VGRC

As a server administrator, needless to say I have to be familiar with the Linux platform. Linux servers are known for being secure, and if it was properly configured then you can trust that it will work without giving you a lot of hassles.

However, despite the fact that every server I work on runs Linux (typically CentOS or some flavor of BSD) none of my home or business computers do. At the office, there's a couple Linux boxes that I'm tasked with maintaining, but none of my own PC's actually run it.

In fact, my experience with Linux as a desktop computing solution has been largely negative. Most pre-configured distros these days come with a lot of extra crap that bogs down your system, especially older systems. You could run an older version of a major distro, but then you run the risk of having unpatched software vulnerable to all sorts of security risks. Even lightweight distros come with unnecessary extras or are configured all weird so if you attempt to change shit and you don't know what you're doing, you can fuck your entire system up.

This is especially a problem if you're still just trying to learn Linux and you have no idea where to start, because you start working with the pre-configured GUI, which as for anybody who knows even just a hint about Linux, is NOT what you want to become accustomed to if you plan on using Linux even only somewhat effectively.

Then I discovered Arch.

Arch Linux, which brands itself as "A Simple Lightweight Linux Distribution," is exactly that. Included in the basic CD images is the core Operating System, VIM (an awesome text-editor) and Pacman, a simple Package Manager that connects to their online repositories so you can get extra software as you wish. And that's it.

The beauty of Arch is you configure it yourself, from the very start. If you are only vaguely familiar with how to use command line, you'll have a much greater understanding of how it works after you've built your entire OS and desktop from the ground up. To top it all off, their Wiki is one of the best software Wiki's I've ever had to refer to for assistance, as every aspect of the core OS and how to set it up is exhaustively documented with step-by-step instructions.

The other thing I love about Arch is it gives you the ability to setup a fully-fledged usable OS on an older computer. My 2.2 Pentium 4 laptop with 512MB of RAM slows to a crawl trying to run any distro that comes with GNOME or KDE. (See: Pretty much all of them) With Arch, I was able to build the basic OS, and install extra components as I needed them. There was no having to remove extra crap I didn't need, because "extra crap" wasn't there in the first place. No messy GNOME purges trying to install a lighter desktop environment. I know every single folder and program that is on my drive because I built it from scratch, and that was with having only a very modest understanding of Linux to start with. I even have a fully-fledged desktop environment in the form of LXDE, which is basically the Openbox window manager with a couple extra tools. And it runs incredibly zippy; even faster than a bare-bones Windows XP install ran on it, which was much more memory- and CPU-efficient than any major distro pre-packaged with GNOME or KDE.

I had a bitch of a time trying to get the X Window System trying to run on my laptop, which is to be expected when installing it from the ground up for the first time with no prior experience. (Hey, why would I need to run X on a webserver? I had literally never touched it before.) But once that hurdle was passed, it has been very smooth sailing. There is a lot of available software through the Pacman repositories just to start with, and even for stuff you can't snag through Pacman it's not like it's hard to compile a tarball. And I can always take solace in the fact that I know every single thing that is on my system, and walk away having learned a bit more about the inner-workings of Linux.

My main desktop is likely to stay running Windows XP as it's primary OS, since I also use it heavily for graphic design, gaming and multimedia purposes, which is far from Linux's strong points. (Plus XP is stable and I have had no major complaints about it.) But for a laptop that will enable me to easily manage web servers from a remote location, quickly edit pages and browse the web, it's perfect. Plus I can install (and have installed) XAMPP so when I'm parked at the office, it can double as a local testing server before deploying sites live. Score! And keeping with the "Keep it simple" philosophy that Arch employs, the XAMPP services only run when I tell them to, controlled via a simple service, so there isn't an entire web server running in the background taking up resources if I don't need it to.

So three days into using Arch and so far I am very pleased. Very pleased. If the "major" distributions such as Ubuntu have you turned off Linux because of bloat, I definitelly recommend giving Arch a spin if you aren't afraid of getting truly down and dirty with it.