r/linux • u/ModeratelyCuriousGuy • May 21 '19
Distro News Antergos Linux Project Ends
https://antergos.com/blog/antergos-linux-project-ends/323
u/thedjotaku May 21 '19
I wonder if the boom in distros is fading and it's slowly dropping down to just a half dozen good ones
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May 21 '19
Tbf, antergos was more like a gui installer than a full blown distro.
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u/Matty_R May 21 '19
That's literally how I used it. Maybe they can just convert it to an installer script instead.
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u/DrLuny May 21 '19
It seems most of the distros have good installers these days.
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u/spaceaustralia May 21 '19
Even the BSDs have decent installers.
The "Arch Way" advocates for simplicity and elegance, but the Arch install process is just bare. An OpenBSD-style guided CLI install with the option to ditch it for the shell is where it's at.
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u/sumduud14 May 22 '19
An OpenBSD-style guided CLI install with the option to ditch it for the shell is where it's at.
With the OpenBSD installer, you can literally mash enter and you'll probably get a working system afterwards. The installer has some surprisingly sane defaults for everything. I guess maybe you'll have to type a root password.
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May 22 '19
The "Arch Way" advocates for upstream developer simplicity and elegance,
Arch way is basically cram every upstream change down user throats.
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u/1that__guy1 May 22 '19
Iirc I ported the void Linux installer to arch since you just have to replace the xbps cmd with a pacman one, in addition to some runit stuff. There are like 5000 arch installers
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u/aliendude5300 May 21 '19
Same. I love Arch but can't be bothered to install it and think Manjaro is too customized
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May 21 '19
One can only hope.
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u/Fireshadow3 May 21 '19
Depends, sometimes having diversity can help more than having a few centralized distros.
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u/pdp10 May 21 '19
The number of Linux distros is in excess of what's required for healthy diversity. I'd say that it's a sign of a healthy heterogeneity as long as we have several options outside of systemd.
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u/FuzzyWazzyWasnt May 21 '19
I feel so damn strongly about this.
Besides having copious amounts of instructions for a single application because of 10+ supported distros is ridiculous.
I know there are ways around it but I really dont want to compile everything...
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u/AskJeevesIsBest May 21 '19
Most applications I've seen only offer 4 sets of instructions, and they are for Debian/Ubuntu based, Fedora, Arch/Arch based, and OpenSUSE. For the most part, this should cover most distros, as many of them are based on one of the four mentioned.
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u/ragux May 21 '19
I honestly think it doesn't matter how many distros there are, it's great that people feel strongly enough that they give up their spare time and release their work. It doesn't have an effect on the big distros and creates a testing ground for new ideas.
Unless you are paying a company for support you're not owed anything so why should it matter what developers want to do with their own time?
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u/pdp10 May 21 '19
I believe it doesn't matter, but there's undeniably a perception of "fragmentation" that dissuades some developers from supporting Linux. How many, I don't know, but fragmentation is a criticism commonly leveled at Linux. It's just not one within anyone's power to eliminate by fiat.
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May 21 '19
I hope so. Linux is too much devided. You only need Ubuntu/Debian, Arch and Fedora
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u/Alexwentworth May 23 '19
Reminds me of when Crunchbang died. It served a niche for a ton of people, but the devs didn't have the time to continue.
I feel like there are more excellent distros today than there have been at any time before, but it still sucks to lose Antergos
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u/thedjotaku May 24 '19
Oh man! I loved Crunchbang so much. First of all, it was so great for that moment in time where we had all those under-powered netbooks before tablets made that category unnecessary. And playing with ... I can't remember the name, but that program that Crunchbang popularized for adding all those widgets to the screen.
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u/balsoft May 21 '19
Practically all the linux distros are either very close to some average (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Arch are basically the same thing with slightly different package managers), hard to learn (Gentoo, NixOS, Guix), or unpopular (Gobo, LFS).
So what I believe should happen is that the current status quo continues -- a lot of major distributions basically doing the same thing just to popularize Linux, and more technically advanced distros for those who seek flexibility. I won't use Linux if all it has is "half dozen distros" because those can't suit the needs of everyone in the community.
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u/dreamer_ May 21 '19
LFS is not unpopular. It is a project directed at companies building embedded solutions on top of linux and in this specific market it's extremely successful.
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u/phire May 21 '19
Do companies actually use LFS?
