by kmihelich » Sat Jun 18, 2011 5:03 pm
For the Pro/Video/V3, yes, you're stuck on an older kernel. We're working on it, but we're not expert kernel programmers. Are you?
For every other reason, people come to this distribution because of our focus on explicitly defined platforms. The bigger distributions primarily just manage a port of their x86 version to ARM. For most, this means a blanket generalization in order to support really anything out there with an ARM chip, meaning they build for ARMv4t as a target. For our v5 port (overwhelmingly used by plugs) we focus on plugs from the kernel down. We maintain a community-supported patch on the latest kernels to make plugs work better, and in some cases work properly at all. Arch's philosophy of keeping things simple translates extremely effectively to ARM devices: you're in full control of what's running, there aren't significant amount of dependencies on packages to take up more space, packages are easy to create and build by even inexperienced users, and of course they stay on the bleeding edge of versions. The bleeding edge might break things occasionally -- any Debian sid user knows this too -- but they are quick to correct issues and most of the issues only result in problems with that specific package, not impacts across the entire system.
Though as I've said elsewhere, if you switch to a different distribution, obviously this is not the place to get support for it.
Arch Linux ARM exists and continues to grow through community support, please
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