I decided to take a look at Arch Linux this evening. It’s an interesting idea, but has a long way to go:

  • The installer configured the wrong root= command line into my syslinux configuration, resulting in a system that wouldn’t boot.

    Update: As far as I can tell, the syslinux-install_update command doesn’t actually make any attempt to configure syslinux.cfg at all.

  • I tried to install libvirt and lxc, but there are unresolved library dependencies…the virsh command apparently requires libX11.so.6, but the package is missing the appropriate dependencies to pull in the necessary packages automatically.

  • I tried to install puppet, but there is no puppet package in Arch Linux. One apparently exists in the Arch User Repository, but there are no packages in Arch Linux that will let you install packages from the AUR.

    Arch also seems to be missing chef, so there go the two biggest names in configuration management.

  • There’s no way to report bugs without first registering with the bug tracking system…and there’s no federated login (e.g., with Google, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, etc), so this would be Yet Another Account to remember.

So, back to Fedora, I guess.