My post about Arch Lin­ux from yes­ter­day got post­ed at tux­ma­chines and there was a com­ment there.

I can't re­ply at the site be­cause:

• It re­quires lo­­gin.

• I can't find a place to get an ac­­coun­t.

• It has freak­ing google ads pop­ups

So I re­ply here be­cause:

• Hey, it's my own blog, so I can do what­ev­er I wan­t.

Here's the com­ment by hus­sam with my (ad­mit­ted­ly ranty) re­spon­se:

I've been us­ing Arch­Lin­ux as my on­ly dis­tri­bu­tion/­op­er­at­ing sys­tem since ear­ly 2006. It is re­al­ly a good dis­tri­bu­tion but late­ly there have been a lot of re­al­ly bad choic­es which I call bad com­pro­mis­es:

1. Too many Arch­Lin­ux users think gnome/kde are bloat and in­stead in­stall some half de­vel­oped win­dow man­ag­er and some ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor and call it a "min­i­mal­ist" desk­top.

Why is that any of your busi­ness? And what "com­pro­mise" is there?

2. Op­tion­al de­pen­den­cies are the worst idea ev­er. If a pack­age is linked against lib­some­thing.­so then lib­some­thing should be a de­pen­den­cy not an op­tion­al de­pen­den­cy. Mak­ing lib­some­thing an op­tion­al de­pen­den­cy just be­cause "min­i­mal­ist" users don't want to in­stall de­pen­den­cies is plain stupid.

That's not what op­tion­al de­pen­den­cies are for. For ex­am­ple, con­sid­er the ex­am­ple I men­tioned, rst2pdf. It can use python­mag­ick. It can al­so not use it. You will lose one small fea­ture that AFAIK on­ly one per­son ev­er used. If you need that fea­ture, the man­u­al tells you what to do: in­stall python­mag­ick.

Maybe there should be a pac­man op­tion "in­stall opt­de­pend­s" which turns op­tion­al de­pen­den­cies in­to reg­u­lar ones. That would make you hap­py and keep oth­ers hap­py too.

3. Bad lead­er­ship. Aaron is fan­tas­tic guy but I know at least two Arch­Lin­ux de­vel­op­ers who can do a much bet­ter job.

That's just stupid and mean.

4. Too many Arch­Lin­ux users now like bad­ly au­to­ma­tion scripts like yaourt or what­ev­er it is called.

Parse er­ror. And then again: yaourt is great. You don't like it? Act as if it does­n't ex­ist and be hap­py. You seem to have a big prob­lem ig­nor­ing peo­ple who dis­agree with you. That's a re­al­ly, re­al­ly se­ri­ous per­son­al flaw. I sug­gest you grow up.

5. Too many noobs who do dumb things like peo­ple adding their users to hal, disk and dbus group­s.

Sure, they should add them­selves to op­ti­cal and stor­age. So what? It's a sim­ple prob­lem and it has a sim­ple so­lu­tion.

Then again, the ad­dus­er scripts prob­a­bly should do that for reg­u­lar us­er ac­counts. Af­ter al­l, who wants to cre­ate a reg­u­lar us­er that can't use re­mov­able stor­age? And if said use case ex­ist­s, that should be doable by re­mov­ing the user, and not vicev­er­sa!

On the oth­er hand, I don't give a damn, be­cause I can fix it triv­ial­ly.

The main rea­son why I don't think I will switch to an­oth­er dis­tri­bu­tion soon is that cre­at­ing Arch­lin­ux pack­ages from scratch is very easy and the initscript sys­tem is re­al­ly fan­tas­tic.

All in al­l, Arch­Lin­ux is a re­al­ly strong dis­tri­bu­tion now and it's con­stant­ly grow­ing.

I ex­pect you, like most elit­ist poseurs, will run away when you feel Arch is too pop­u­lar and ac­ces­si­ble to "too many noob­s" or some sim­i­lar non­sense.

Which, like the ti­tle says, is why you are a big part of what's wrong with Lin­ux user­s.