Why I can't recommend Arch or Gentoo

Mon Sep 21 08:05:46 EDT 2015

The thing about no live desktop is an explicit arch decision, could even 
say it's a feature, same about gentoo, but gentoo has, or did have at 
some point, a live image.

W dniu 21.09.2015 o 13:56, Tony Baechler pisze:
> 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
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