What do you think of Debian vs Arch vs Gentoo? Debian at least gets points for seniority. It is also about as far from the bleeding edge as you can get. Yes, it lacks the latest and greatest features of several other Linux versions, but it more than makes up for it in stability. What do you think of Arch? Arch Linux is perhaps most comparable to Fedora and FreeBSD. I don’t know anything about those. Arch Linux is a binary distribution of Linux. As long as it is not two faced. Arch Linux lacks a good installer and a configuration and automation tool. Arch Linux has a lot of packages in its repositories, but beyond pacman, it is limited. Pacman is one of the standard packagers, I think. Why don’t you like it? You have to set up the network yourself if you want to use Arch. It doesn’t have the hand holding of OS like Ubuntu and Mint. Gentoo has a large community behind it. It has a lot of applications and desktops to choose from. That simplifies things a lot. Beyond that, Gentoo is more of a demo of a Linux desktop PC. It gives you a ready made desktop and full application suite, but a lot of other advanced Linux functions are lacking. What functions is it lacking? Gentoo doesn’t have a GUI for the hard disk installer. Gentoo requires you to set up a partition and create user data files by hand. So you have to be an expert in Gentoo to do anything beyond the basics. And Gentoo lacks the resources aside from user forums to reach that level, unless you are already a Linux guru. If I were a Linux guru, I’d be using Debian or some more advanced Linux version. But Arch’s goal of being an over-arching distribution is somewhere over the rainbow.

• published: 21 Aug 2014
• views: 67