/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

I’ve been thinking lately about the configuration time I’ve spent with Arch vs. what I’ve spent with Ubuntu. Now, by configuration time, I’m not just talking about hardware, I’m also referring to customizing and setting up the working environment to my liking. Now, a lot of you might think that Ubuntu is set up in a workable environment to start with. It is for the regular user, however I don’t feel I’m a ‘regular’ user. In Arch, it’s the exact opposite. Once installed, you reboot and have a prompt and a fairly clean slate to work with. Let’s look at what I had to do to get each environment to a state where I was happy with how things were working.

Ubuntu
I rebooted Ubuntu and logged in, greeted by GDM. I logged in and was presented with the default desktop, default apps, no actual ATi driver (using the open source version) but everything worked. So, what did I have to do to get the environment to my liking? I had some things I needed to install:

- ATi proprietary drivers (some may frown on this, but I’d like to use vendor-supplied where possible)

- build-essential, in case I find something not in the repository so I can build it.

- Mozilla Firefox from Mozilla. I find things seem to work a little better with the actual client from Mozilla.

- Media codecs. I need my media to play. This involved adding a new repository and installing a couple of packages

So far, not a big deal. Now we get into the area where I spent a majority of my time, namely removing things I didn’t need and disabling services I had no intentions of using. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu (and it’s still on the laptop), but I just wish some days for a stripped down version other than the server version. It would be nice to start with a clean baseline install. At any rate, here’s what I ended up doing:

- Uninstalled applications that were of no use to me (bluetooth, evolution, PDA utils, Firefox from the repository, Tracker and a few other things)

- I disabled some services from starting up at boot time that I didn’t need

- Edited some menus to remove / update entries.

- I disable some session startup applications

On top of that, I found my favorite GTK theme and went ahead and installed it.

Arch
Arch is at the opposite end of the spectrum. As I mentioned, once installed, you get a login prompt and can log in as root only. So, the time I spent in Arch was installing / configuring things I need. Here’s what I went through:

- Create my everyday user and add to the needed groups

- Install xorg, flglrx and configure it

- Install Fluxbox and configure it. I should note that as I install / remove apps, I have to edit a menu. No big deal, it doesn’t take too long

- Install some needed services (hal, fam, dbus, cpufreq, acpi) and configure them

- Install the apps I need / want (Firefox, Thunderbird, Conky, Amarok, etc.)

Now, as far as multimedia codecs goes, I didn’t have to add repositories or anything of that nature. One pacman command and I was set up. Not a strike against Ubuntu, just here for comparison’s sake. As of this writing, I have pretty much everything I need to function. Below is a screenshot of my working environment (click to view full size)

In Conclusion
In conclusion, I figure it’s a wash as far as time spent. While Ubuntu will get you up and running quickly, if you’re anything like I am you like to tweak / play / streamline and that’s where the timesink comes for Ubuntu. One the opposite end, Arch starts you off with the bare essentials and you install what you need. Ubuntu resides on my laptop because I’d rather not deal with tweaking it too much since it’s been relegated back to mobile / secondary status. Which one is for you? Well, that depends on what you want. If you want instant gratification and aren’t concerned with default applications, Ubuntu would be the way to go. If you want to learn about Linux and install exactly what you want, go with Arch.

One final note: Arch is a rolling release distribution, which means packages are constantly being updated and there isn’t a set ‘release’ with set versions of software like Ubuntu has. This can be a blessing and occasionally a curse when something comes down the pike that breaks things.

If any of you are following me on Twitter, you may have noticed a Tweet where I mentioned I installed Arch on the desktop. I figured I would go into my reasoning for going back to Arch. I left Arch initially because I got tired of messing around and tweaking things to get them working, but I also missed two big things when I switched to Ubuntu: up-to-date software and the install what you want way of things. I am keeping Ubuntu on my laptop, because now I’m moving back to the desktop for most of my computing at home. This leads me into what I have running as far as a desktop goes. Once again, I installed Fluxbox. It’s small, easy to configure and pretty flexible. I’ve been spending the past few days installing the software I need, and right now I’m working on transferring my music and such from the laptop back home to the desktop. All and all, I’m happy to be back on Arch, at least on the desktop. Ubuntu will work fine on the laptop, although I think I’ll probably end up installing Fluxbox on it as well.

As far as Twitter goes, I’ve been a little lax on my updates there. I’ve been rather busy at work, so that limits the amount of tweets I spit out during the week. On the weekends I’m usually pretty busy with family things, so again, lack of updates. One thing that’s beginning to annoy me with Twitter, though, is that there are a lot of ’spam’ users cropping up. I don’t add anyone that follows me. What I usually do is check out their Twitter page and see if they interest me at all. If it turns out they’re a spammy type of Twitter (spammy being ‘listen to x podcast! buy x!’), I’ll block them so I don’t see them on my follower list. I notice some of my Twitter friends are using another service (Plunk, I believe), so I might give that a shot at some point.

Life has been going rather well. I’m in a happy place, with a loving family and a great job. While I still have my moments, for the most part I’m fine. I did the taxes this weekend and I’ve found that we’re going to be able to make one of my 2008 goals already, which was to eliminate a loan and credit card debt. This really makes me happy, because it’s the end of a loan and also the end of a chapter, so to speak. In addition to that debt, we’ll also be reducing a couple of others.

On the geek front, not much new to report right now. I’m going to be working on revisiting MythTV again. Tivo is 12.95/month. MythTV’s TV listing subscription is 20.00 per year. It’s easy to see which one wins there, but there’s also the fact that I can archive some episodes if I’d like. My computers are back to running Arch again. I like Ubuntu, I really do, but Arch just feels like a better fit for me. I like being able to build a machine to the exact specs I need. As a bonus on the laptop, I didn’t need to build ndiswrapper or ALSA by hand as the Arch versions were up to date.

I’ve decided that I’m going to move back to Ubuntu from Arch. Arch is a great distribution, but there are some packages that aren’t built yet, and even with AUR sometimes they don’t build correctly. I think I’ll be able to get a relatively clean system if I start out with the Ubuntu server install and build from there, but I’m not sure exactly which way I’m going to go yet.

I’ve used quite a few desktop environments and window managers. I’ve tried e17, Enlightenment, XFCE4, Openbox, Fluxbox, Gnome and KDE, and the one I keep coming back to? KDE. I don’t have a real valid reason, other than the fact that I just like how it feels. Fluxbox / Openbox are nice and lightweight, but the configuration files and piecing things together got to me. I do have a valid reason on why I chose KDE over Gnome, however. Options. Gnome, to me, seems very dumbed-down, which is what they might be going for. I like having configuration options readily available to me, and I don’t really like to go digging in a “registry” to find an obscure setting.

Overall, though, I use KDE because I like it. It’s the environment I always come back to, and it just works for me, which is all I need in my desktop. Here’s a shot of my desktop as of right now (click for full 1440×900 size):

What you see is the standard KDEmod theme, urxvt and Pidgin in the system tray. Nothing spectacular, but it gets the job done.