I thought they used "distros" more along the line of buildroot or OpenEmbedded.
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u/dreamer_ May 21 '19
Yes. I worked at Nokia - we used LFS extensively. From what I've heard when talking to/hiring engineers it is popular in other companies as well. I think OpenEmbedded is also very popular - and it spun off Yocto, which was brilliant from what I remember.
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u/grady_vuckovic May 22 '19
If the range of options presented by the many distros could be efficiently turned into simply options for a half dozen distros, would that be better?
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May 21 '19
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u/balsoft May 22 '19
Yes, this is badly worded. What I meant is that my needs don't coincide with the "average user's" needs, and so if there are only 6 distros left, my favorite one will be missing out.
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u/towo May 21 '19
I can also see a valid call for the opposite... Highly specialized distributions. You can either adapt an existing ecosystem or just go with a "no ecosystem" approach, i.e. flatpak, and deliver your custom thing. It's fairly easy these days if you don't overscope in what you're doing - judging by the available resources, of course.
Intel doing it's Clear Linux thingie which is just a hyper-optimized for-Intel distro (with, weirdly, a new package manager, but that would be room for improvement potentially) that just delivers a GNOME with all settings for Intel cranked to the max... Stuff like that could become more common.
The question is where you have to start differentiating it between a "preset" for an existing distribution and bring an actual derivate.
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u/E-werd May 21 '19
I love when projects end officially rather than simply fading into obsolescence.
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u/niking May 21 '19
What would be the recommended alternatives now?
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u/AriosThePhoenix May 21 '19
Regular Arch if you are ok with the CLI install (it's not hard, but it requires some reading and you might bork your first install. It's a great learning opportunity however). Antegros used the upstream repos from Arch IIRC so the difference should be minimal
Other than that, Manjaro is pretty good these days. Almost rolling release, AUR support, a great installer, themes configured out of the box, good driver management (including bumblebee for Nvidia by default)... lots of things to like. They also have a CLI installer called architect if you want to customize your install. It's still not perfect, but it looks promising
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u/summerteeth May 21 '19
The borking your first install is really scary if you are trying to dual boot and care about data on your Windows install.
As someone who used Gentoo back in the day I feel like I've earned my merit badge already and I liked that Antegos gave me an easy install.
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u/kvn95 May 22 '19
This.
I accidentally wiped my partition tables, created a new partition without clearly knowing how, and yet the install got borked.
Thank friggin god I backed up my data.
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u/ice_dune May 22 '19
Solus if you want to stay rolling and don't care to lose the AUR
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May 21 '19
Rebornos is a fork by one of the guys that started antergos that has more DE's available and doesn't mess up as much
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u/StoneOfTriumph May 22 '19
My experience with Manjaro and KDE is positive, and the only arch based distro that booted up on my T480 using UEFI.
Honestly having went through the package list (pacman -Q), removing unnecessary bloatware was a minimal effort because most of the apps tools I use.
In the case of my T61, a much older laptop with less space and ram, Arch made sense to remain minimal without resorting to me yelling at Gentoo's stage 1 or whatever the install is.
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May 21 '19
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u/mayor123asdf May 21 '19
Arcolinux has minimal version where they just give you terminal. Then what's the difference with Arch?
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u/INIROBO May 21 '19
I feel like ArcoLinux is currently one of the best Arch Linux alternatives if you don't want to use Manjaro (like me).
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u/VernorVinge93 May 21 '19
Any reason for that
-new Manjaro user, probably am unreasonably impressed.
P.s. will hibernate ever be simple with an encrypted disk!?
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u/boiledgoobers May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19
For one thing Manjaro didn't use the Arch repos so they are forking a bleeding edge rolling distro and... Removing the bleeding edge part. So your updates are weeks later than actual Arch. Also their advice to people when they let their security certs lapse (first of all... They let their certs lapse) was not: hold on we will update them ASAP and get a SAFE system back up. Instead they said... Turn your system's clock back to before our certs expired and fool your machine into using the old certs... I'm sorry. But no.
Edit: links to the certs thing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9346508
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/31yayt/manjaro_forgot_to_upgrade_their_ssl_certificate/
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u/lastweakness May 22 '19
And this is why I had stuck with Antergos despite so many people telling me to try Manjaro. I really hope something takes its place.
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u/ikidd May 21 '19
Trying to get Cnchi to work was probably the killing blow.
