Article: Arch Linux (Shallow Thoughts)

Article: Arch Linux

My latest article on Linux Planet is a review of Arch Linux.

I've been quite favorably impressed with Arch. It's a good, solid, straightforward distro that's very well suited to folks who like to administer their systems via the command-line -- or who want to learn how to do that.

I've been running it on my laptop for a few months, because it has excellent performance, without a lot of the bloatware you see in a lot of other distros, and it boots fast.

The only real problem I've had involves fonts. I see nasty font artifacts -- sometimes subtle, a line or a few pixels missing from certain letters -- but sometimes severe, as in this screenshot or this one. In the article I talk about some solutions I've found that make the problems less bad, but I haven't found any way to make them go away entirely.

Unfortunately, since the font problems are worst inside browsers and I use my laptop for presentations at conferences, this may eventually drive me off Arch. I hope not -- I hope I can find a solution -- because otherwise, Arch has been nothing short of a pleasure.

Tags: writing, linux
[ 20:36 Jan 13, 2011    More writing | permalink to this entry | ]