complex setup process. With the removal of the AIF (Arch Installation Framework), they made things increasingly taxing to set up. It's not all that much relatively better than other distributions either.

While I don't think you should be able to stick in a disk and have it do everything for you, I think there should a certain amount of simplicity when you're installing an operating system. Arch doesn't offer that and it isn't a reasonable operating system for servers or home users. Maybe advanced users and aficionados, but really... come on? I've had my fair amount of experience using Linux and I find it unreasonable to spend as much time setting things up as Arch required, maybe even with the AIF they used to offer. There is also an increased level of instability with Arch. I'm not saying that it's awful, but it's much worse than on other distributions. That's the price of being "new", "untested", and "bleeding edge".

Just to add, I still love Arch - but not for the same reasons you seem to. You seem to have a different opinion of it.