Interview: Arch Linux Team
Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Mon 11th Jan 2010 15:57 UTC
Original OSNews Interviews 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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RE: Ugh
by B12 Simon on Tue 12th Jan 2010 12:56 UTC in reply to "Ugh"
B12 Simon
Member since:
2006-11-08

A total waste of man-hours.


I don't know what you do with your time but it's likely a lot of people would consider it a total waste of man-hours. Similarly you might consider whatever I do with my time a total waste of man-hours as well.

The important question here is whether Arch provides something other distros don't. IMO unlike a lot of distros it does.

As the devs say in the interview, wheels do get reinvented from time to time. So be it. On the plus side we end up with a huge choice of distros to play with til we finally find one that fits us perfectly.

Unlike the Windows and Mac OS worlds Linux users have choices. This is a good thing.

I'm not an Arch user but I've nothing but admiration for this distro and the people who make it.

Reply Parent Score: 3

RE[2]: Ugh
by nt_jerkface on Tue 12th Jan 2010 15:23 in reply to "RE: Ugh"
nt_jerkface Member since:
2009-08-26


I don't know what you do with your time but it's likely a lot of people would consider it a total waste of man-hours. Similarly you might consider whatever I do with my time a total waste of man-hours as well.


It's not a question of one's hobbies, it's a question of whether or not it makes sense to have distro teams spending most of their time preparing packages when there is a common goal of greater improvement.


On the plus side we end up with a huge choice of distros to play with til we finally find one that fits us perfectly.

There's a surplus of general purpose distros that don't do anything to distinguish themselves over the others. Most of them might as well be theme packs. You said you liked arch linux because of quality but that is what everyone says about their favorite general purpose distro.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[3]: Ugh
by B12 Simon on Tue 12th Jan 2010 15:46 in reply to "RE[2]: Ugh"
B12 Simon Member since:
2006-11-08

There's a surplus of general purpose distros that don't do anything to distinguish themselves over the others. Most of them might as well be theme packs. You said you liked arch linux because of quality but that is what everyone says about their favorite general purpose distro.


That's very true, especially true of the plague of *buntu-with-a-different-wallpaper distros. I'd say Arch does distinguish itself very well with its KISS philosophy, rolling updates and relatively vanilla packages.

While someone who's purely an end user might not notice the difference between Arch and another distro (they might not even notice the difference between KDE/Gnome/XFCE/etc) your average OSnews reader should appreciate the differences under the hood.

Reply Parent Score: 2