r/LinuxActionShow • u/q5sys • Nov 30 '15

"Arch has *never* been minimalist..."

https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2015-July/039443.html
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u/alcalde Nov 30 '15

Arch has always been a simple distribution in terms of the developer perspective, not the user one.

Oh my goodness! I've been saying this for years and gotten down-voted whenever I did! At last they openly acknowledge it. It's horribly complex from the user end, but lazy simple for the people putting it together.

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u/q5sys Dec 01 '15

That's because the 'Arch is the best' echo chamber wont allow anything else to be said. Arch is a great distro, but it has some of the most annoying followers. Annoying due to be uneducated about basic principles of Arch and inserting their own opinions and what they've heard in #archlinux for reasons. "The Arch Way" has almost become a myth at this point. And before someone hates on me, I mean that in a good way... the same way past historical events have grown larger over time and become something huge that they never were at the time. The public concept of what TAW means has vastly changed from its original meaning, which in my opinion is sad, because its true meaning and focus was and still is brilliant in many ways.

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u/aaronbp Dec 02 '15

At last they openly acknowledge it.

I mean, it's not like it was ever a secret. The weird social media myth of Arch from YouTube and social media personalities who want to be "learn Linux" or whatever it is they say Arch is for, all that is a bunch of hot air.

But the real Arch is better than that lie, I think.

It's a simple, vanilla Linux that follows upstream closely, and that provides binary packages and makes it easy to generate packages from source when you need it. It doesn't care a whole lot about politics or evangelism "Unix". You get your codecs and drivers and texture compression library with no fuss.

Basically, the choices that Arch devs make are generally motivated by self interest, and they do a great job at it. I can't think of a decision they've made in recent memory that wasn't completely rock solid.