My personal choice after few years on Linux. Desktop : Arch (desktop) && Slackware/Salix (laptop, brother's/parent's pc). Server : Debian (web server) && Slackware (NAS).
Slackware is tempting for me . How is that ? They say curiosity killed the cat , I hope not. I am an arch user and I think it s the best linux for me , very stable , i have not had a problem with my arch for long time , maybe because i switched to lts. haha
Tip for any Linux user: Just because updates are ready doesn't mean you must update.. Do you need all the packages up to date all the time? Probably not... Learn your system needs and yours. You can pick the software you want o need up to date or do not even update at all if you choose to!. You are your own system administrator, to administer your system means making your own choices.
Great vid Kaddy, and agree with pretty much everything you said. That's why i run Arch on my laptop and Gentoo on my desktop. They're both great in several ways. MJ
One "pro" you forgot for Gentoo is having packages built specifically for your computer and not a generic x86_64 or x86. That's always been one of the main reasons I've toyed with Gentoo. I always stuck with Arch though, it's always treated me better than Gentoo.
It's been my experience that the people having problems with updates borking their systems are usually the ones who wait a few weeks and then mass update their system. People who update regularly ever day (or at most every 2 or 3 days) have much less trouble. The more updates you install at a time the more chance of them conflicting with each other and causing problems. Also the more updates at once is a more complex update.
+PAC MAN It's the other way around for me. Tried installing Gentoo a couple of times before (a few years ago) on my desktop but it was always buggy or could never get it to work properly with my Nvidia GPU. That's also the main reason why I can't permanently switch over to Gentoo on my desktop pc. On my laptop it was super simple in comparison. It was just a matter of looking up how to install the integrated Intel drivers and everything worked perfectly. In terms of GPU drivers anyway, getting wifi to work took me ages :P
I know arch an gentoo are often compared since they are both considered „power user“ distros. But from a gentoo perspective arch is actually more comparable with Debian. (I know this hurts, but hear me out. :D) The main difference between distros today is the package management. In arch and Debian the approach of getting software on your machine are binary packages you install via the package manager. Availability of software mainly depends on the availability of packages. (I know you can build your own package, but who does that? In the end it’s rather download the source and run make) In gentoo you build your own systems, downloading the source and running make is the norm and portage is just a way of making That easier and Controlling the dependencies. In arch and Debian you could say the Pacman or apt repository *is* what makes the distro. While in gentoo portage is just a wrapper for making your own distro and GitHub and gitlab are the repositories and every open source Linux software there is, is what makes the distro.
@@metaldiceman well what’s the difference than? More complicated install, you have to type 10 commands into a command line instead of clicking 10 times. Wow. but apart from that it’s just different package manager and different package testing policy. That’s basically all there is what differentiates most of the distributions today. What’s the difference between Manjaro and Arch? Graphical installer, DE preinstalled and packages are tested (by arch users) a little bit before they are added to the repo. Same thing endeavor. It’s even worse with all the Ubuntus and their derivatives since they even use the Same repos. Only difference is a few changed packages and the desktop theme. /oh and you have the AUR of course. A repo where anyone could put in anything binary and you download and run it on your machine like windows monkeys.
@@hansdampf2284 I don't know if you thought I was being sarcastic, I meant Arch was adorable. Loved your binning of Arch in with Debian and the Windows monkeys. I concur and even a Linux outsider like me, I balk at just trusting package repositories on what seems like blind faith.
@@metaldiceman oh I thought you meant me with adorable ☺️ Problem is not really the official repository. Installing from there is quite save because of all the cert checking and checksums
I've used Arch for 2 years and never had any of the cons he mentioned; getting in situations like that are pretty niche or rare. I've also never used the Arch forums; I don't even have a forum account there. Also, just because there are frequent updates to get *up to date software* (go figure), doesn't necessarily mean that the system is unstable. I only use KDE and have never had my system itself misbehave with the only exception being the obvious from learning how to overclock my Nvidia GPU As for Nvidia, use the "frogging family" Nvidia installer, not the official one because it will make your efforts in doing that astronomically easier and will fix Nvidia specific issues.
i finally got gentoo installed successfully . it only took me 3 full days. now to install some stuff in it and hope i don't screw up. (i want to clarify something ... ) the first day , not 100% gentoo's fault lol , i somehow managed to screw up grub.
