Thread: Migrating from Arch Linux to... what?

Hello everyone!

I'm struggling with, lets say, tactical decision, which is key to the future of my beloved desktop computer...

I've been using Arch for the last year and a half, and it was really, really great experience; unfortunately, bleedin' edge nature of this awesome distribution makes it very liable for entropy. As the time progresses, it gets weirder and weirder: Strange errors appear, fonts are changing into some hellish bushes after every midnight, performance is dropping, xterm's are flooded with tens of thousands of lines with warnings about who-knows-what... [even google is completely GREEN about what is going on... ]

Ehh... I can remember how beautiful it was just a few months ago...

Kernel with BFS and CK patches was QUICK. I haven't been waiting for any desktop application to launch AT ALL!
Firefox in one quarter of a second... Damn... And all this on a machine with seven years of livin' on its back...
Powerpill and aurget installed apps in a matter of seconds. I could have everything I wanted, when I wanted... Now, after just a few months without an update, hell of dependencies got me, and it got me hard... I cant even launch virtualbox without some planning ahead...

Custom NVidia drivers and fine WINE allowed me to play my favourite games in high resolution, with extra details, which was IMPOSSIBRU on win32.

RAID0 conf was easy to achieve, and it works SUPERB... But who knows what might happen with all those strange things that has been going on lately?

I'm affraid about my data, which I've been garnering for almost two years now. So, I need to migrate. But where?

Somewhere, where things dont change too fast, that's for sure... Somewhere, where I could reboot system safely after updating it to a new version... To the land, where things will work as fast as on Arch...

It would be good if my configs were compatible with stuff used on new system, but I guess it shouldn't be the problem; I mean *rc files, those in ~/, not /etc

I've been thinking about Debian, but it's UNSTABLE [ yep, it IS! ] And I'm talking squeeze. It just hates my laptop, even uname throws an exception. [true story! ]

I dont know any Linux distro that would give me features like Arch and would have unix-like updates policy... Binary backward compatibility, extreme stability, that kind of things...

Where should I go?

Where?...

I'm using Debian Linux 6.x stable on my Dell m6500 laptop with NVIDIA drivers. Stable as a rock. I never had any problems or lost any data. My hard disk did crashed twice. It was replaced by Dell. I make daily backups. However, you will not get cutting edge features with Debian 6.x.

Another recommended option is Mint Linux.

Thanks for a reply!

I'm glad that You're happy with Debian. I've used it myself for a long time, but, as You had said, one has to forget about cutting edge software tech...


Unfortunately, Mint is way too heavy for me. I appreciate simplicity and minimalism.

Hmm... Maybe one of FreeBSD flavours would meet my needs... But, on the other hand, I've heard that *BSD on desktop is a sucide mission. Has anyone an opinion on that matter?

Yes, FreeBSD seems like a good choice. But, many Linux features such as flash may not work at all. So yes it is a suicide mission :P

Personally, I use Fedora. Good software. Any thoughts on Ubuntu LTS? See some answers Mark Shuttleworth Answers Your Questions - Slashdot

I also moved from Arch Linux about three months ago. I tried several other distros. At the end, I had two favorites, Sabayon Linux (Gentoo based) and Siduction Linux (Debian sid based). I probably liked Sabayon the most except for one thing; everything seemed sluggish. So, I migrated everything to Siduction and I am very happy with it. It is very advanced, e.g., it currently uses the 3.6.10 kernel and I expect it to get the 3.7 kernel any day now.

Tim