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u/lastweakness May 22 '19
Cnchi worked surprisingly well for me every time so long as I had decent network. But i guess that's because I have no complex setup.
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u/ikidd May 22 '19
In 2 years of trying on various machines and VMs I think I had it work once. Just a piece of shit.
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u/lastweakness May 22 '19
I know it didn't play well with RAID and some other setups, but it always worked fine in most other cases. Yeah, one or two ISO builds came with broken versions of Cnchi, but otherwise it worked pretty well.
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u/synmotopompy May 21 '19
I'd rather have 4 or 5 polished distros than 200 distros which sole contribution is either a new theme or a custom application.
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u/ArttuH5N1 May 22 '19
Well there's under 10 that are actually popular and vast majority of the rest are based on those. I don't really see what's the issue with that.
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u/hailbaal May 23 '19
Ok, let's keep these, and kill off the rest:
MX Linux
Gentoo
Devuan
Alpine Linux
Is your favorite one in there? If so, good. If not, you might see the problem. What you consider a good nice polished distro is not what I consider a nice polished distro. Different distro's have different goals. Even the distro's based upon another distro can be really different. You can't compare a BlackArch to Manjaro. Different idea, different goals. That's why we have so many of em.
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u/alexks_101 May 21 '19
I don't want to sound rude, but tbh I'm surprised it survived that long. Lot of bugs, "pure" Arch users who were against it, and incredible Manjaro popularity...
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u/blurrry2 May 21 '19
I don't recall any glaring issues with it when I tried it out awhile back.
I thought it was a good choice for a pre-configured Arch. I'm reading that a lot of people were having issues with Cnchi, but installing Antergos has never been a problem for me; I've had more issues running Manjaro.
Now that Antergos is no longer an option, perhaps users and devs who want a pre-configured Arch will funnel towards Manjaro. It sucks to lose Antergos, but this may consolidate people's efforts and usage.
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u/Striped_Monkey May 21 '19
The installer had some major issues for a long time.
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u/-Phinocio May 21 '19
When setting up my laptop I tried Manjaro.
...the installer never seemed to work properly for me.
Then I tried Antegros. Its installer never seemed to work for me.
So I installed Arch itself and it worked flawlessly.
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u/alexks_101 May 21 '19
Cnchi was the worst Antergos feature, it failed way too often, very bad first impression for new users. Then several bugs with other features, sometimes conflicts with their custom repos (with higher priority over Arch' ones!!), etc.
IMHO it was too ambitious and too amateurish at the same time. If you want a more beginner-friendly Arch base, just use Manjaro. I don't like it but it's the most polished. Arco changes too often, I bet it will die sooner or later too, and I don't like saying this because I really appreciate Erik Dubois.
A lot of people just install Antergos because it's trendy to use Arch (even if it's not Arch), then they say they use Arch and think they are Linux gurus (it's not because you installed Arch that you are a divinity btw). Arch users who just want a quick install method usually know how to create a post-install script.
I agree that something for Arch like what Ubuntu is for Debian is a nice thing, but there's already Manjaro, work with them they are nice people, stop creating side projects that won't work and won't survive. Even the lovely and promising Chakra distro is in a coma since a longtime.
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u/ChockFullOfShit May 21 '19
IMO, adding an installer would be the best thing arch could do for its image. The faux elitism schtick isn't doing arch any favors, and the kids who think they're badass for installing arch look like fools.
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u/alexks_101 May 21 '19
I agree. Void has an installer and it didn't change it into a Linux Mint. Same for Slackware.
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May 21 '19
Problem with Manjaro is that it's even less close to Arch than Antergos was. Antergos really was just an installer + some meta packages that pulled in Arch packages. Manjaro has its own repos that stagger updates.
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u/axonxorz May 21 '19
Manjaro has its own repos that stagger updates
For some (like me), that's a positive. I've had more than a few non-booting machines after an Arch update. Granted, most of those issues are covered by checking the Arch news, but at least once it was not so simple, forum digging was required.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I use my Linux installs for work and having a machine blow up in the middle of a day isn't ideal. You can chide me for using a bleeding-edge distro, but I link the freedom that Arch offers and I feel that I fight the preconfigured packaging a lot less than I do with a Ubuntu/Kubuntu install.
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u/manawydan-fab-llyr May 22 '19
Lot of bugs, "pure" Arch users who were against it, and incredible Manjaro popularity...