Nice channel & discussion video mate. I'm hot testing eventually about 60 live Linus distros on sticks through 2018 and I like some of the bare bones if you wanna things about Arch Bang, though I am sure for some that can be irritating but to a degree the under the hood needs if you want certain services means much is turned off initially for security and stability. I like that. I am sure there are other, smaller even less = better/safer distros but maybe I have not tested those. Most of the distros are full of holes because they have too much stuff turned on or two many packages from everywhere in play or available and I can run the distros on a stick or a hard drive install and in 1, ONE, day on the internet I can watch a mess unfold or easily honey pott system compromises & set-up intrusion builds beginning to take place. That is the reason why I left Windoze. Too much garbage turned on for the kids from the ether to play with. Terribly insecure.. Hell with that. Arch Linux, live at least, is one of the better distros @ stability and security I have tested of about 30 so far. I cannot compare it to Gentoo because I tried to compile, got garbage the first time & half working the next so I said maybe later, though it was probably my bad in there somewhere all my machines are hack builds from motherboards on up. Cheers, keep up the good work!
I fucking love Arch, it has never disappointed me and it just works, but at the same time, the whole Gentoo experience is very interesting, so I have both installed.
me too. What i did was put a binhost on my gentoo laptop (dont have a desktop) and installed a separate partition (i hate vms except QEMU) and put a bin host and installed sys-apps/pacman on it to avoid errors with my main system. Its great b/c i can make gentoo more similar to arch but not vice versa. Either way, arch is my #2 still no matter what.
aur is the primary reason i do not run arch and the build time is a none issue for me with gentoo, the control I have over my system in gentoo makes that con an irrelevance even on my raspberry pi which has almost infinite compile times for some packages (does not have X :). Also, gentoo is EASIER than any other distribution I ever used and i learned more about using linux doing my first gentoo install than I did when running debian for 2 years prior to that install.
I like both but you're right on one thing Caddy it's a pain in the butt when a update or package breaks your system on Arch and my pc has nearly gone out the window several times..I think it's a horses for courses thing..Just bloody use what you're happiest with ED :-)
linux4unme good vid i like that your even an dont let bias get in thats hard to do with the linux comunitys now adays it seems lol keep up the good vids
gentoo is pretty fustrating sometimes i find but then again im new to it, sometimes i wish there was a emerge --just-do-it flag LOL , maybe they could implement it and have it basically do like a standard install of what ever package it is (more or less the same configuration that arch would have installed it with).
In terms of choosing between these two I believe it all comes down to how much time you are able to spend Installing and maintaining your system. That's why i've been using Arch for years now. Linux fans all have loads of fun doing so. That is why i choose able and not willing. But If you have enough free time LFS might sound even more appealing.
Having worked with ebuild, PKGBUILD, and spec files(rpm), I find ebuilds to be the most easy to write, powerful and flexible, once you have understood some concepts. The power of ebuilds resides, in they are just a wrapper for the build process, thus leave all the options available and, you can specify from processor instructions to features to be left in or out of a package, in contrast if you were making an arch package or rpm, you are forced to work with the lowest common denominator in hardware, and thus don't use sometimes instructions available in your CPU. IMHO: in terms of power, and better packaging i would say: ebuild > rpm > PKGBUILD
About an hour to install chromium! 😂 I am happy with arch. I can keep it less prone to any hiccups by being Conservative in updating and holding my kernel...
An hour... to install a browser.....? Sorry but your OS is a complete piece of shit, and you don't know anything about computers if you think that isn't a "hiccup" in basic functionality.
I never really liked Gentoo, its ports system can be very hard to work with, sure AUR isnt perfect and I have had my fair share of issues with AUR but i feel packages compile much faster on arch and arch does have better distros under its umbrella like Manjaro and antergos
am making my way into linux and I like what you say...sorry if this is not related but could you share with us your experience with any virtualization hypervisor? my HTPC is running Proxmox and since its Debian, i installed Gnome to be able to use it as HTPC, I need proxmox to run PFsense, Emby and some other VMs...i was wondering if there is something better than proxmox.
thinking of moving from arch to gentoo , the all day compiling thing freak me out. gentoo thing looks more geeky for me. Though I am still on Arch boat
Jules Octave I moved from Arch to Gentoo and it's not a all day compile. The initial install should take a while but once you got everything you don't have to compile that much. You can update once a month and be fine.
Relatively new to Linux here, literally the only way to know is to try them all out. As for me I'm currently on Ubuntu and as for the DE I'm on a fence between MATE and Cinnamon . Xfce/LXDE (lightweight) and KDE (full-featured) were a bit too extreme in my case.
