I have been using Arch Linux since 2005. It is a great distro and there are a few devs that are still keeping it the Arch Way. For this I am grateful. However, the community has taken a change for the worse. When I first started using Arch if you asked a noob question you were given a man page or a google query. If you wanted to succeed with arch, you had to read up. I think this turned away a good amount of users, but that was the type of distro Arch was. Now the community is soft, we are willing to put up with people that have no clue what they are doing and that can’t survive on their own!
ataraxia summed it up very well:
“A part of me really misses those old days. We’re far too welcoming of people who don’t substantially get what The Arch Way is even about, or who just don’t agree with it. Arch hasn’t been materially harmed by the changes, but I think we’re overly patient in these forums nowadays with people that are just too inexperienced to succeed anyway, and even more so with BIGNUM practically-identical threads that could have been avoided by simply reading the last day’s posts (or even the front page news) before posting a new thread.”
Well I was not excepting this to come. Let me explain. First my mother’s laptop died, sort of. It would be on AC power and then suddenly switch over to battery power. Because the battery no longer held a long charge ( <5 min), this became problematic. I decided it was best to give my mom my Dell Vostro 1000 laptop and just buy some cheap stuff from newegg. As you may or may not know my desktop at the time was an Atom 1.6ghz. This was enough for normal everyday tasks, but not enough for the occasional Virtual Machine or movie conversion.
$150 for a motherboard, cpu, and a stick of ram sure in the hell beats $400 for a mediocre laptop. I ordered the parts, but later that night I found out that the sata card on my server stopped working. This meant no more Hard Drives! Needless to say this caused the Linux to crash and it was impossible to bootup again.
So Linux saved the day… It was about 11:00pm and I was getting ready to go to bed. This was when I found out my server’s sata card just died. So I took my Atom desktop, took out the hard drive, and tossed the server’s drive in there. Then with a little bit of file editing (fstab, grub, and inintrd boot image) I had the system back up and running. So in three hours I had the whole server back online with all its services going. Now lets see that happen with Windows.
Finally, the motherboard, stick of ram, and cpu arrived. To make a long story short, I installed everything into the case that was housing, the now broken, server. Everything was going fine and I installed Arch Linux. I went to run firefox, but had no luck. I was receiving a “Bus Error”. After a quick google and some time on IRC I determined there was a corrupt library installed. Instead of trying to figure out what lib was corrupt I figured it was just easier to reinstall as I didn’t have much setup.
I reinstalled and now everything is working without a hitch. Now for the part you’ve all been waiting for, the specs!
The PSU and case are 4-5 years old, but, hey, they work. Overall this is a pretty nice system. It has more than enough power for what I need it to do. My only complaint with the motherboard is that suspend-2-ram is total trash in Linux. The onboard nvidia graphics are pretty nice too. I can play UT2004 which makes me happy!
I need to replace the power supply as it is very loud! I will probably do this before I go of to college as I doubt my roomate wants to listen to a blaring fan all night long!