Arch vs. Slackware, a friendly comparison

"By "getting your hands dirty", I mean there's a lot of manual configuration file editing, not a lot of GUI friendliness, and lots of terminals. Eventually you'll get the system set up with a nice GUI; both Slack and Arch officially support KDE—Arch also officially supports GNOME which is easily available for Slack via third parties.

"Why would you subject yourself to this? Answer: because you'll learn a lot about how the system works, and when it breaks, you'll be much better-prepared to fix it.

"The irony of the user-friendly systems is that the layers of user-friendliness are by necessity layers of complexity. The systems are offloading the tasks of system management from the relatively smart super-powerful human brains and moving it onto a relatively stupid piece of complex and fragile system management software. (I'd argue that the reason these pieces of management software are fragile and complex is that historically Unix systems were administered by humans, and they weren't built with "fire-and-forget" machine administration in mind, but that's a story for another time.)"

Complete Story

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• My Arch Linux Experiment (Part 3)(Sep 23, 2009)
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