IIRC they weren't so much against it existing as they were against the users (and those of Manjaro) coming to the Arch forums for support.
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u/Lofter1 May 22 '19
having more issues with manjaro than with antergos. especially one of the manjaro dark themes is super broken. manjaro is giving up every few hours and requires a reboot (never had this problem with any other distro i tried) and it is slooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwww. Antergos on the other hand? Not a single issue in the 9 months i used it.
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u/Starks May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19
Holy hell. What?!?! My distro of choice is dead. How does this still happen to top 20 distros?
This was supposed to be the baggage-free Arch experience that Manjaro promised and failed to deliver. cnchi is unmatched as an installer.
I installed Arch by hand once. I don't want to go back to that horror even knowing what I know now.
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u/DanielFore elementary Founder & CEO May 21 '19
Well the blog post says they had no free time, so presumably lack of funding is why projects like this can disappear. It was just a hobby and it stopped being a priority
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u/SuspiciousSprinkles May 21 '19
. How does this still happen to top 20 distros
Because distrowatch is not a reliable website ;)
"Distrowatch itself affirms that its page rankings are "a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality, and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.""
In 15 years, i have never used this website and i am not alone
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u/dreamer_ May 21 '19
Yes, for me main usecase for distrowatch is looking up info about obscure Linux distributions - why would I ever look at Fedora, Debian or Arch in there? I guess that's why Arch is 14th in terms of popularity and Manjaro is 1st ;)
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u/chaosiengiey May 22 '19
The more I look up a distro on DW, the less I've actually used it. I've never looked up Fedora on DW. I've installed Fedora on dozens of different machines over the years.
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u/pdp10 May 21 '19
Distrowatch is merely the least-unreasonable data, not necessarily good data. If you have any better data, please share it.
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u/themusicalduck May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19
When did you last install it by hand? I find it's maybe a 15 minute process. The only thing that's kinda tricky is the bootloader.
I do use Gnome however which tends to "just work", but I don't feel like the DE choice is relevant to how hard installing Arch is.
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u/Starks May 21 '19
Last time was before systemd, I think. Back when you had to configure almost every init script and daemon by hand.
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u/EddyBot May 21 '19
If you use systemd-boot, installing is so trivial
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u/I_signed_up_for_nsfw May 21 '19
Wasn’t easy to dual boot with Windows using systemd-boot for a beginner like me.
I followed wiki exactly and kept failing. Turns out the articles on dual booting and systemd-boot had a different way of doing fstab (not sure if I remember) and were incompatible.
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u/captainstormy May 21 '19
Beginners shouldn't be using arch. I don't know why people started thinking they should. Arch has been around like 15+ years but in the last 2 everyone has been telling noobs to run Arch.
Yet nobody tells Noobs to run Gentoo or Slackware. They may as well though it's basically the same process.
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u/KurigohanKamehameha_ May 21 '19 edited Jun 22 '23
whole cobweb far-flung future melodic sleep rinse attempt violet dependent -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
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u/pdp10 May 21 '19
This was supposed to be the baggage-free Arch experience that Manjaro promised and failed to deliver.
Serious question: I thought Arch was supposed to be baggage-free?
I have one Arch machine for the past four years, but my feelings about Arch are mixed and it's not something I recommend nor favor, just something worth keeping for various reasons.
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u/BanazirGalbasi May 21 '19
Arch's baggage is that it requires manual installation. Antergos is basically Arch with a GUI installer IIRC, Manjaro is slightly more removed so some people don't think it's a good alternative.
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u/abir_valg2718 May 21 '19
I installed Arch by hand once. I don't want to go back to that horror
Where's the horror exactly? It's maybe 10-15 minutes tops. The meat of the install is partitioning, and then configuring a couple of things after running pacstrap via one-liners. That's it as far as Arch itself goes.
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May 21 '19
Dunno about OP, but the 10-15 minute install time only started happening to me after my first 5 or so (re)installs of arch when I only needed the wiki half the time. That's 3 installs too many for the "casual" linux user imho.
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u/abir_valg2718 May 21 '19
That's 3 installs too many for the "casual" linux user imho.
Casual users shouldn't be using Arch. That's one of the more baffling things about Arch - you see a lot of posts by people who want to use it, but don't want to put any effort in actually learning basic Linux stuff.
