Surprisingly i have been a Kubuntu user for the past 3 / 4 years, after switching from Knoppix to Fedora to Open Suse i decided to give Kubuntu a go and havn’t looked back. Kubuntu 9.10 is a great release.

Yes its the dreaded ‘K’ubuntu the one which has so many flaws and breaks at the drop of an upgrade (or so i have heard).

Anyway, I decided to give Arch ago about a month ago because i wanted something more ‘bleeding edge’. I was impressed!

The things i liked:
1) Minimalist approach
2) Rolling release ideology.
3) ‘Bleeding edge’ packages including a Xorg / Nvidia drivers which i was really hanging out for.

Things i didn’t like:
1) KDE-mod has lots of broken packages.
2) Arch repositories are no where near as large as Debian. Despite claims of a different approach (with ABS). There are still no where near the amount of packages available. Plus Debian has a lot more ‘unsupported’ / 3rd party support.

I couldn’t find particular packages in Arch / AUR which i needed despite the website claiming that they were in ‘Extra’ (this was after updating / cleaning the package database).

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To anyone considering Arch >

I think Arch is a good distro, i don’t really see how installing Ubuntu server or even minimalist and staring from there would be ‘much’ different. If you really want to go ‘Hard Core’ nothing is stopping you edit the ‘default’ files Ubuntu installs, after all it is Linux and you are free to do whatever you want with it.

If I understand even half of where Ubuntu is taking the internals, I like it. Once it’s finally sorted out and as well-documented as the current inittab, xorg.conf, etc systems are now…well, it looks like it’s going somewhat *BSDish — firmly organized and efficient. Only with Linux’s somewhat more extensive hardware support. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Xircom Cardbus-Ethernet adapter.)

Now, as long as Intel helps clean up and maintaing their Poulsbo chipset driver, and Canonical calls in a few graphics designers, everything will be set for the 10.04 LTS version to blow Windows out of the water!

After breaking Ubuntu (I’m always messing with things), I couldn’t fix it. I tried Arch, and after a long, non-clean setup, I got it running. But it wasn’t the way I wanted. I gave it another shot, I reinstalled Arch. This time I knew what to do and I had this perfect distro. Stable, fast, and exactly my way.

I just purchased a new ATI card, and installing drivers manually (should have backed up..) I totally screwed up my system.

Installed Ubuntu 9.10 to check how it was like. I’m running it now, but I’m not happy at all. 3D performance is pretty much garbage, don’t know why, it boots freaking slow, I don’t like grub2 at all, I can’t find out how to configure some parts of Ubuntu.

Hell, downloading arch again, never to switch back to ubuntu!

Ubuntu should have a more ‘simple’ (checkout the arch wiki to find out what kind of simple I’m referring to) underlying setup so experienced users can easily edit it!

And I love the usb .img from Arch. Distro switching costs a lot of CD’s, even if you use RW’s which tend to break after 5 or 6 distro switches ^^

With Arch, you don’t generally need to compile things, they come prepackaged, but compiling and recompiling packages is, to me anyway, an order of magnitude easier.

However, there are a few pages from the Wiki that I would strongly recommend you read.

http ://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide
— Just that, a beginner’s guide to installing Arch Linux

http ://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_vs_Others
– Paticularly the Arch_vs_Ubuntu section. Like it makes clear, there is a great deal more configuring to do

http ://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FAQ
– Well, it’s an FAQ, what more description do ya need? You might be interested in question 1.4: “I’m a complete GNU/Linux beginner. Should I use Arch?”

Personally, I migrated from Ubuntu to Debian (what Ubuntu is based off of) first, because Debian uses the same package manager as Ubuntu does but requires more configuration. From there I moved to Arch, but I still enjoy Debian.

I am currently an Ubuntu user, I would call myself a newbie because I just started using Linux, coming from Windows, I dont know much about compiling and using the command line etc. Although I am fascinated about looking at different Linux Distros and would hopefully one day be proficient in the Linux world. Could anyone advise me on a way forward (learning) on how to use a distro such as Arch. We all have to start somewhere.

One thing for sure, I will never go back to Windows.