Successful install of Arch

[fox]

I had another problem on Arch that I just solved. The problem was poor font rendering in Microsoft Office 2010 running in Crossover Linux. This was noticable on only certain fonts, but they included the all-important times-roman and arial. What was maddening was that the same program didn't have this problem in Ubuntu running on the same computer (my 2010 27" iMac). I kept flipping back and forth to see which settings were different, and I finally found it. What was different was the antialiasing setting (accessed through the gnome-tweak-tool). In Ubuntu it was rgb; in Arch it was greyscale. Changed the Arch setting and the font rendering improved immediately! Now why it was set at greyscale in Arch is a question I can't answer; is that the default or did I do it by accident? What's interesting is that even with the greyscale setting, font rendering was not adversely affected in Libreoffice Writer or WPS Writer. I don't know enough about font rendering to be able to explain this, but if someone reading this knows or has some idea, please post a reply.

This is a big deal to me. I use Office 2010 a lot in my work for compatibility reasons, and the poor font rendering would have driven me nuts and forced an early ending to my Arch experiment.

[Jason]

Interesting. I didn't think about antialiasing. It could be that  LibreOfice and WPS Writer can override the setting and are actually using RGB mode. Evidently, RGB is better on LCD monitors and grey-scale is better on CRTs.

http://alienryderflex.com/sub_pixel/

[fox]

It's also interesting that the effect of the greyscale antialias setting isn't consistent across computers. The Arch installation on my Dell xps also had antialiasing set as greyscale, but in this case, Office 2013 (on Crossover) didn't have the poor font rendering seen when running Office 2010 on my iMac. Unfortunately, there are two relevant variables that are different between the iMac and the Dell xps (Office 2010 vs 2013) and pixel density (109 vs 166 ppi).

[fox]

Arch doesn't do much automatically when you install it. I just discovered that I couldn't print from Arch because no print drivers were loaded. Once I loaded CUPS and the specific driver for my laserprinter, all was well. Meanwhile, I updated after two weeks of absence. Big download, but all went smoothly. I update from pacman instead of any GUI updater.

[fox]

Almost two months since I installed Arch on my iMac and my Dell xps and all is well. Updates continue to come in successfully; nothing has been broken. A lot of updates come in every week; I would estimate that each Arch install is using 1 GB per month of downloads. If you have limited bandwidth available for downloads, this distro isn't for you!

I've been trying to do the updates on the command line with pacman right after bootup (sudo pacman -Syu) rather than letting the GUI software updater (Pamac) do them. Rightly or wrongly, my perception is they're safer when done from the command line. But even after I do them, the Pamac software updater frequently indicates that there are one or two more, and they are ones from the AUR repository that were pkgbuilds. None of these has caused a problem either.

[Jason]

I think it's the same whether you use pamac or not except that pamac does let you know of the AUR updates and installs them which is a cool feature. I've noted that pamac seems to see all the updates that pacman -Syu does as well.

So far I've had no problem with Arch with updates either. Lots of them but many are small.