CodeSource | The Strange Rise of Arch Linux

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CodeSource | The Strange Rise of Arch Linux

You’ve probably heard somebody say it. “By the way, I use Arch.” This is the story behind that joke. It’s stranger than the meme.

The year is 2001. In a small bedroom in Victoria, British Columbia, a Canadian university student named Judd Vinet is staring at a Red Hat server, getting more frustrated by the minute. He has a side job doing system administration for a small dot-com, and every time he upgrades these servers, the process is painful. Slow. Brittle. Easy to break.

So he goes looking for something better. He tries Slackware. Too limited. Then he stumbles onto a tiny distribution called CRUX, made by a Swedish developer named Per Lidén. CRUX is even simpler than Slackware. So simple, in fact, that its package tool can’t resolve dependencies, and there’s no way to upgrade your whole system in one command.

So Vinet decides to fix it. He starts writing his own package manager. He calls it pacman. And almost as a side effect, he starts building a whole distribution around it. He calls that Arch Linux.

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CodeSource | The Strange Rise of Arch Linux

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