Diary of a Wolfeman

Ok, I’ve played with it for a couple days, and I have to say that Arch Linux definitely shows alot of promise…but it needs more work.

There are several known bugs in the package lists, most notably in KDE itself. While I was able to get the sound working, I had to jump through a number of hoops to do so, and arts still isn’t quite on the bandwagon, even though alsa is.

One major drawback is going to be the hardware incompatabilities. There are certain hardware vendors that only provide rpm drivers, (notably ATI video cards) and this system is rpm-unfirendly. While it is possible to get these drivers installed, it is a long and arduous process that leaves this distro in the hands of the guru rather than the mid-level enthusiast.

If you want to learn more about how Linux works, right now would be a good time to play around with Arch, before the developers iron out all the kinks. If you want to run Linux but don’t want to have to delve deeply into the command line, stick to one of the big boys like SuSE or Mandrake.

As for me, I think I’ll be investing some time into an ftp install of SuSE 9.1 over the weekend.