Comments on: Three things Phoronix couldn’t measure

By: Cian

Cian — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:50:30 +0000

Arch is definitely leaner than Ubuntu. I’m not sure how anyone could argue anything else.

But why would anyone be surprised by this? Arch is by design a minimalist system, Ubuntu is by design a maximalist system. Unless the Arch designers really screwed up, its always going to beat Ubuntu. The point about Ubuntu is that it should work for everyone, the point of Arch is that you should be able to make it work for yourself. These are different design goals.

It probably takes a bit longer to install Arch the first time, but its also an educational process. You’ll really know linux by the end of it, which is useful. I’ve found that subsequent installs took slightly less time than Ubuntu. I find Arch very easy to maintain and understand, whereas Ubuntu isn’t particularly in my experience.

And one reason I prefer Arch’s package management, is that its really easy to modify for your own purposes and to add custom packages. For some people that’s a godsend, other people are never going to want/need that.

By: Nugnuts

Nugnuts — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:04:17 +0000

I’d be interested to see actual performance comparisons between the various package managers, because I generally don’t believe one could be doing anything so much more optimally than another that there are significant differences. The only obvious exception I can think of here would be dependency management, and the only real advantage I would imagine would be leaner dependency sets (as Arch’s are asserted to have over Debian et al.). But then even that should really only translate to fewer package download/installs on a per-app install basis, and wouldn’t really have much impact overall when building and then updating comparable systems.

By: Nugnuts

Nugnuts — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:01:19 +0000

Thanks. I didn’t mean to imply that my pacman performance was bad at all, by the way. More the converse in that I’m surprised by assertions of abysmal aptitude performance. The only times I’ve had any issues with my apt’ing coincided with servers getting hammered due to new Ubuntu releases.

And yes, under the covers, apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, etc., use dpkg at the end of the day to do actual installs and such.

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Mon, 24 May 2010 02:49:03 +0000

And to actually be helpful, http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Improve_Pacman_Performance

By: spc

spc — Sun, 23 May 2010 23:13:39 +0000

Apart from what is the quickest distro in the universe, the main factor here is time. If You are a student, unemplayed, basically person with truckloads of spare time, you can sit back and watch pacman at work, but if one have to get things going, well it reqires different approach bit heavier (I do think KDE 4.4 is monstrosity – to heavy is bad).

About dependencies I believe You.

If You don’t like dependencies why aren’t You using real man’s distro – Slackware – no deps – no problem. You could have system without Gnome (almost)
Or Gentoo…

By: eldarion

eldarion — Sun, 23 May 2010 18:06:04 +0000

@spc

“You see that’s what i meant. No matter what, Arch is betterer because it’s , I don’t know, divine law…
No argument agaist Arch is valid… because is betterer..”

I think i was perfectly clear. What i wrote is a FACT, not a guess. Try it yourself.

Let me help you:
(1) Arch repo list -> http://www.archlinux.org/packages/
(2) Debian repo list -> http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

now, if you don’t what to install both for testing (like i did), just check the dependency list of some packages in (1) and (2).

By: gullars

gullars — Sun, 23 May 2010 15:14:01 +0000

I just don’t get why I would want open office, if it is shortest to what I can be productive with, arch also wins on speed, but if you can’t live without the bloat of course it is faster to get started with ubuntu, and it is probably the distro that works best for you.
I want to have a system without using all the bleat of a big DE. and then it is so much easier to start with arch and build than to starw with ubuntu and rip out things, and then suddenly hose my system.

By: spc

spc — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:45:08 +0000

@eldarion
You see that’s what i meant. No matter what, Arch is betterer because it’s , I don’t know, divine law…
No argument agaist Arch is valid… because is betterer..

I challange every Arch user: Arch vs Uberbloat Kubuntu 10.04.
First to install OS,open openoffice, craete .odf file, write a sentance:
“Arch is waste of time or is it??”, save file wins.

By: DePingus

DePingus — Sun, 23 May 2010 03:45:38 +0000

Personally, I use both Arch and Ubuntu. I think each has its place. I use Arch on a netbook and on a headless media server. Ubuntu is my main machine running on a beefy laptop. I also run FreeBSD on an old laptop as a cloud facing server.

I prefer Arch’s pacman (actually yaourt) to Ubuntu’s apt-get or even FreeBSD’s port and package systems. But I don’t really think its a preference of speed, but rather comfort. I know Arch via CLI better because of its bottom up design.

One thing I gotta give to Arch. It teaches Linux. Going through the set up using the beginner’s guide was the best thing I could have ever done.

By: eldarion

eldarion — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:11:16 +0000

@spc

“ubuntu can be as light as you like.
You can get Debian, as snappy as you want – its up to You.”

You can’t make Ubuntu or Debian lighter that Arch (or as light as Arch). Belive me, i tried it. Even if you install the minimum amount of packages using the net-install option and then add what you what after the installer (ex: xorg, kde, …), The dependecy list of some packages in Ubuntu or Debian are absurd and you will always have a bloated system in the end. The dependency list on Arch is more sane.