I am a KDE user. This article is about the experience installing Arch Linux.
Screenshots at the end.

Computers. Theyre in my way. Do I hate them? I don't know. They certainly can make things flow, or not.

Experiencing Gentoo

A few years back I was using gentoo for laptop and servers. I remember I really loved it on the first of my laptops. It was a giant Acer Aspire 17" 4:3 haulable weighing about 7.3 kg with the battery in it. The power adaptor was the size of a VHS cassette. The major design feature on that one was that it used components usually found in stationary computers. A Pentium 4 CPU, standard 3.5" hd, DIMM modules that would fit any stationary at the time. Two big disadvantages was noise and weight. But gentoo worked very well on this computer. It didn't have wireless which meant I didn't have such driver problems. I even played the Call Of Duty 1.0 game on this one using Cedega and had about 50% higher FPS (frame rate) than the same computer had on windows XP. KDE3 filed on this computer and all was fine.
The only thing that didn't work was suspend to disk/ram. But who cared. This wasn't the kind of computer you closed the lid on to take a walk... I even used this to my benefit when going home from work, closed it, took it to the car and it continued compiling on my way home. Compiling. Well, there was a lot of that back then.

The amazing possibilities that come with a source distro like gentoo can also be a drawback. As my use of gentoo grew from one laptop to one laptop and six servers I started losing track of which computer had what environment. Being able to tweak grows to a pain when you feel that you have to but don't want to.

Kubuntu

And then I got a new laptop with wireless and a 1000mbit wired. Dell XPS M170. A high performance laptop. Drivers... At this point I didn'lt like to do a distributions job anymore and searched for a more out of the box working distro. I tried Suse and Kubuntu. No way I was going to use gnome... Here the driver hell started. Composite wouldn't work with the modern nvidia gpu, wireless was difficult to get going and even the wired was a pain to enable. I fell back to gentoo for a couple of times, Kubuntu came out with a new release and I tried it again.

Another laptop. Zepto 6625 WD
And another. Dell Precision M4300.

KDE4

None worked right, but the last one had
As KDE4 came out Kubuntu decides to discontinue support for KDE3, WAAY before KDE4 is stable in their own repository. So This spring I was "forced" to start using KDE4 even though it didn't work too well, since I would be without support for KDE3 as of about now. One of the decisions among KDE4 and Qt4 developers was to push the envelope regarding supported graphics hardware features, even though some drivers (always mine) couldn't handle the features.

What did this leave me with? A fully *non* accelerated desktop with extra nam nam bling bling, constantly lagging the user interface and occasionally messing up the screen. X was taking 10% CPU at minimum and was performing ... I mean not performing.

But somehow I got used to this. I learned what I could do and couldn't, if I wanted to get something done.

KDevelop 4

One of the tools I have been waiting for for years is KDevelop 4. This summer it was finally in a usable state, and to my great joy I could install it from source and get coding. On my crappy install...

Updating KDE from 4.2 to 4.3 in Kubuntu - FAAAAAIL

A few days ago I updated the KDevelop sources and when I ran CMake I got the message that the sources now require KDE 4.3 ... Oops... Alright, just add the 4.3 repository and go apt-get dist-upgrade.

Of course that command failed miserably. It messed up my install and I couldn't get apt to escape the path I had begun walking.

Try "apt-get -F install" .. "it might help". Well it didn't. And I couldn't install any other package I needed either, because ubuntu was stuck in this loop.

Performing a big update in k?ubuntu has NEVER worked for me. ALL the attempts I've made to let the system do this have resulted in a broken system. And I also have a friend who has the same experience.

• reboot. No X. Aaah, love the feeling.

So I was forced to reinstall my system.

• Backup to USB-drive
  
• Download Sabayon ISO (lucky I have another computer)

Sabayon

As I was fed up with that african "humanity towards others" I reluctantly downloaded Sabayon (build upon Gentoo), knowing at least that I am experienced with Gentoo and might get it up in a reasonable time.

I didn't want to have to tweak really. I want "out of the box". But since Kubuntu has always been a notorious screwup for me, I was ready to do a little work myself.

I downloaded a 64 bit Sabayon live-DVD (which wasn't really easy from a usability point of view. Their download page mixes the terms x86, x86-64, amd64 in a way that made me download the 1.86 GB x86 live-DVD first ) and it launched beautifully with all bling working on my gaming computer, which has an i7 and nVidia Geforce GTX 275. *Hey, this is gonna work!*

But it didn't. The live DVD booted fine on the laptop but then the screen went black and the computer was dead. I tried again in safe mode (no nvidia driver). Black screen, but I was able to switch to VC 1 and restart xdm from there. It worked. Now I could install. Just to find out that it behaved exactly the same way after install. I tried to find an older nvidia driver (using the sulfur program, which didn't appeal to me at all) but found log messages like "could not load nvidia kernel module"...

At this point I imagined spending the next hours fighting portage using various package masks like I have done before and was completely discouraged.

I googled for "popular Linux distributions" and found this page:

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

This was found regarding Ubuntu:

• Pros: Fixed release cycle and support period; novice-friendly; wealth of documentation, both official and user-contributed
  
• Cons: Some of Ubuntu's own software (e.g. Rosetta) are proprietary; lacks compatibility with Debian

Eeeeh? Whas that the only negative thing? I mean, I am facing the fact that major updates never work...

So, maybe I shouldn't trust that list.