M moving from fedora to a new distribution.. Was really confused b/w arch and gentoo.. Finally going with gentoo... Luks like using that is gonna teach me more about Linux than arch..
zod is my god .fila 1) There are plenty already out there 2) The gentoo handbook explains it better than I could verbalize on video 3) It would be a long and boring video for my viewers to watch and for me to make o_0 4) I can't be bothered
+ahmed alamassi I still haven't gotten around to installing / learning slackware... it has been on the to do list for a couple years but I haven't been interested enough to go ahead and do it yet. Linux from Scratch was of far more interest to me... so I have no opinions on Slackware but it is definitely the sort of distro that I would enjoy. (If I sunk my teeth into it)
+OwnedByNemz I downloaded something called Salix , and will try it soon , I just hope there is "binaries" at least for the big packages like desktop environment and libreoffice , package manager without dependency solver sounds weird.
+ahmed alamassi I used to use Slackware when I had an i686. I just dont feel like it ever caught up after x86_64 became the norm. I know theres slack64, but theres just something about it and I dont care for it. Slackware will always be my favorite anyway though.
Dudes Totes agree, Arch : pros - lasted and great as the developers has written it (for most part) - aur and custom packages - pacman and package simple good and easy com: -if you have a number of Svn/git packages they are hard to manage as u complie individually grr - custom packages for the abs system as same above -aur packages aren't always well constructed Gentoo : pro - portage ................ I will say it again for anyone else reading this .. portage. it does everything pacman does and more. if you want to system a system wide changes it automatically handles everything. if you want rock solid stability Debian style but modern packages choose stable, if the best possible experience closest to the bleeding edge "~amd64" plus mixing and matching Svn/git and having multiple version of packages side by side "slots". once you main config file are setup it's all automated (mostly) con: circular dependency and portage generally complaining. yes portage does complain
I agree with most of your comments, but with distro's like manjaro who have removed a lot of negatives for arch(i.e updates breaking system) I would say arch defiantly has the upper hand over gentoo. Just need to sort the fan boy's out for arch....
+TheDrunkenAlcoholic Well... I wasn't comparing Manjaro, I was comparing Arch to Gentoo. I am not convinced that Manjaro is stable, eg: They would well and truly have plasma 5 in their repos by now and I have "heard" that manjaro has had it's issues with stability in the past.... but I have not used Manjaro myself over a long period of time to make any claims.
+username (I can't reply directly, you seem to have it disabled) "Arch is not bleeding edge. It is the latest stable" Not 100% true... I have come across stable, beta and even alpha packages in the main repo. Don't believe me? Have a browse through Arch's package search website and look at the version numbers for a wide variety of packages. Upon a 5 second search I even found that they have 0AD in the main repo which is currently Alpha19. In Gentoo it is masked.
You can even go deeper with march. My march ( in ARch for makepkg ) is -march=haswell -mno-aes -mno-avx -mno-avx2 -mno-bmi -mno-bmi2 -mno-f16c -mno-fma -mno-xsave -mno-xsaveopt -mbam . Arch and Gentoo are very similar. You have makepkg=emerge and ebuilds=PKGBUILD. You can configure makepkg.conf just like you configure the make.conf in Gentoo. I used both and i find Gentoo being a bit ridiculous on compiling part, because I don't see a reason compiling every single application. There is a benefit, but in most applications there is a MINOR benefit. Also, in ARch, if I want to compile from source, I simply get the source with ABS and compile with makepkg ( or get the sources directly from AUR's with pbget --aur packagename). That's the only real difference. Oh yea, and in ARch you don't have to care so much about infinite FLAGS that in Gentoo can be so annoying, specially for new users.
+CoderMonkey Nathan True... as I mentioned. But my point was that there is more potential for unstable packages to be released in the main arch repos... from there, it is the user's job to identify that and fix the problem Vs the portage tree where the aim is for all portage updates to be stable in the first place. As far as I recall... ArchLinux's Arm version is a community port which is not "officially" supported. If that is not an accurate statement then the information has not been updated in the Arch wiki.
Linux4UnMe Arch ARM is a support branch of Arch and they try to support most ARM chips. archlinuxarm.org/ It's also officially supported by a number manufacturers.
CoderMonkey Nathan That doesn't mean that it is officially supported by the same team that created / maintain "Arch Linux." Like I said... it is a community port of Arch Linux for Arm. If I am wrong, show me...
One of the most popular requests I receive on my channel is to cover more Arch Linux videos however I agree with you in terms of "stability". I am too busy to maintain an Arch system. I can't spend all of my time chasing bugs and other software/system related issues due to bleeding edge software. I commend the project for their niche and what they bring to the community but it's just not for me. I need to have a no nonsense system that requires very little up-keep that gets out of my way and lets me get work done.
