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Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg.

I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it languished and the Arch wiki became the goto.

(I haven't used Gentoo in well over a decade at this point, but the Arch wiki is useful regardless of when I'm using Arch at home or when I'm using other distros at work.)

by goku1215 hours ago|

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I'm on Gentoo without the precompiled packages, except for very large applications. Gentoo wiki is not a match for Arch wiki for its sheer content and organization. But Gentoo wiki contains some stuff that Arch wiki doesn't. For example, what kernel features are needed for a certain application and functionality, and how a setup differs between systemd and other inits. I find both wikis quite informative in combination.

by ofalkaed16 hours ago|

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Arch was young in those days but I think fairly well known? we were quite vocal, opinionated and interjecting our views everywhere by the time of the Xfree86/Xorg switch. Perhaps it is just my view from being a part of it but I remember encountering the Arch reputation everywhere I went. Or maybe it is just the nostalgia influencing me.

by VorpalWay15 hours ago|

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Could be. I don't remember Arch being on my radar at that point though. But it wasn't long after I switched from Gentoo to Arch (and then Debian for a decade due to lack of stability before going back to Arch 7 years ago or so).

A few years before the Xorg thing there was also the 2.4 to 2.6 kernel switchover. I think I maybe was using Slackware at that point, and I remember building my own kernel to try out the new shiny thing. You also had to update some userspace packages if I remember correctly: things like modprobe/insmod at the very least.

by ofalkaed15 hours ago|

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2.6 was also the switch from OSS to Alsa, which caused some fun, Alsa really was not ready for prime time.

by VorpalWay15 hours ago|

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Oh yeah, you just unlocked a forgotten memory. I was actually lucky there, I had a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 which worked just fine on ALSA (hardware mixing even worked out of the box). But I remember lots of other people complaining on IRC about it.

by ofalkaed17 hours ago|

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Most distros were stable well before Arch because Arch worked out most of the bugs for them and documented them on their wiki. Arch and other bleeding edge distros are still a big part of the stability of linux even if they don't break all that often anymore, they find a lot of the edge cases before they are issue for the big distros. In 2005 it was not difficult to have a stable linux install, you may have had to hunt a bit for the right hardware and it may have taken awhile to get things working but once things were working they tended to be stable. I can only think of one time Slackware broke things for me since I started using it around 2005, it taking on PulseAudio caused me some headaches but I use Slackware for audio work and am not their target so this is to be expected. Crux was rock solid for me into the 10s, nearly a decade of use and not even a hiccup.