Ubuntu versus Arch

 

Now before I begin, I know there is going to be some arch guy telling me just how wrong I am. Save your breath for somebody else. 20 plus years experience makes me absolutely certain I am right.

And this is not some shot across Arch or Manjaro's bow. Because they have a solid place in the Linux community, and the have earned that place.

But the truth is that for the great majority of Linux users, something like Ubuntu is the best choice for them. Why?

If you are not a car person, you might not get this, but Ubuntu is a Subaru forester. It's not going to go 300 miles an hour. It's not the sharpest thing on the road. It's not ugly, it's practical. And I love it.

Ubuntu is the car you buy that 20 years later, if you've kept the maintenance up on it, it's run without a hiccup continuously. A car you can give to the kid at 20 years of age and know it's not going to be dead on the street somewhere. Reliability is it's name.

Arch (especially Manjaro, but this fits most archs)... are that sweet 72 Plymouth road runner with the holley double pumpers, 440 hemi in competition orange. The car that has been tuned to perfection by her owner. When it's tuned right it's formidable, beautiful...

But in a week's time the timing is off, the carb is screwed up, and the tank is nearly empty because Plymouth's purpose was not fuel economy.

The Arch users car doesn't want to turn over, and he spends an hour and a half getting it running again. 

The Ubuntu user walks up to his car for 20 years straight, and it has turned over every time. Yeah, it needs a oil change every 3k miles. Yeah, once every 5-7 years she needs new tires. And yes, the Ubuntu machine has never blown the doors off the competition. But the Ubuntu user isn't yelling at his machine because it just won't start. 

This is, for the most part, a very accurate statement. Their have been outliers over the years, but as a whole this description is spot on.

To sum this up for non car people. Ubuntu is rock solid and reliable the great majority of time. Arch is not reliable, but if you get it tuned right, it's a beautiful thing to behold. But you will be fixing it far more often.

There's a reason none of the companies I work with are running Arch on their servers. It's usually fedora, red hat, Ubuntu or Debian.

One strange last thing to note... And in truth I never understood this.. most of arch is identical to Ubuntu, fedora, Debian, etc... Their is different tweaks in the UI or GUI, there are different package managers, but in truth in the guts of the machine, they are running the same kernel with the same set of gnu utilities, and either the exact same programs, or ones that serve the same purpose.

For the life of me, I have never understood why arch and Ubuntu run so very differently...

-Denny