Arch Linux

Arch Linux is not represented among the top ten distributions at distrowatch. My friend suggested Arch Linux or Chakra, although he has no experience thereof himself. Chakra is based on Arch and has a more mainstream user approach: live CD, graphic installer, specialized KDE, etc.
I went for Arch, since the idea of modding KDE brings late releases and slow bugfixing to mind...

When I made the decision to try Arch, I was expecting lot's of reading, kernel tweaking, module source download, problematic wireless etc. Well... I was surprised how good it was.

Installing Arch

Strange mountpount tool

I was a little confused by the above screen. I was expecting a "format this partition" checkbox but that wasn't the Arch way. As I wanted to keep my data on a number of partitions I answered "No".
Other installers probe for what file system is already on the partition, but this one needs you to select a file system that matches the one on disk. Better know what you are doing then. It doesn't look so bad right here but when there are many partitions which aren't identical, this tool doesn't look very good. But it got the job done.
Using LVM was a bit difficult. More about that later.

Continuing install

After installation of the base system and a reboot, I had a useless system that booted under 10 sec. From here I had to find some guidance and found this document:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide

Reading such instructions and getting it right is something that comes easy when you've used gentoo before. I guess the average user doesn't like to have to do things like this. Hey, I must be a power user then!

Arch has four (actually three) ways of installing software:

• pacman - binary packages.
  
• ABS -Arch Build System - compile before install using a PKGBUILD.
  
• AUR - Community provided repository of PKGBUILDs.
  
• (downloading building and managing yourself...)

I focused on using binaries to not mess upp my install. This proved to be a naive thought... I'll get to that.

I installed kde and nvidia drivers. And upon first try I was surprised to see that the bling bling actually worked, and not only worked. It was niiiiiiiice!!! It seems vanilla (unpatched/original) software is better than managed repositories like kubuntu's.

Flashplayer, sound and mp3 worked right away which wasn't the case last time I used a manually maintained system (gentoo a few years ago). Suspend to RAM was also working on first attempt.

The only thing that didn't work was that KDE doesn't have a stable network manager applet yet, meaning the program I needed wasn't available in compiled format. I thought "Here we go... time to get dirty". But discovered that even installing unstable software from source was a breeze thanks to PKGBUILD and pacman. The AUR provided the plasmoid I needed and had a tarball prepared with a PKGBUILD that contained all needed information like Source location, revision, dependencies and so on. This sounds like an obvious thing, but this is the first time I've come across a system that incorporates unsupported software in a safe way, and also provide a way to solve dependencies automatically upon install. Meaning that I could generate the package I needed in an instant using

makepkg -s

which build a package for me, which could then be installed using pacman, which in turn installed all the necessary dependencies in from binaries. This means that I can also use pacman to remove the custom built software, keeping track of dependencies all the way.That's what I call user friendly!

Since the kernel had support for all my hardware I was up and running with a big smile in quite a short time. I had to read a bit, so it still took me a couple of hours but the result was:

A very fast 64-bit system. Boots in no time, browses files waaaay faster than ubuntu. Firefox had no performance issues.

One thing that still wasn't working was running 32-bit applications. I googled for this and found information mostly regarding other distributions and I thought this is going to be a little messy...

But all the googling eventually ended up in the AUR again, particularly at these pages:

• Skype: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=7914
  
• Google Earth: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=12890

Again, we're talking about unsupported software with special dependencies, being 32-bit binaries. Downloaded the tarballs from AUR and just did the friendly sequence:

makepkg -s
pacman -U bin32-skype-2.1.0.47-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz

This fetched the binaries, installed dependencies and even registered the programs so I can add their icons to my plasma panel. Very simple from a user's perspective.
Both Skype and Google Earth fired up without any issues and This really made my day.

No more issues. Everything's working on my laptop. And it was easy. Thank you Arch Linux!

My server

After experiencing my laptop performance hit red, I quite immediately was tempted to replace the Ubuntu Server installation in my fanless web server. Why? Because it was performing really poorly. I had up to 15 seconds of waiting every time I connected to it via ssh and the network ping was everything between 0.5 and 300 milliseconds.

Long story short, I put Arch in the server too and now I can browse it over fish protocol fast as never before, and the ping is always below 11 ms.

I installed Call of Duty World at War dedicated server on the little thing before and it had a ping between 30 and 300 ms even when the load average on the server was 0.00. I found this unacceptable. Thought it might have to do with the hardware... But then I installed it on Arch instead and the performance and response is so much better.

Performance isn't always measured by how fast a server responds. It might get more things done by concentrating on single tasks for longer periods of time before switching to another process. That might be why Ubuntu Server was so slow. But that doesn't explain why I got 5 times faster file transfer over SSH than before.

Using LVM with the Arch Installer

The server runs LVM2, hence the experience.
In order for the Arch installer's file system manager to properly detect the logical volumes LVM must be started before the installer opens the file system manager. Do it before running /arch/setup, or switch to another virtual console and do it there before starting the manager. The device mapper kernel module must be loaded for it to work.

# modprobe dm-mod
# vgchange -ay

Negative remarks

Not many yet. I might need to get back later when I've used it for a longer while.
My Arch installs are performing and behaving amazingly well!
However, If you want debug symbols for say Qt4, you'll need to compile Qt4 from source to get that. There are no debug symbol packages in Arch as of today. This is a problem any time you want to send a sane bug report to KDE for instance.

Links

http://www.kdevelop.org/
http://www.sabayonlinux.org/
http://www.kubuntu.org/
http://www.archlinux.org/
http://chakra-project.org/
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS_-_The_Arch_Build_System
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchLinux_User-community_Repository_%28AUR%29
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_To_Other_Distros

Screenshots