[pxc]

Unpopular opinion: the only people I'd recommend Arch to are people without a lot of Linux experience (who are interested in learning).

Once you learn the basics of what goes into a distro and you know how to set things up and troubleshoot, there's no reason to use a distro with a package management story as backwards as Arch's.

After you're done with Arch, learn to write packages for a couple distros (practice building them on something like OBS[1], which lets you build and distribute packages for almost any distro). Then choose your distro based on the quality of the tooling it is built on and package whatever you need that isn't already in it.

—

1: https://build.opensuse.org/

[matheusmoreira]

What's so backwards about Arch's package management? I've written PKGBUILDs for my own software and used that to make packages I could install on my system. Works pretty well in my experience.

[pxc]

Lots of cosmetic warts, like combining nothing but CLI flags instead of a subcommand interface or the necessity to use subshells and pipelines to achieve functionality that's native and obvious in other package managers. Some of my favorites kinda suck that way too, though.

Poor support for managing multiple repositories: no facilities for it built into pacman, no notion of vendor (which is useful for managing packages that may be duplicated across repositories, but with different versions or build options), the main repos are small so a huge number of packages you might want to use have an unofficial status that is much more markedly second-class than on other distros (must be compiled from source/no binary caching, installation process is either very manual or requires unpackaged tools).

No support for treatment of past transactions in the CLI for ‘undo’-like behavior or rollbacks.

No tools for managing the behavior of the dependency resolver, like to make upgrades less destructive or to automatically retry solving with more aggressive solutions that involve more downgrades and removals.

No plugin architecture, so additional functionality like integration with CoW filesystems for snapshotting requires wrappers, which is clunky and may not be composable.

No support for declaring a version for pinned packages (just the stateful IgnorePkgs, which says ‘keep whatever I have’) or restricting upgrades based on constraints or classes (e.g., in Gentoo Portage).

And it doesn't really support any of the more interesting recent innovations, like installation/upgrade atomicity, installing multiple versions of things side-by-side, installing packages on a per-user basis, running multiple package management operations at the same time.

But the single most backwards thing is the whole situation with the AUR being in eternal limbo but also a de facto standard due to the small size of the official repositories.

Pacman does have some outstanding strengths relative to most package managers: speed (by a wide margin vs. most distros) and ease of writing packages. Another thing is that if you're unbothered by the awkward status of the AUR (and having to build its packages from source), Arch users don't typically do much repo management.