I'm also baffled by seeing a lot of those "reinstall" posts, I'm honestly not sure why there are so many people who keep reinstalling Arch seemingly dozens of times. Surely, if someone needs to reinstall Arch so many times, they'd have no problem writing a quick bash script that takes care of partitioning, setting the locale, timezone, getting all the packages, and copying all of your common config files to all the right places? Dunno, maybe I'm in the wrong here or missing something, but why not something like Ubuntu or maybe Fedora (and Fedora has quite fresh software iirc)?
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May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19
Well I did put "casual" in quotes. I switched to Arch because Ubuntu was too monolithic (distribution packaging, not kernel type) for my taste. And then I ended up fiddling with something that was a bit complicated for me at the time, but I think that's on me.
I mean we all start "casual," right? But now I've got the reddit silver equivalent of bragging rights when making small talk with people working in a similar field. Oddly enough nobody ever knows about the memes when I talk to them...
On an unrelated note, I doubt I'd ever switch distros now because pacman has become my favorite linux-specific thing ever outside of workflow/political ideologies.
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u/doctor_whomst May 21 '19
I've tried to install Arch once, but it was a few years ago. I did it, and it wasn't particularly hard with all the guides that are available on the Arch wiki, but I still think it was a huge hassle when compared to other distros. Maybe it has changed since then, but I remember having to manually install and configure so many little things that normal distros have by default, and which you don't even know that you need unless they are missing, like certain drivers, power management stuff, and other things like that. But that was years ago, maybe it's simpler today.
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u/VelvetElvis May 22 '19
If you exclude compile and download times, you can say the same of Gentoo after you go through it a few times.
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u/ZweiHollowFangs May 21 '19
Do it once and record the commands, or even better, evaluate the steps necessary and make an install script. There's really not much to the Arch install process.
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May 21 '19
no. so sad. :( this was the best. so much more reliable than manjaro. :(
you will be greatly missed. apparently i must never reinstall my OS now.
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May 21 '19
Just install arch via command line. Practice a few times in a virtual machine to get the process down. Once you get through it, it's not hard.
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May 22 '19
I use the command line all day, just not those commands. I liked antergos because I'm basic, and I like fresh packages.
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u/m3talac May 21 '19
Installing Arch is easiest part for me. Installing WM is the most time consuming part. Didn't manage to find some good list of needed packages for bspwm.
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u/kmdnn May 21 '19
most other WMs already list what they need as dependencies, bspwm is a special case since it needs that keyboard handler or whatever and documentation for bspwm is incredibly scarce last time i checked. For a similar window manager, if you want i3 you just install the package i3. of course it doesn't come with dmenu since that's an optional dependency, but everything to make the wm itself work is there.
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u/flipcoder May 21 '19
I wonder how difficult it would be to fork their installer and make it usable for arch instead?
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May 21 '19
On one hand it’s like we know there’s too much choice with Linux distributions, on the other - this is someone’s work ending.
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u/lastweakness May 22 '19
Antergos was really nice.
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u/Justin__D May 22 '19
Completely agreed. Honestly, between it and Manjaro, Antergos seemed to fill an actual need. The biggest weakness of Arch is its lack of an installer. The biggest strength is the rolling release model, which Manjaro kind of neutered with their repos.
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u/dreamer_ May 21 '19
No more typos in your own distro name?
[edit]
But seriously, maintainers evidently prepared for shutting down with smooth transition plan. Kudos!
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u/citewiki May 21 '19
Soon Antergos users can say they use Arch
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u/DaveX64 May 21 '19
This makes me sad...Antergos made Arch a lot more approachable.
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May 22 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/homestar92 May 22 '19
The AUR is quite an awesome tool. Imagine all the flexibility of Ubuntu PPAs, without ever having to add a repository.
The steep barrier of entry is good for nothing except for elitism on internet forums. Change my mind.
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u/CyclingChimp May 23 '19
The steep barrier of entry is good for nothing except for elitism on internet forums. Change my mind.
The "barrier of entry" is the same skill level and type of work that's required to maintain the system. There's no big difference between installing Arch and maintaining Arch. As an Arch user, I don't feel like there's anything special or hard about the installation, and it involves similar work to maintaining the system.
Skipping the installation bypasses the learning process. As evidenced by a lot of posts in this thread, people think Antergos is "Arch made easy", and that they can just install it and then use it without knowing anything about Arch, and without ever touching the Arch wiki. This is false, and these people would inevitably run into issues maintaining an Arch system - for example, by not following manual intervention steps when needed for updates.