+Amy Flannigan Depends what you are referring to exactly... I have videos on porting Rpm binaries across Rpm distributions, I have videos rebuilding / porting debian binaries. There might be a video on my channel about "alien" which allows you to convert rpm's / debs etc.....
Linux4UnMe I don't know, but it's not. They make only RPM and Deb packages and there is nothing in AUR. And the best advice I got form the people was, make your own. Drivers.
Arch is binary. Case closed. Binary means - there is certain policy how software is built and hangs together, and you have to deal with its pros and cons. Gentoo does not have this.
+Linux4UnMe hahahahah cool, ye it's not that bad, but yano once you start filling that package.accept_keywords and it grows pretty big then i dunno, imo stable is for servers and unstable for desktops, in any case if smth is really bad it would be masked anyway, and hey .. if you really kaboooom it (which I highly doubt) there's always a fresh install lol
Gentoo, Google based their ChromeOS on Gentoo. The Chromebook is the top selling laptop on the market today. Google had any Linux distro to choose from and they chose Gentoo this should speak volumes not only to stability but the other pros you mentioned.
Actually in it's original form it used Ubuntu but they switched..I know Lou this is very late but I guess you can understand why they got rid of the Canoical OS and moved to Gentoo..I always wondered though what a ChromeOS system based on Arch would be like possibly a little faster lol..I feel a in coming of abuse shortly
Kde is not lighter than Gnome man... and it is definitely in NO WAY lighter or similar to Xfce... thanks for the sub, I don't do many videos anymore though...
i have used arch, debian, gentoo, opensuse, centos....i run gentoo on my 2 main machines and centos on my server.....there is just no way i would even consider switching distro...gentoo is perfect once you are familiar with it... I cant see anything else ever measuring up...plus, since i lerned how to install properly it has been super stable, and always right up to date. why would i even consider a different distro ? why bother with arch linux, last time i did eventually my entire system broke and had to reinstall, plus i use my machines for work, and there is no way i feel comfortable using some aur build on my top secret machines., plus bleeding edge (unstable) doesnt make any sense to me.....i dont care that i am using version 5.5.1 on gentoo but could be running version 5.6 on arch....bleeding edge packages dont really generally offer much more benefit.....the only thing that really matters is security updates...which you get in gentoo. its the best distro out there, seriously guys, all i hear is people complaining about build times for packages, i build either during the day whilst i work, or at night whilst i sleep... its very rare that you get a long build, maybe a couple of times a month...other than that upgrades usually only take a couple of minutes. arch linux has the best wiki...period....... but gentoo portage is the best package manager in the world....period plus gentoo forces you to analyse various aspects of linux which is only a good thing................................."right"...
just use the gentoo wiki....and slowly follow the installation guide... if you are on weechat and irc...goto server freenode.....and join channel #gentoo. thats where the experts lurk ...me included ...but i am not an expert like some of those guys... and they will hand hold you through any bits you get stuck on. take your time over it.....learn about partitioning your drive...read the arch wiki for this ...even if you are installing gentoo..spend lots of time soaking up what you are doing ...even take a week reading around partitioning .....downlaoding a tar ball...choosing your correct architecture....installing....and then setting up a basic system.. take your time, and your installation will work and then from there you learn as you go.
Ebuilds are the PKGBUILDs that you make with makepkg in Arch and I don't see why you wouldn't be able to get the same sources that ebuilds have and create them in pgbuild with makepkg. You just need the source code to compile and the source code is not only available for Gentoo, lol. I use both ( a fork of Gentoo ) and I used pure Gentoo and I find it ridiculous to compile so much. Very little to zero benefit to compile from source for some programs, even with the flags that you set, you wont notice any difference in applications compared to what you used on other distros or operating systems. The performance is also minimal to non-existent. The only IMPORTANT and USEFUL thing ( for what most users will use and need ) that gentoo actually has and Arch doesn't is a genkernel package. You can get or make a genkernel script on Arch, but I talk here about regular users.
Not true. Arch is stable af. Installed my build in 14 and it runs like a cat ever since. Maybe 2-3 interventions of a few minutes required in order to fix update-issues which were all documented very well
Agree to disagree. Not being biased but I've been running arch linux in my macbook pro for a good 6 months now. I always update every week, use quite a few packages installed from the aur and I use gnome for DE. My system never broke, there have been some bugs here and there but all easy fixes. Gentoo IMO is just unnecessarily complex but a great distro nonetheless.
CoderMonkey Nathan i use plasma , and i very much like it. works almost flawless on my machine here, there has only ever been 1 issue for me and that was with my old graphics card it made blackness all over the place when you dragged windows, but no issues with the new one.
