Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Mon 11th Jan 2010 15:57 UTC
A few weeks ago, we asked for the OSNews community to help with some questions we were going to ask Aaron Griffin from the Arch Linux team, and the response was glorious and somewhat phenomenal. We added those questions to our own and sent them on over, and then we were surprised by receiving not only Aaron Griffin's responses but answers from various individuals from the team.
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Member since:2006-02-05
Horses for courses.
I too use OpenBSD and find its quality and simplicity refreshing. The tradeoff one makes (for "general" desktop use) is that the ports aren't updated for a release (or, as of late, -stable) due to the fact that the devs there prefer to focus their time updating the ports for -current. In addition, the OpenBSD approach to security, openness of all code, etc. puts some apps out of reach (wine, high-performance VMMs, some drivers,...). If you need those things, OpenBSD is not really an option.
For what Arch does (rolling release) its quality is exceptional. I've been running it as a general-purpose desktop for a couple years with little (and typically minor), if any, breakage. The quality difference between Arch and Gentoo circa 2+ years ago (which I left in frustration before finding Arch) is a chasm measured in parsecs.
Another interesting (and spot-on, IMO) comment Aaron Griffith made in the interview is that he was worried about Linux getting more interdependent and intertwined. This worries me as well, as I don't want Linux to become the wipe-and-reload-once-a-year-to-clean-out-the-mystery-problems mess that Windows is. I'm keeping an eye on NetBSD and DragonflyBSD in case that happens 
Edited 2010-01-12 05:37 UTC
Member since:2009-05-20
In addition, the OpenBSD approach to security, openness of all code, etc. puts some apps out of reach (wine, high-performance VMMs, some drivers,...). If you need those things, OpenBSD is not really an option.
True enough. Performance has always been an eternal issue with OpenBSD as well. But that was not really the question here.
For what Arch does (rolling release) its quality is exceptional. I've been running it as a general-purpose desktop for a couple years with little (and typically minor), if any, breakage. The quality difference between Arch and Gentoo circa 2+ years ago (which I left in frustration before finding Arch) is a chasm measured in parsecs.
Well, while the quality of this "rolling release" methodology may be good, there are still breakages, as admitted by the team. I left Arch behind exactly for this reason. If there only would be a binary distribution that would be "rolling releases" but not bleeding edge.
Another interesting (and spot-on, IMO) comment Aaron Griffith made in the interview is that he was worried about Linux getting more interdependent and intertwined. This worries me as well, as I don't want Linux to become the wipe-and-reload-once-a-year-to-clean-out-the-mystery-problems mess that Windows is. I'm keeping an eye on NetBSD and DragonflyBSD in case that happens
Yeah, this was an insightful comment. And personally I think Linux already is largely that. By borrowing your cheerful expression, you already have to wipe-and-reload-once-a-year-to-clean-out-the-mystery-problems with things like Ubuntu and Fedora. Except that you have to actually do it twice a year
. As the team also discussed, there is generally a great danger for distributions like Slackware and Arch Linux when more and more Windows registry-like *Kits and HALs are emerged as more or less necessary dependencies. Perhaps the big-name distributions have too much power on certain "upstreams".
The complexity will bite. Mainstream Linux is more and more like Windows with all of its flaws, each passing day.
Edited 2010-01-12 06:04 UTC
Member since:2006-07-14
I too use OpenBSD and find its quality and simplicity refreshing. The tradeoff one makes (for "general" desktop use) is that the ports aren't updated for a release (or, as of late, -stable) due to the fact that the devs there prefer to focus their time updating the ports for -current. In addition, the OpenBSD approach to security, openness of all code, etc. puts some apps out of reach (wine, high-performance VMMs, some drivers,...). If you need those things, OpenBSD is not really an option.
Maybe because it's development model is more server oriented than desktop. Want to run a BSD desktop, go FreeBSD.
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Member since:
2009-08-18
Arch is by far the best Linux distro IMO, but in terms of quality it still doesn't match OpenBSD ... once you use OpenBSD and it ports and package system which IMO is superior (in terms of consistency) than any of Linux or BSD release, you won't want to come back.
I happily run Windows 7 and OpenBSD 4.6 ... great combination ... Windows for .NET development/Outlook (work), openbsd for other dev stuff (python, perl, ruby etc).