Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 3rd Nov 2004 07:07 UTC
To paraphrase one of the best "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes, "Best of Both Worlds", both Arch Linux and Slackware represent the best of all the OS worlds: the power of traditional Unix, the elegance of BSD and the ease of mind of Mac OS X. This is an article outlining the differences between --what I believe-- are the two best Linux distros around today. Mind you though, "best" doesn't always mean "easy".
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I think that Eugenia hasn't tried to do a complete upgrade from slack 9.1 to slackware current and see how its system will work later.
this is true if dependencies support is disabled. i tried to go from 9.1 to current (right before 10.0 was released) and it was a disaster. tons of missing libs. i recently enabled dependencies support, but i have not tried such a drastic upgrade again. new users of swaret beware.
i use swaret a lot, because one box is Zipslack based, and i didn't have 10.0 CD handy. the main problem is the dependencies support is damned slow and that irritates me. i use ldd `which /usr/bin/whatever` and often semi-manually pull the packages in quick succession.
i used Arch heavily in mid 2003 and i found it was a darn good distro. however, it is minimalist in some ways and can be hard to configure (like Slack). adding hotplug package makes USB configuring a tad easier.
Thanks for bringing Arch to my attention! I've been using Slackware as my main OS since 9.0, and I've been wondering if there was anything comparable to it.
people looking to get their hands a bit dirty might like Debian, Slack, or Arch. for a real minimalist distro, maybe LFS or Crux (Arch is crux-based IIRC). for an old machine maybe Deli or older Vector version. i don't know the source-based well enough to comment, although I liked Lunar, and disliked Sourcemage and Sorcerer.
c) it boots faster then slack, so i'm surprised that you talk that you would install slack on k6 300. arch would be faster on that machine.
i found that some packages e.g. Mozilla took a while to load, but the general feel of Arch was that it was fast. the boot is probably faster due to less services and daemons in the default install. i went through slack and disabled a bunch of stuff in inetd.conf, disabled 5 gettys, and for security i added "-nolisten tcp" to X server. i can do a UDP and TCP port scan on my workstation and there's nothing visible (although syslogd, klogd, and gpm and non-network junk is running). it would be neat to strip a distro down to barebones (much like Crux), use i686 optimized packages, and see how quick it feels.
... could the lack of packagers be the fact that there are too many distros.
i think variety is good, although there is a bewildering array of distros for newbies to choose from. i think natural selection will thin the herd, and some new ones e.g. Ubuntu will gradually show up.