Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Arch vs Slackware, a Friendly Comparison

For some time, there hasn't been a great comparison article about Slackware. Most of the article i saw usually compared Slackware to other Linux distribution that has different point of view of how operating system should be developed, so it tends to be a biased review.

But yesterday, i saw a new article has been brought up back to Twitter about Arch vs Slackware. It's an old article, but i found it very interesting since it tried to compare two Linux distribution that shares the same basic philosophy: simplicity. No fancy GUI during installation, mostly manual configuration required, and highly configurable.

I also like the conclusion, since it gives both side pros and cons based on the facts:
Slack and Arch: KISS principle, 32 and 64-bit, tarball-based package management, text install, config file editing is expected in administration, KDE.
Notable points to help decide between the two:
Slackware: total stability, good for servers and not-bad for desktops, relatively small (but reasonable) amount of well-tested stable software, security updates provided, GNOME from a third-party, standard release schedule, i486 build officially distributed, admin tools depend on sh.
Arch: good (but not guaranteed) stability, huge amount of cutting-edge software, good for desktops but not-as-good for servers, update everything continuously, GNOME officially supported, "rolling release" schedule, i686 build officially distributed, admin tools depend on bash.

Which one is truly better? That's up to you!

3 comments:

  1. IMHO Arch have a fault: if you can't upgrade your Arch for a long time (ex: 2 months) sometimes do a pacman -Syu have a lot of bad effects. Arch is so much bleeding-edge. I prefer total control and simplicity of Slackware and Pat's tools.

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  2. i had that problem last month where i didn't perform pacman -Syu for three weeks and then it caused the system to break.

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  3. I always do pacman -Syu every time I turn on my laptop, besides, is it not a good thing for your system to break? you get to learn linux by fixing broken system :). I'm using Ubuntu right now, not because Arch breaks every so often, but because it doesn't have Unity. I miss Arch :)

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