Why I can't recommend Arch or Gentoo

[Tony Baechler]

All,

I've been following the Talking Arch discussion with great interest.  I'm 
sure what I am about to say will be rather unpopular, but I can only go by 
my own experiences and what I've read.  If these issues can be addressed, I 
think both distributions have great potential, but as things stand now, I 
can't recommend them.  I'll start with Arch first.

I had no problem downloading Arch and burning it to a CD.  It fit on a CD 
without difficulty, but apparently the current release doesn't.  That is 
most unfortunate as not everyone wants to burn a DVD for a command line 
based distro.  You expect it with Fedora and Ubuntu, but even Debian has 
several small CD images for installation.  Hopefully something can be done 
to get it back to CD sized media.

Unlike what Kyle says, I couldn't get speech upon boot.  I pressed Enter at 
least six times, plus other random characters.  I've also encountered the 
problem where speech starts after a few keys, but not in this case.  I know 
where the problem lies.  It's because of my sound card, specifically the 
emu10k1 driver.  It has a weird problem with no volume by default.  It isn't 
muted, but the analog switch is toggled.  This was fixed a long time ago in 
Debian and Ubuntu, but obviously didn't make it to Arch.  I reported this to 
the support address and didn't get a reply for about two weeks.  There was 
no interest in fixing the problem, even when I offered to help.

Similarly, due to how brltty is configured by default, it locked up my 
DECtalk Express.  I had to reset it by turning it off and on before it would 
talk again.  Again, in the same email, I reported this to support and there 
was no interest in fixing it.  In looking at the brltty.conf installed with 
Debian testing, it looks like literally just commenting out a line would fix 
this.  I understand that some people still use serial Braille displays, but 
USB autodetection is the default and serial devices aren't very common 
nowadays, so the serial detection can probably be safely disabled.  People 
can still start brltty by hand or edit brltty.conf directly.

Finally, due to its unofficial nature, it is not officially supported by the 
Arch developers, so there isn't a way to file bugs in a public forum, such 
as a bug tracker.  It has the same problem as Vinux (which I also don't 
recommend) in that there are only two active developers working on it.  If 
one of them gets sick or for some reason can't keep up with the latest 
releases, so much for Talking whatever.  I am strongly against specialized 
distributions for the blind exactly for this reason.  Whatever happened to 
Oralux?  Both Debian and Ubuntu do have accessibility teams and the 
developers take accessibility issues seriously.

Although I like Gentoo in concept, I can't recommend it for different 
reasons.  As others have pointed out, it's very complicated to install. 
Unless you really like the command line and have a serious Linux/Unix 
background, you're going to really struggle to get it finished.  It took me 
about a week from start to finish.  Debian and Ubuntu take me an hour or 
two.  It's all very well to say Linux is for everyone, but most people won't 
have the patience to go through literally a book to get their system up and 
running.  I think even Fedora is better now in this regard, but I haven't 
tried it yet.

When I did get Gentoo finally working, I was forced to install Apache 2.0 
when I didn't want it.  This was about 10 years ago, so hopefully this has 
changed, but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get 1.3 to install due to it 
being masked.  I found a way around the mask by forcing it, but I ended up 
with a broken install.  What was the last straw was when the computer 
completely locked up due to a kernel issue.  There seemed to be no way to 
fix it and I quickly realized that Gentoo is many things, but stable isn't 
one of them.  I would never again attempt to use it in a production 
environment.  It would be nice if they would tell you it isn't for servers.

Finally, here is the biggest reason why I can't recommend either Gentoo or 
Arch.  They don't have a live CD/DVD with a working graphical desktop.  As 
much as I don't like Vinux, it does come up with a desktop which you can 
try.  Ubuntu is the best in this regard in my opinion as it plays a sound so 
you know it actually works.  I'm not going to make Windows comparisons here, 
but if the Linux community wants the blind Windows community to take Linux 
seriously, there needs to be a talking GUI which just works.  Unless someone 
really likes DOS, they aren't going to like the command line enough to give 
it a fair chance.  This applies to the sighted community as well.

What do I recommend?  For people who do like the command line and have a 
strong DOS background, I recommend Debian.  It has a talking, menu-driven 
installer.  The command line is there if you want it, but it isn't required. 
  For most people, I recommend Ubuntu MATE.  It's fast, stable, works on old 
hardware, has a very familiar feel to Windows and the live DVD just works 
for the most part.  Since Ubuntu gets fixes made in Debian, I don't have the 
sound card problem.  Ubuntu does not enable brltty by default, but again, 
it's a matter of changing one line in /etc/default/brltty to enable it.  I 
was able to fully install Ubuntu without sighted help.  I was able to 
navigate to one of my NTFS partitions with lots of mp3 files, open the 
folder I wanted, select a file and play it.  All of this just worked without 
me having to do anything special.  Once I got it working, of course I 
tweaked it to suit my needs, but I wasn't required to do so.  It was my own 
choice to remove Pulse, for example.

In conclusion, I run a Linux support business, so I darn well better 
specialize in Linux support and know what I'm talking about.  I've received 
several complaints about both Arch and Vinux which I won't go into here. 
Generally, if I get people interested in Linux, they want a GUI.  I very 
much subscribe to the belief that Linux is for everyone, even to saying that 
no one should require an unofficial distro.  That's why I almost always 
recommend Ubuntu.  I would recommend Fedora, but they were very opposed to 
accessibility in the past, to the point that they referred people to 
speakupmodified.org.  For all I know, you still can't install a server 
release of Fedora with Speakup.

I've begun working on a Debian live CD due to the fact that the official 
live CD doesn't come up talking, but it is 99% identical to the official CD 
except for accessibility packages.  The accessibility features can be easily 
turned off with two commands and anyone can build their own live CD (with 
live-build) if they have the patience.  I don't doubt that Talking Arch is 
very good and is similarly identical to the real Arch, but someone 
unfamiliar with Arch (such as me) apparently can't download an official Arch 
CD and have speech.  This problem will eventually be fixed in the Debian 
live CD, in which case my CD hopefully won't be necessary.


--------------------
Tony Baechler, founder, Baechler Access Technology Services
Putting accessibility at the forefront of technology
mailto:bats at batsupport.com
Phone: 1-619-746-8310   Fax: 1-619-449-9898