Questions about new Linux setups

[Jason White]

Kyle  <speakup at linux-speakup.org> wrote:
>I run Arch here, and I love it. It starts out in the command line 
>environment, and you can add only what you want to it, including full 
>GNOME if you want. The Pacman packaging system is quite powerful, and 
>few packages actually need to be built from source manually. 

I am considering Arch as an option whenever my next machine is purchased, or
maybe I'll just install it in a vm at some point.

It's also one of the few distributions (with debian and derivatives being the
other notable cases) that has an accessible installation process supporting
both speech and braille if I remember correctly. The accessible installer
unfortunately isn't the default yet, whereas in Debian it most certainly is -
no separate "accessible" image required.

A slightly annoying aspect of Arch, based on what I've read, is that it
doesn't support separate packages for debug symbols. If you need a stack trace
to report a bug, you'll have to rebuild the relevant package with a debug
flag.

In general, though, I think Arch is the most interesting distribution to have
emerged in the last decade.