Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 17th Feb 2009 17:34 UTC
The ArchLinux Release Engineering Team announced the official release of the 2009.02 ISO after a long period of intense development. This distribution is among the first to officially support the new Ext4 filesystem. I've always noticed that Arch seems to be quite popular among OSNews readers, and I'm interested to know from our Arch users: why? What makes Arch such a good Linux distribution?
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RE[5]: Arch Pro Bullet List
by ralsina on Wed 18th Feb 2009 00:06
in reply to "RE[4]: Arch Pro Bullet List"
Member since:2007-08-14
RE[6]: Arch Pro Bullet List
by sbergman27 on Wed 18th Feb 2009 17:04
in reply to "RE[5]: Arch Pro Bullet List"
Member since:2005-07-24
You seem to imply upstream doesn't care about user satisfaction.
I think that both upstream and downstream, in general, care about both correctness and about user satisfaction. But I think that upstream, quite rightly, tends to have a higher focus upon correctness relative to user satisfaction, and that downstream, quite rightly, tends to shift the balance toward user satisfaction at the expense of correctness.
The Linux Kernel, and the downstream distros, are a pretty good example of what I am referring to. I think that we all come out better due to that division of responsibility and concerns. It is not my intent to criticize upstream. I think that both ends of the stream are doing their jobs.
This does not mean that a patch applied by downstream can't come back to bite one in the butt. Just that, in general, the fact that most all distros do some patching is a good thing.
Edited 2009-02-18 17:06 UTC
Member since:
2005-07-24
I think of patching by downstream providers as representing a cooperative effort. The upstream providers are quite rightly concerned about the maintainability of the code. The downstream providers are quite rightly concerned about customer satisfaction.
The patches will either be integrated into the next upstream release, be improved and integrated into the upstream release, or turn out to be a mistake and get discarded, entirely.
Your "movie analogy" just doesn't click with me. Not at all. It's a different thing.