Arch Linux Noise

Eugenia published a nice marketing plug for our favorite distro, and I would like to make a few comments. All in all, I do like her article. Its nice to see some noise getting created about Arch Linux, but like all good distros, with noise comes more users, and with more users comes cruft (think Gentoo pre-1.0).

Gentoo supports eBuilds (similar to Arch's makepkg/ABS philosophy) however usually the most common option available is compilation from source.

Gentoo's package format is ebuilds. Ebuilds are build scripts (just like PKGBUILDs) that tell the package installer how to install the package. Portage builds the package, and instead of taring it up into a tarball, it dumps it right into the filesystem; pacman creates a tarball for distribution. Gentoo has an option to install from binary packages, but its default option is to install from source. Arch is the oposite. srcpac (no mention of it in the article) provides users a portage-like way of managing packages. srcpac will download, compile and install packages directly. makepkg is designed not as a package manager, but a package builder. Its designed to make packages for distribution, not install packages locally built from source.

Despite what you might think though, Arch is not perfect and no matter what Archers might advocate to you in the forums or IRC, Arch is not for newbies.

From Arch Linux's about page "Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution targeted at competent linux users (read: not afraid of the commandline)". I've not heard a regular Arch Linux user claim its easy to use or for newbies. In fact, I see a lot of newbies trying to use Arch Linux, when in fact they'd be better off on Debian or Fedora.

Makepkg is definetely not as convenient, at least for ex-Slackware users.

See my above comment about makepkg. Its not meant to be a package manager. Its a package builder. srcpac is the source-based package manager.
No mention of Arch Linux's heavy usage of /opt either. One of its best features, in my opinion. Getting used to having lots of packages in /opt takes time, but its great once you adjust.