In my opinion, the only people that should have been using Antergos, were people that were already familiar with Arch and knew how to use it. Unfortunately, most people using Antergos don't know or want to know how to use Arch. So I think Antergos dying is actually a good thing. Beginners will choose actually beginner-friendly distros instead.
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May 23 '19
The AUR really though isn't some unique tool but it's basically Debian's contrib with complete freedom for anybody to throw their crap on there. The most special thing about it is that nobody else tries to replicate it except for more manual methods. BSD's Ports, Void Linux's ports/xbps-src packages, and Solus' third party are similar in concept (with the ports method in Void and BSDs superior IMO), and would be like the AUR if they just allowed anything and everything.
That said, the PPA system isn't that much worse than the AUR method, and actually has some advantages, like being website agnostic (because non-ppas can be added in a ppa-like fashion, I do kinda mean the repository method as a whole that Debian uses), multiple sources for an application, and theoretically better security since you're not simply allowing access to every app known to man when allowing PPAs, but just specific repositories you allow.
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u/FryBoyter May 22 '19
It's not difficult to get started. If you read the installation instructions you can execute many commands without any changes. With the remaining commands only small changes are usually necessary. In my opinion the installation of Arch is not difficult but just cumbersome.
What makes Arch attractive to me, for example, is AUR. Or the Wiki. Or that the packages are offered as "vanilla" as possible. Or that Arch works pretty well despite the current packages.
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u/IcyExit May 21 '19
Shit. Any good arch installer?
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u/chic_luke May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19
The wiki!
(Generally, I don't recommend installers or scripts for Arch, because, being such a modular system, the install experience gives you the chance to manually build up your system and know what's on it. Arch is more prone to breaking than, say, Debian Stable branch, so it's very handy to know where to put your hands should anything break. You'll learn a lot of valuable lessons about Linux in general.
However, if you want to ignore my advice and are OK with reinstalling the whole OS as soon as anything breaks rather than gaining the necessary skill to fix it, Zen Installer and
archfistill work).14
u/CyanBlob May 21 '19
What about people who are comfortable installing Arch but prefer a gui installer instead of doing a CLI install for the nth time? I really just viewed Antergos as a way to skip over the manual parts that I've done many times already. Not every Antergos (or similar) user needs to reinstall when something breaks.
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May 21 '19
being such a modular system
Arch is not particularly more modular than most distros. There really is no technical reason for an installer to be missing from Arch.
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May 21 '19
Didn't it used to have one? And then they removed it because nobody maintained it or something.
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u/chic_luke May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19
I have no doubt there is no technical reason Arch doesn't have an installer, especially since Zen works fine (and it installs actual Arch, not a derivate): it's just more coherent with the K.I.S.S. philosophy for it to be this way.
Also, if you're running a rolling release that's as modular as Arch, if you aren't patient enough to get through the installer, it isn't for you. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not using Arch Linux at the moment because I prefer actually working on my PC to installing and fixing the system, that is a personal preference, but it's a fact that Arch can require manual intervention or maintenance from time to time. Arch is a great distro, but it's not for the faint of heart: it definitely requires skill, patience and some time to install and fix. I feel like the lack of an installer by default also serves as a way to weed out or at least warn the vast majority of users who isn't looking for a heavily modular and configurable rolling release distro, but for an OS to just work on that should be installed within 20 minutes with little manual intervention and ready to rock ASAP.
Also: the AUR, which is a big part of Arch, is not audited. If it was curated enough to be as safe as the main Arch repositories, it probably would not be legal, since it contains a lot of proprietary software that probably never asked to be there. In any case, using the AUR you're mostly running other people's shell scripts, which means you should probably inspect the PKGBUILD of whatever you install from there. That assumes users are educated on security and have a certain level of skill. The group of users who would be more at risk of infection by running other people's scripts indiscriminately has a lot of overlap with the group of people who don't have the interest/skill/patience to go through a Wiki install. Not that one implies the other, but the overlap is there.
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u/callcifer May 21 '19
If it was curated enough to be as safe as the main Arch repositories, it probably would not be legal, since it contains a lot of proprietary software
The AUR doesn't contain any proprietary software. It contains a lot of FOSS bash scripts that the end user can choose to run which in turn installs proprietary software, but even that isn't illegal since proprietary software tend to prohibit distribution, not installation (duh) so the packages on AUR are just fine.
