Ubuntu was founded in 2004 by Canonical.
Canonical’s backing comes from billionaire Mark Shuttleworth.
It also derives revenue from selling commercial support, and donations.
Ubuntu is a fixed release Linux distribution with discrete six month release points, once
installed your system will only receive security updates for specific applications and components
for the life of the distribution.
Long Term Support releases are released once every two years, and are supported for five
years with optional pay for support to extend further beyond the five year point.
Interim releases are supported for just nine months.
There is an official upgrade path between releases of Ubuntu with the preference being
to retain users on the LTS releases.
Arch Linux was founded in 2002 by developer Judd Vinet.
Funding comes from community donations and partnerships with Velocity Network and Kartenzia
who provide hosting services for the Arch Linux servers.
Arch Linux is a rolling release, meaning once installed your system will remain close to
the bleeding edge throughout its life.
Ubuntu focus on three specific interfaces
– Server, which has no desktop, but can be managed through the optional Ubuntu Landscape
management tool, there is also Unity 7 for desktop and laptop systems, and Unity 8 for
Mobile and Tablet.
In the future Unity 8 will supersede Unity 7, but at time of recording Canonical are
offering the two desktops in their x86 desktop based install of Ubuntu.
In terms of system architecture Ubuntu offer 32 and 64 bit, as well as ARM.
There are many different official and unofficial derivatives which gives you the ability to
choose from a wide range of Linux desktops.
Arch don’t really offer an a specific interface as such, the system is very much “build
it yourself”, and you can choose from a larger range of Linux desktops than you will
find on Ubuntu.
I know this fact from bitter experience when I was putting together the Desktop December
series and most of the desktops were available within the Arch repositories.
Compared to Ubuntu and Debian where they either had to be compiled or installed from a third
party repository.
In terms of system architecture Arch only offer 64 bit.
At time of recording 32 bit is in support only mode and will be totally unsupported
by November 2017.
For ARM systems there is a port of Arch Linux available which caters to that specific architecture.
There’s a few unofficial derivatives of Arch, including: Manjaro, Apricity, Antergos,
and OBRevenge.
Ease of Install Ubuntu comes with a simple point and click
Ubiquity graphical installer that is very kind and forgiving to new users.
Installation of Ubuntu can be carried out either online or offline.
Arch is entirely command line for the system installer, there are guides on the Arch wiki
in order to assist with installation.
The first time I tried it was very time consuming and confusing.
Didn’t help the noobs guide was missing at the time.
Installation is dependant on having an Internet connection.
For an experienced user the hands on command line approach will not present any difficulty
at all.
If a user has built themselves a custom script, then it could well be quicker to install Arch
than Ubuntu.
Most of the derivatives of Arch come with the universal Calamares graphical installer,
which makes installation as easy as Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer.
Help Canonical provide Ubuntu forums and Ask Ubuntu
online community support.
Arch provide a community maintained wiki, which is superb, and I have utilised it on
many, many occasions.
Even if I need help for another distribution, the Arch help pages are often relevant, or
at least provide you an approximate location for a configuration change.
You have the different audience to consider – Ubuntu catering for newer users and providing
the more human touch, vs Arch catering for more experienced users and providing the more
technical touc h.
Both are winners in this section as they provide a perfect help solution for their respective
user base.
Packaging Ubuntu uses the Debian packaging utilities
Apt and Dpkg to install Deb files, which contain precompiled binaries.
Command line interface is relatively simple, and there is a GUI utility called Synaptic
which can be used to install and remove packages, as well as adding new third party repositories.
Ubuntu utilise the Gnome software centre on their Unity desktop, which is fancier than
Synaptic, but not as feature rich.
Canonical have been driving forward with a new universal packaging format called Snaps.
Snaps provide both the application and all its dependencies in one package.
It potentially means you can have multiple copies of the same library files on your system
if they are used within different snaps.
There is an unofficial GUI for installing Snaps with SnapWeb, however it is certainly
not as convenient as Synaptic or any of the desktop specific package managers.
Traditional package management in Linux allows for only one copy of a package to be installed,
which is more efficient on space, however forcing an upgrade of individual components
through third party repositories can break the delicate balance of version control.
Arch uses Pacman to install tar.xz compressed precompiled binaries.
Command line interface is not quite as simple as Apt, but there are a couple of GUI’s:
Octopi and Pamac.
The number of packages in the official Arch repository is rather low at around 15,000,
compared to the 55,000 available in Ubuntu.
