Arch Linux
Mayank Sharma finds himself at that juncture in his life where he has the time to appreciate Arch, but not the patience to use it as his daily driver.
Mayank Sharma is at that juncture in his life where he has the time to appreciate Arch, but not the patience to use it.
From a chronological perspective, Arch Linux is a relatively new distribution. But in the grander scheme of things, it’s one of the few distros that despite not being born in the same century as the Linux kernel, has had a profound impact on the Linux distro ecosystem.
The design approach of the distros’ development team focuses on elegance, code correctness, minimalism and simplicity, which calls on the user to be willing to put in some effort to understand its innards.
Judd Vinet started the Arch Linux project in March 2002. He was inspired by the source-based CRUX distro, but didn’t take a fancy for its package management. This led him to create the package manager pacman, which soon became one of Arch’s crown jewels.
Back in 2002, most distros were compiling against the i386 architecture, while Arch was optimised for the i686. This staying-ahead-of-the-curve became a hallmark of the distro, which selected an install-onceupdate-forever, rolling-release model. Arch added PAM support in June 2003 when it was still very new and experimental, and replaced XFree86 with XOrg soon after its release in 2004.
Best of both worlds
Over the years Arch has come to be the favoured distro for people who want to be as close to the bleeding edge as possible, without the complexities of compiling everything from source.
Arch is the distribution of choice of long-time Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, and is usually the first one to make the latest Linux kernel release to its users. For instance, Linux 5.13.6 and the 5.10.54 LTS version came out this year on July 28 and were pushed to Arch users on July 29. The trend continues with virtually every other piece of software as well. LibreOffice v7.1.5 was available the same day it was released, and Firefox v90.0.2 was available within a few hours as well.
Arch Linux focuses on simplicity in design, which it adheres to by shipping software as released by the original upstream developers with minimal distrospecific downstream changes. It also takes special care to use well-commented, easy to follow configuration files, which endears it to proficient Linux users who have the skills to appreciate its DIY nature.
The pacman package manager is one of the major distinguishing features of Arch Linux. It combines a simple binary package format with an easy-to-use build system. Pacman 2.0 in July 2002 debuted the initial script for the Arch Build System (ABS), which is the magic ingredient that makes it easy to turn source code into a compiled package.
A couple of months later, Pacman 2.1 2002 introduced support for multiple repositories. The current repos took shape in 2007, which is also the year when the developers decided that all packages that end up in the Core repository must go through the Test repository to ensure that they don’t end up bricking an installation.
In April 2005, Arch introduced another of the distro’s highlights, the Arch User Repository (AUR), which provides user-made PKGBUILD scripts for packages that aren’t included in the main Arch repos.
In addition to the distribution itself, another of Arch’s hallmark contributions to the broader Linux landscape is the invaluable Arch wiki. Since going online in 2005, the Arch wiki is brimming with guides and fixes that can just as easily help chaperone users on virtually any Linux distro.