so i get to do a gummiboot tomorrow morning! i have green tea and some eggs!
watching the football now, drinking a bit ya see...
i love you guys!
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I have always likes Gummiboot. I like its refined simplicity and ease at which I can control multiple EFI boot configurations over multiple Distros and kernels.
Id refine that and say Arch is a hobby distro for the Arch devs, which in turn is why its a hobby distro in general. Thers no real user end focus in my opinion which leaves it in a weird place. Dont get me wrong though, its actually a decent distro. Anyone with any technical mindedness whatsoever (as in you can read..) should be able to install it without to much trouble. But again, its not a distro in the sense that debian, or Fedora, or Gentoo are. Its very much up the the devs whims, they just happen to align well with most of the users I guess.
Where are you getting this from? Arch will resolve dependencies. If your using the AUR its all manual unless you use a helper, helpers (packer, aura, etc) will automatically resolve dependencies.
edit: ah if you mean the the xorg gnome dependency. Its not the only distro that does this, but yes this is a problem of what i mentioned in my previous post, it lacks user based tools so you dont always see what you need. In this case, you dont neccessarily need xorg for gnome (well right now you do, but we have wayland as well) so pulling in xorg would be the wrong thing.
Ideally I should ask you but in this case it doesnt seam to.
@wendell slight correction (i was maybe not clear) Arch devs maintain around 5800 packages, there is a community maintained repo thats included in the pacman,conf with more packages AND the AUR with everything else, but neither of these are maintained by Arch proper.
I also agree with you completely on the documentation. The wiki is very good if you have experience with Linux, but its not the best wiki around, the documentation (in my opinion) is a bit disjointed and expects you to know a lot of things that even I sometimes sit and think "...what..?". A lot of people praise the wiki, its good, but its not brilliant.
Yeah I think I actually have seen the same behavior. When I boot a recent Live USB on my XPS 13, it will boot in legacy mode, yet install EFI correctly when installing the OS. I had noticed "in the early days" it is quite easy to load the required module, chroot into a new install (still in the Live USB session), and replace the bios grub package with the EFI version. Maybe they automated that, or do some additional checking when they detect the system boots from a GPT disk. Perhaps I should check that more in depth, just guessing here ;-)
So for the interested audience: the bios boot partition Wendell was talking about, is needed when your system boots BIOS, but your disk layout is GPT. It makes up for the DOS compatibility region, a "gap" in the old partitioning scheme that allowed for additional bootloader code to be placed. But this gap is gone in the GPT layout, therefore you need to reserve the space yourself. GPT is nice since you no longer need the primary/extended partition layout.
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For future reference, Arch uses systemd to manage its services. For example after installing gnome and gdm, use the systemctl tool to enable gdm service then it gets started at boot. Arch is wonderful after you'll get use to it. Those who are up for the challenge, check i3 out.
I approve this Bee Box video for obvious reasons.