OK here comes my long winded take on Arch vs Ubuntu.
I’ve been messing around with computers since 1992. Back then the internet didn’t amount to much. A night on line consisted of hitting a few sites or a couple of slip streams. I went through a nasty divorce that left me working, paying child support and scrounging computer stores and Goodwills for used parts or systems to build stuff out of. I didn’t know any other users so what I learned was from documentation that came with operating systems, library books, and occasional book from a store, and magazines. At that time I ran all DOS based programs from a prompt or I used and old program called Power Menu as a front end for them. The key at that time was the magazines. I was low on funds all of the time trying to make ends meet. On payday I would put gas in my car for my one outing for that pay period and drive 40 miles and sell my plasma for $30.00 and buy used computer parts, a hamburger, and a couple of computer magazines. I would hit the library look for books and head home with my treasures and entertainment for the next 2 week. I like to tinker. I have taken stuff apart to see how it works my entire life. So computers were a natural path for me to take. They kept my time and mind occupied. During this time in my life the computer magazines were key. I was very selective in the ones I bought, They had to have something in them about the tech side of things. I have never been a gamer to speak of. I just wanted to know what made them tick and how to do things in them. I started reading about some guy named Linus Torvalds that wrote a kernel while in college and put it out there free of charge for anyone to use. I also read about a project call GNU was using that kernel to run with their programs to make a free operating system. When you are selling your plasma to buy computer parts, magazines, and a hamburger a free operating system sounds like a pretty good deal.
So we will fast forward to 1994. My finances were a little better by now. Not much, but a little. Windows 3 and 3.1 had come and gone and Windows 95 was on the scene. I really didn’t see much use for them. To me they were just a really fancy front end sitting on top of dos running for the most part dos programs dressed up a little to match the environment. My mom bought me a new computer. It was a Gateway with a Pentium 266 MMX slot 1 in it and was running Windows 95. I thought it was great. I actually owned a new computer. After owning it about 6 months my tinkering got the best of me. I was messing around inside the tower and static shocked the motherboard killing the system. I wanted to puke. Times were a little better though and I was getting some extra hours at work. So I saved my money and bought a new Abit motherboard and new ram to go with it. Luckily I hadn’t killed the processor. So after no computer for a month I was back up and running. The lesson learned was to ground myself before messing around inside the system. I was still reading about this Linux thing and read about this company called Red Hat. I had a little extra money one day when I was in the city so I stopped at the Comp USA there and picked up a copy of Red Hat. My choices were that and Suse. I had read plenty about Red Hat but nothing much about Suse. I went home all excited with a box with two book in it and a bunch of 1.44 disks. I was ready to conquer the world. This is when I found out that GNU/Linux was not Microsoft compatible. I would have to replace part of my hardware to get the system to work. The best I was going to be able to do at this point was install the system, but I wouldn’t have Internet access until I bought a new modem because the modem in my system was a win modem and it actually didn’t modulate or demodulate. It was just an interface that Windows used to modulate and demodulate through the processor. I got a crash coarse in formating a hard drive because back then there was no / system /home /swap going on. It was a full partition with a partition for everything. The whole process to actually get a functioning system minus the modem took me a week. It was pretty much sit and read then try and fail. Read some more and try again until one little piece after another started to come together. So after a week I had a functioning system. Two weeks later I bought a US Robotics modem and was able to get internet access.
So what is my whole point to all of this you might ask. Simply this before there was an Arch Linux I did it the Arch way. For those of us back then that didn’t want to run Windows and wanted to run GNU/Linux that is the way we had to do things. Read and learn, trial and error, That is how you ended up with a functioning GNU/Linux system. Once up and running experimenting with it would lead to a bricked system from time to time and you would start over and do it again hoping you didn’t make the same mistakes the next time around.
All of that above leads to this. For those wanting a bleeding edge system that you personally set up from the absolute bottom to the top, run Arch. You will have an understanding about how your system works that the average user won’t. For those that are new to the GNU/Linux world I would highly suggest you start with Ubuntu Mate. Start with familiar ground and get use to that, and then dive off into the deep water when you are a little more sure of yourself. My personal preference these days is a little polish and ease of use never hurt anyone. I don’t need to start at ground zero anymore and work through the process.
A caveman found a rock and by striking it against another created a spark and eventually he figured out how to make a fire. These days I can grab a lighter or match and accomplish the same thing in a few seconds that took the cave man a considerable amount of time to accomplish. The end result is the same. You have a fire you can warm yourself by, or cook a meal.