On Friday, after three days experimentation, Arch Linux replaced Slackware as my main Linux distribution. Slackware is still installed, but the machine now boots into Arch by default.

There are a few different reasons for this. One was that GNOME 2.10 is included in the official package repositories, while Slack still ships 2.6 and may drop it altogether in the near future. While there are some third-party GNOME distributions for Slack, I’m not overly keen on most of them. Other reasons included curiosity, and a desire to try something new. I won’t deny that the fact that Arch is an unashamedly hard-core distribution also appealed in a masochistic sort of way (although once you’ve got it installed and working it isn’t really any harder to deal with than Slackware).

My impressons so far have been very good. Most of the things I liked about Slackware are also true of Arch: the mostly unmodified packages, simple and easily comprehensible underlying architecture, and speed. In fact, Arch doesn’t just share Slack’s nippiness, but, thanks to being fairly heavily i686 optimised, it noticeably exceeds it. Everything feels slightly quicker and more responsive. Some of this speed difference may be between GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.3 or GNOME 2.6, but even at the console, I think things are a bit speedier. Also, MP3 encoding with Lame (and Grip) goes roughly three times as fast, which I found rather surprising.

Another strength of Arch is Pacman, its package manager. Aside from the cool name, Pacman is a pretty decent package manager in the APT/YUM/urpmi vein, although coming from Slackware with virtually no package management at all, almost any kind of package management seems a bit special. While I never missed having more advanced package management in Slack (and nor did I have any significant dependency problems), it is rather fun to be able to just type pacman -Syu and have everything on the system automatically updated.

Speaking of which, Arch is very up-to-date with its packages. Almost everything is on the latest stable release. As a particularly impressive example, KDE 3.4 appeared in the ‘Extra’ repository on the same day as it was released (the release candidate having already appeared in ‘Testing’). It’s possible that this may rob it of some stability, but the lack of package customisations (which often introduce new bugs) and underlying simplicity should tend to offset that, and I’ve certainly had no problems.

Downsides? First up, DevFS. The image on the install CD uses DevFS to manage its device files, and if you install it (which is selected by default), it will be used in preference to Udev, meaning that all your devices will have crazy names like /dev/discs/disc0/part2 instead of /dev/hda2. Fortunately, as long as you are careful not to install devfs at the start, then you will only have to suffer this nonsense while installing, and can then go through your fstab, lilo.conf (or whatever the grub equivalent is, as you can install either), and other config files, and remove all references to the aforementioned silliness.

The other slight quibble I would have is that both KDE and the Linux kernel include Arch branded artwork by default. Fortunately the kernel is otherwise stock and unmodified (I think), and so backing up the .config, copying the unmodified source from my Slackware partition and building a custom kernel from that (which you can do as part of the system install) meant I was able to get Tux back at the top of the screen at bootup. Of course, any sane person wouldn’t care about this anyway, but never mind. KDE’s branding I am less bothered about, partly because with a rather cute little wombat, it actually looks quite nice, and partly because I’ve gone back to using GNOME, and won’t see it anyway (although I have installed KDE for K3B and Konqueror — it’s always worth having an alternative HTML rendering engine available). And it is, after all, a very trivial matter to replace it.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased. The install process isn’t the easiest in the world (I won’t go into details, as it’s described quite adequately in several other places; there are some links on the Arch website), and I would never recommend Arch to someone without some prior experience with Linux (although you don’t have to be a great expert, because I’m certainly not that), but I, at least, am very happy with it. I won’t deny that part of why I’m pleased is all the improvements that have been made to GNOME since 2.6, which have nothing to do with Arch itself, but even allowing for that, I take my hat off to the Arch team for a top-notch distribution.