Re: Mozilla Firefox ESR for 64bit systems
> > I use Firefox not with Debian,
> > but other distros.
>
> I didn't notice that..I see Arch Linux listed among the multitudes:
>
> http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/12.10/gldt1210.svg
>
> You can't have too many Linux distros apparently. What's to like
> about Arch Linux?
> --
I feel compelled to reply. I was looking at Alpine and tried Arch after
a user called Landry mentioned on the OpenBSD list that he had really
liked Arch as one of the most BSD like distros but didn't like the
direction they were heading. I wish I had known about Sabayon then.
Arch has some good plus points such as a very fast package manager
and package updates being released quickly (though you will still find
some corner packages debian knows are vulnerable but hasn't fixed yet
perhaps around for longer), but only if you are competent and also
don't mind wasting time when they release changes may it be an OK
system for you.
One of their main principles is to follow upstream to the letter and
use that reason to silence users, which is the opposite of Gentoo which
tries to empower the user as much as possible and so is compilation
based to avoid the dependency issue (unfortunately a big barrier to many
and hence my preference for better designed software).
Breaking the system because Arch haven't tested it well enough, or
released the right information happened atleast three times in the 6
months that I used it.
It is actually the most unprofessional distro I have ever come across
and I have tried a huge number of various UNIX types.
Sabayon based on Gentoo but without the compilation comes as a fully
functional KDE desktop even with GUI package management out of the box,
unlike arch and has all the plusses of Arch such as bleeding edge
packages and without the other drawbacks of Arch. It also has a server
version if you wish like Arch to only install what you use (ignoring
dependencies) initially. The package manager requires a lot more cpu
time but much more complete and your system will never break without
support and I haven't seen a breakage requiring admin intervention
and unpredictable root commands required yet even with very infrequent
updates. It is unsupported but you could if you wish even mix the Gentoo
build system which is very powerful (no polkit or no pulseaudio
useflags tha apply to all builds) with the binary packages and so work
around some dependencies without building everything.
On Arch, if you don't update for "they often say two weeks, but this is
rubbish" a certain amount of time, they say you can't, of course it
actually just gets more difficult.
If you Google "Arch" "unprofessional" you will see they do have quite a
long history of burying problems apparently including removing forum
pages and recently moderating even the users list but allowing devs
obviously to make comments that have since been found to be incorrect.
--
_______________________________________________________________________
'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'
(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________
Reply to: