KISS for Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Its first formal release, Arch Linux 0.1, was on March 11, 2002. Inspired by the elegant
simplicity of Slackware, Polish Linux Distribution, and CRUX, and yet disappointed with their lack
of package management at the time; Vinet built his own distribution on similar principles as
those distros. But, he also wrote a package management program called pacman, to
automatically handle package installation, removal, and upgrades.

In late 2007, Judd Vinet retired from active participation as an Arch developer, and smoothly
transferred the reins over to American programmer Aaron Griffin, aka Phrakture, who
remains the lead Arch developer to this day.

Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution based on ideas from CRUX, a great
distribution developed by Per Lidn.

Arch Linux is a versatile, and simple distribution designed to fit the needs of the competent
Linux user. It is both powerful and easy to manage, making it an ideal distro for servers
and workstations. Take it in any direction you like. If you share this vision of what a
GNU/Linux distribution should be, then you are welcomed and encouraged to use it freely,
get involved, and contribute to the community

Arch Linux uses its own Pacman package manager, which couples simple binary packages
with an easy-to-use package build system. This allows users to easily manage and
customize packages ranging from official Arch software to the user's own personal
packages to packages from 3rd party sources. The repository system also allows users to
easily build and maintain their own custom build scripts, packages, and repositories,
encouraging community growth and contribution.

The early Arch community grew steadily, as evidenced by this chart of forum posts, users,
and bug reports. Moreover, it was from its early days known as an open, friendly, and
helpful community.


AARON GRIFFIN
I originally began using Arch back in 2003. You could say I grew up on Arch, as most of my
heavy technical knowledge was learned on an Arch box. Later on, I was asked to come on
board the core development team, and became the lead developer for pacman, as well as
developing tools such as mkinitcpio.
Nowadays, Judd, the previous "owner" of Arch, has stepped aside, and I have taken his
place. Believe me though, that sounds more prestigious than it actually is. Arch runs
smoothly because we have a great group of people working on it. Not because of what I do.

JUDD VINET
Arch Linux began in early 2001. I had been using the Polish Linux Distribution (PLD) for a
good while and had recently switched to CRUX, where the developers were a little more
fluent in English. :)

I immediately loved it. CRUX was simple, elegant, and very quick and easy to use once you
understood how it worked. And understanding did not take long, because everything just
made sense -- concepts and methods weren't complicated unless they had to be. Per Lidn
did an excellent job with it and I happily ran it for a few months.

I disagreed with some of CRUX's ideologies, though. Per had decided to keep package
management very simple. Packages were nothing but gzipped tarballs that were extracted
directly into the running system. There was no meta-data, no dependency tracking, and no
easy way to locate and download packages. The package set was also very minimalistic.

As a sysadmin, I was running PLD on many of my servers and was looking for something
more reliable and easier to maintain. While PLD had a good package update system (apt-
get in front of RPM, a la Conectiva), their packages were overly modular for my tastes and
many of them were broken. CRUX was the next logical choice, but maintaining many
systems without dependency support wasn't going to be fun.

At that point I decided to start Arch Linux. It was an opportunity to take all the great
concepts I liked about other distributions and combine them together, along with some of
my own tastes. So I built an LFS system and began assembling some rudimentary package
build scripts, modelling them after the format I had seen and used in CRUX. Simplicity and
elegance were my goals. Once the base system was assembled, I began work on pacman.
In the beginning, he was just a glorified tar/gzip utility with file tracking, but quickly evolved
into a very useful little application.

Simplicity, flexibility, and transparency are tenets of Arch Linux. We try to stick to the KISS
principle whenever we can. The transparency of the system makes it easy to learn, and
competent linux users are constantly thanking us for this reason.

DISADVANTAGE
In my experience the major disadvantage of Arch is bugginess. Not Debian sid style total
brokenness, but minor, irritating bugs in the latest versions of apps, that haven't been ironed
out yet.
A good example is the current version of Qt, 4.6.3, in which the QGTK engine is broken
unless you use a full desktop environment. It's only annoying insofar as Qt apps don't match
the rest of the destkop, but there you have it.
(Another one is the Gnome/PolicyKit mess from a while back, where suspend and hibernate
didn't work by default. That was a more severe example, but still possible to deal with by
editing PolicyKit.conf.)
What I'm getting at is that some things in Arch are always going to need duct tape, and
probably will look like they've been duct taped once you've fixed them.
Also, Arch's config files are AFAIK unfriendly towards GUI config apps; they make things
easier by far for experienced users, but harder for newbies. So Arch is probably not so great
as a base system for an "easy to use" desktop distro.

In my experience the "Dark Side of Arch" includes;
All of what Gullible Jones said.
Some problems that arise because of your custom Arch configuration can be and are
uniquely yours, (and quite a pain to debug and fix).
Without experiencing other distros (even one's non-linux), you may lose sight and forget
about the other "true innovations" and ideas that people may have brought to life in a distro.
Arch is all about choices, and much choice can be a bad thing, like alcohol
Here's an extreme but unfortunately true case (for me at least). Using Arch has turned me
into a kind of power-user freak. I know I'll eventually abandon all other distros once I build
an LFS-system complete a *BSD-style init and custom written package manager. "Simply to
have more control".

1) For a server (not SOHO, but slightly bigger), Arch is not that good, because of unsigned
packages (less security) and absence of some equivalent of Debian Security Advisories.
2) Sometimes (not always!) config files aren't well documented and organised. E.g.,
Apache2 - it took me about 10 minutes in Debian to configure simple server, but in Arch -
about an hour. Debianists often polish original documentation, sometimes it even works
3) Surely, a lot of freedom can be bad, if there's too much freedom, especially for newbies.
Through the prism of KISS principle, most of these disadvantages are cost of this principle.
KISS and rolling release model aren't supposed to suit all needs, but IMO on
workstation/laptop it is quite powerful.

Q) Why would I not want to use Arch?
A) You may not want to use Arch, if:
after reading The Arch Way, you disagree with the philosophy.
you do not have the ability/time/desire for a 'do-it-yourself' GNU/Linux distribution.
you require support for an architecture other than x86_64 or i686.
you take a strong stand on using a distribution which only provides free software as
defined by GNU.
you believe an operating system should configure itself, run out of the box, and include
a complete default set of software and desktop environment on the installation media.
you do not want a bleeding edge, rolling release GNU/Linux distribution.
you are happy with your current OS.
you want an OS that targets a different userbase.