However, adding in the AUR (Arch User Repositories) adds another 39,000 to the total.
Which is a comparable to the quantity available through the standard Ubuntu repository.
Canonical provide Launchpad, an open source project hosting service, which allows you
to further expand the number of available applications to Ubuntu.
It also allows you to obtain newer versions of certain applications, which does have the
potential downside of causing breakage due to conflict of versions as I mentioned earlier.
Another aspect I would like to cover with packages is the “build quality” - how
well all the dependencies are linked.
From feedback I have received there seems to be fewer issues with dependencies in applications
on Arch.
In particular with the KDE desktop where it seems to be a smoother running experience,
and can execute GTK based applications more cleanly than Kubuntu and KDE Neon, which are
both Ubuntu based distributions.
It seems to me that the Arch maintainers have done a better job with getting package dependencies
linked correctly compared to the Ubuntu and Debian maintainers.
Overall there is no clear winner in terms of packaging, both have advantages and disadvantages
compared to each other.
Resource Usage Difficult to get a fair comparison of resource
usage, since Arch doesn’t come with a specific desktop, although to be fair the resources
utilised by the desktop is just one component of the overall memory usage of a Linux system.
What we can tell is Arch just loads kernel modules and drivers specific to your system.
Bootup speed of Arch on a rotational drive is about on par with Ubuntu booting of a solid
state disk.
My experience of Arch with Manjaro and OBRevenge utterly tramples all over the performance
of Ubuntu and KDE Neon.
Not to say I have ever felt Ubuntu is slow, its simply that Arch is faster.
On the other hand you could say my system boots a few seconds quicker, now I just need
to keep it going for 10 years or so and I’ll have made back the hours I spent learning
how to install Arch.
Kernel choice Arch make it easy to switch between different
Linux kernels, they offer a choice of a brand new vanilla kernel with few patches applied,
a Long term support kernel, and two other Arch specific kernels: Grsec and Zen.
Grsec offers increased security, and for Zen I’ll quote “The ZEN Kernel is the result
of a collaborative effort of kernel hackers to provide the best Linux kernel possible
for everyday systems.”
The Linux kernel in Ubuntu is fixed at the version released at time of Beta development,
and Canonical supply security updates to the kernel throughout the life of the distribution.
For the LTS releases of Ubuntu it is possible to obtain a newer kernel with the LTSEnablementStack,
which provides an updated kernel for the life of the distro it comes with, but that means
the operating system can outlive the kernel and it is up to the user to switch to a new
LTSEnablementStack.
Canonical also supply new kernels through the Mainline PPA and you can obtain the latest
release candidate and stable builds of the Linux kernel.
However this is a manual process and up to the user to maintain on their own system.
Arch is definitely the winner for ease of switching and obtaining the latest kernel.
Package Updates As it is a rolling release Arch maintainers
update all packages within the official Arch repository on a regular basis, based on upstream
builds.
Regular to the point that you can install all your updates, go and have a cup of coffee,
and upon return you may need to do even more updates.
Although it is not necessarily wise to update your own system multiple times throughout
the day, however you do need to be somewhat regular with your system updates.
Frequent updates can necessitate more frequent reboots, likely a big no no on production
servers where the required downtime for a reboot simply isn’t available.
In comparison Ubuntu only updates a core selection of applications and components of the system
that could pose severe security risk if left unpatched.
They can be identified in Synaptic package manager, if you look for packages with the
Ubuntu logo next to them, these are updated throughout the life of the distribution.
All other packages are held at a fixed version based on the upstream Debian builds at time
of development.
Generally security updates will only result in a specific vulnerability being patched
rather than a newer version of an application being supplied.
One exception is web browsers which do receive a whole new version with additional features.
There is one application I’ve never understood for receiving security updates: the password
cracking tool John-the-ripper.
Hmm
In my opinion Ubuntu should be favoured for enterprise and server environments, but that’s
not say Arch should be excluded entirely, because no doubt there is a sys admin somewhere
who has installed Arch throughout the company, and everything is just fine.
Conclusion In conclusion Arch is technically the better
distribution, however from an ease of pick up and use, Ubuntu is the winner.
Quite simply there is no way I could recommend the average Windows or MacOS user make their
first experience of Linux with Arch.
Yes there will always be exceptions to the rule, but for the most part it is like seeing
a child take their first steps, then you turn to them and say “well done, now go run a
marathon” For more experienced Linux users Arch is definitely
a worthy distribution to consider.
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