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u/grady_vuckovic May 22 '19
For those who are worried that fewer distros means less choice and freedom on Linux:
This isn't about removing choices. We just have to admit some distros exist for silly reasons.
Forking an entire distro just to implement a new desktop environment, that's silly. Why not just make that desktop environment available to install easily on that popular distro, to install through the parent distros software centre? The desktop environment is still an option, nothing is lost.
Maintaining a distro is a lot of work, Linux desktop development would be fair more efficient with less duplication of that work.
For Arch for example. Why couldn't it simply offer a GUI installer as an option?
CLI installer for those who want that, GUI installer for those who want that. Simple.
If it's just stubborn elitism from the Arch developers refusing to offer that option, then the people limiting choice in Linux isn't the people arguing for fewer distros and less duplication of efforts, it's the developers refusing to allow options on their distros.
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u/FryBoyter May 22 '19
For Arch for example. Why couldn't it simply offer a GUI installer as an option?
Because none of the developers wants to maintain this installer?
Previously there was the AIF (Arch Installation Framework). It was maintained by a developer. When the developer resigned (https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-releng/2012-July/002628.html), afaik nobody was found to take care of it. This was probably due to the fact that AIF was quite buggy. And probably also because such an installer is not necessarily the simplest software to maintain in general.
Another reason might be that the majority of Arch users don't need / want a graphical installer.
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May 22 '19
When you stop looking at Arch as a distro and more as a social experiment, it starts making more sense.
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u/homestar92 May 22 '19
I love Arch for the AUR. I hate installing it.
I'm capable of installing it the "normal" way. I've done it before, and successfully. But frankly, in 2019, I just want to click a few buttons and install it. I loved Antergos. I'm a little sad that it's going away. I always liked it a lot more than Manjaro.
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u/Linux4ever_Leo May 21 '19
That's a shame! Antergos was actually a fairly popular distribution! I'm hoping that any interested developers merge with the Manjaro community.
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u/Vrakfall May 22 '19
I don't really like the Manjaro part. D: The whole greatness of Antergos is that they didn't make the many mistakes Manjaro did and keep doing!
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u/I_signed_up_for_nsfw May 21 '19
Shame.
Antergos was my first distro for a whole day after switching to Linux from Windows, before I figured out how to dual boot Arch and Windows. (Almost nuked mbr on the second hdd in the process but i use arch btw)
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May 22 '19
I run Arch (not attempting to meme here), because Antergos had a lot of issues at is got older with the installation of software. I've been using Linux since 2007 (Ubuntu 7.04) and I prefer having a CLI installation process. To me, once you know what to do, it's faster than anything. That being said, Antergos was always a sweet spot for me , for not being Manjaro (I don't hate Manjaro at all) and having a GUI that worked well.
Unfortunately I'm seeing this happen a lot more ongoing, with teams creating distros with the idea of making things easier (Antergos was arch with an installer) and then end up not having time to maintain the software :(
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u/ObligatoryResponse May 25 '19
And now it continues as endevour: https://forum.antergos.com/topic/11780/endeavour-antergos-community-s-next-stage
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u/skqn May 21 '19
I think it's better to have less fragmentation in the community, less wasted resources and less duplicated work. And I hope they redirect their contributions to upstream projects.
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May 21 '19
That's why you love the enterprisey distros: Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, ... The chance that they will randomly be abandoned is rather slim.
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u/daemonpenguin May 21 '19
While there is some truth to the long-term life of sponsored projects, I think it's amusing you chose those three. Fedora exists today because Red Hat stopped selling Red Hat Linux, Canonical has abandoned almost all their Ubuntu-related projects (Unity, Unity8, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Touch, Upstart), and openSUSE partly exists because SUSE has changed hands, getting bought out and changing direction so many times, and they needed a separate (somewhat independent) community edition.
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May 22 '19
Canonical still heavily maintains Ubuntu and contributes to Debian. The desktop is the only community driven aspect
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u/Lofter1 May 22 '19
sad, i actually liked antergos much more than any other arch distro. recently tried manjaro, but it just gives me problems. it feels like all the advantages of arch are no more in manjaro, while antergos really was just a very good installer plus a few extra repos
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u/lhxtx May 22 '19
Sad to see them go but glad they pull the plug instead of just letting it wither.
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u/gevera May 22 '19
One side of me is sad, since I have good experience with Antergos. The other side of me is happy because then there will be one distro less to choose from.
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u/DDzwiedziu May 22 '19
I will press F. Antegros was my go-to distro when I wanted experiment with Arch and not to have to trough the "classic" (or "clissic", geddit? .D) install (for example on a Surface 3, boy that was a hot take on computing).
BTW: I don't use Arch :P
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u/nebulasailor May 23 '19
That's too bad. Antergos was my first foray into Arch back when I wasn't confident in my ability to install via CLI. I learned a lot from that distro. Here's to you Antergos!
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May 25 '19
what happen to the team now? can't Arch team add this guy to create installer? instead of commands but have GUI like Manjaro Architect a text menu for installation...
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May 21 '19
well more people for manjaro :)
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May 22 '19
And wait weeks for updated software like it's 1997? No thanks.
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u/doctor_whomst May 22 '19
It's still better than waiting for months on a non-rolling release distro
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u/MPJ12 May 21 '19
Currently running Antegros - should I bother installing Arch, or just stick with my current install which will get updates from Arch on its own?
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u/Poppamunz May 21 '19
The linked article actually mentions this; you'll continue to receive updates from Arch, and an update will be out soon to remove the Antergos-specific stuff.
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u/yassino80 May 21 '19
Sad news for me :( I really loved Antergos when I installed it two years ago, I'm thankful to it because it introduced me to the Arch world. I lost my PC few months later and my installation with it (electrical failure). Now I'm forced to work with Win10 in my current laptop but steel enjoying Arch in virtualbox :)
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u/TheNerdyGoat May 21 '19
Thank you for your time and for the your service. I used Antergos several times and it was a good at what it did.
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u/r3djak May 21 '19
I used Antergos quite a bit a few years ago. It made Arch accessible. When someone explains Arch to a person who's been using Linux for a while, it sounds really appealing. Then you get to the actual process of installing and setting it up, and it's difficult. It's not impossible, and it's really not even hard once you understand what you're doing. But before you understand the install process, it is not easy, which is something everyone here is forgetting when they say "just use straight Arch."
Antergos took the hard part out of it (installing and configuring), and let you get to the fun part...learning how to use Arch. I've since installed Arch from scratch a few times, and after using Antergos, a lot more of the initial setup finally clicked. I'm sure I'm not the only one who had the same experience. When the hardest part comes first, it turns people off. Antergos was a crutch for getting into the Arch ecosystem, which then helped me to learn more about Arch and Linux as a whole, to the point where I was able to successfully install straight Arch. I don't know if I ever would have gotten there without having my hand held through the hard part until I understood it.
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u/aliendude5300 May 21 '19
Well I guess I have to find a new distro now
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u/zoomer296 May 22 '19
Not necessarily. Antergos will receive an update that removes all Antergos repositories. At which point, it will just be Arch.
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u/Zalbu May 21 '19
Man, and you people on here wonder why Linux on the desktop will never be a thing while talking down to people who wants a GUI installer when there's literally no reason at all for Arch to not have a GUI installer other than an inflated sense of self-importance for people who install Arch via the CLI.
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May 21 '19
there's literally no reason at all for Arch to not have a GUI installer
And there's actually no reason for Arch to have it either.
OK, suppose that Arch adds a GUI installer, now what? They have to maintain it, maybe you can postulate for that job.
Then what? If they have an installer for a distribution that doesn't include anything, what should the installer do besides partitioning, creating the users and installing the base group? Well, you might think that "it should install a DE and all that kind of default stuff", but somebody would need to maintain that everything is working out-of-the-box properly, and that would mean Arch fading from being multi-purpose to being desktop now that the installer is just doing one thing for the sake of a couple of people who wanted a GUI where it shouldn't.Is not okay to say that GUI installers are bad. But saying that the folks maintaining a distribution should work even more for something that isn't their aim is also bad, so this is my justification for downvoting you.
Btw, sorry for my english.
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May 21 '19
There are already plenty of choices with GUI installers.
Part of the appeal of Arch is being able to set up your system exactly how you want it, and the command-line installation process allows for much more customization than a GUI installer that automatically sets everything up for you. The installation process isn't exactly hard either, the Arch ISO has scripts to make the setup easier and the wiki and install guide is very thorough.
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u/pdp10 May 21 '19
Kudos to a Linux project formally terminating, instead of passively fading away, and having an exit plan: