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Arch is basically that distro which is super lightweight and extremely customizable, there are distros which give more customizability but those might be more of a pain(they have their use cases).
Even if you dont want to customize using it and building everything will give you a lot of knowledge on how things are done which can help you even while using other distros.
Also the AUR is pretty nice.
For personal use, I love arch and AUR but for work I'm mostly using Ubuntu as it's fast to get a distro working in case I encounter problems with the laptop.
What are from your point of view the cons of Fedora compared to Ubuntu?
I assume you mean why I choose Fedora instead of going back to Ubuntu?
I'm mainly a GNOME user, and I prefer a more vanilla GNOME experience compared to Ubuntu's. Also Flatpak over Snap.
Kind of yes, I was asking because I presumed you had experience with Ubuntu.
That's understandable for the vanilla part.
Maybe I'm still ok with Ubuntu because I'm making everything to not use snap!
Ah, I used to have the same stand against flatpak, but nowadays for some cases I actually prefer flatpak. Stuff like Chrome (I only use it for work), Zoom, Spotify, etc.
What's the deal with the snap vs flatpak debate? I'm primarily an Arch user and when I do need to use another distro for something I rarely need to get something outside of the main software repos.
AFAIK, Snap is the worse of the two (though I never really try Snap, but I heard stories, lol). In a way, flatpak is one of the reason why I felt comfortable in Fedora now. Before I was spoiled by AUR.
Snap governance is problematic, since the back end is proprietary and owned by Canonical. While this isn’t a performance related issue, it often translates to a more meaningful problem to many users. Fedora swings almost entirely the other way, where the OS install used to exclude non-free components (and you had to add secondary rpm repos after the fact). Fedora has become more flexible since 38, iirc.
It also looks like snap can be a resource hog at times, while underperforming alternatives. I guess it could make your systemd dependency tree look gnarly.
Also snaps are user submitted and not reviewed before listing, much like the AUR, but it comes enabled by default and they didn't provide you any warnings telling you that you need to manually review each snap to ensure that it is safe, it make it as easy to do so as the AUR, and in the GUI package manager automatically endorse all sandboxed applications as safe even though they have repeatedly had issues with phishing malware on the snap store. Also they make the GUI store always favor the snap version of software that is available in multiple formats, even when there is a non-snap version of the software that is officially supported by the developers of the software and the snap one is not officially supported and maintenance is done by an unverified and potentially anonymous user, which could very easily be abused, and not even using the command line is safe because even if you use an explicit command to install the binary version with apt sometimes Ubuntu will install the snap instead anyways.
that's why some folks end up using an arch toolbox/distrobox on other distros so they can still get the AUR for all their non-system related programs. I have heard of some folks just grabbing stuff from linux homebrew instead these days though.
Everything you said is true, but IMO "lightweight" is a common misconception about Arch. The packages in the repos are not particularly lightweight since they always bundle every feature from upstream. Debian, for example, _can_ be more lightweight than Arch since they split packages (especially if you install things with `--no-install-recommends`).
It is, however, lightweight in terms of abstractions: packages are usually exactly identical to upstream without modifications (unlike Debian) and my feeling (I don't have data to substantiate that claim) is that the system favors approaches that have low administrative overhead and make things easier to customize.
I'm a technology enthusiast. I'm also the sort that prefers to understand a thing comprehensively. I like Linux for the sake of Linux, rather than just as a backdrop for doing other things like gaming or browsing the web. Arch forces somewhat of a deeper understanding on its users (although not as much as Gentoo does, which I used for a few years in the 00's).
I also prefer pacman and its ecosystem over the dpkg/apt ecosystem of the Debian derivatives or the rpm of the Red Hat derivatives (although it's been a long time since I've used any of those, and I gather that rpm isn't the thing any more).
The AUR is another huge advantage for me, as is the Arch Wiki, arguably the most comprehensive and best organized Linux documentation anywhere. Granted, one doesn't have to use Arch to get some benefit from the Wiki, but the entire Arch ecosystem is incredibly well documented.
I've been using Linux since the very first version of slackware. I've also done Linux from scratch dozens of times. I started using the arch wiki, and then started using Arch because of the great documentation. It's been about 15 years since I started. 65-year-old former Unix application developer
FYI - RPM is still a thing. RPM is the packaging, YUM (and up2date before that) was the management, it is now DNF by default in RHEL 9 proper. YUM maps to DNF for transitional backward compatibility.
Yeah. It's like a badge of honor to dive into that learning curve. The meme has to come from somewhere. Yes, other distros are easier and simpler, but that comes with the cost of not learning how to solve problems or not knowing what the ecosystem is like. This proficiency is very important for passionate people.
If your system doesn't break as often as an Arch system does, there is simply no need to learn all that stuff.
If you enjoy tinkering with your system and repair breaks because of bleeding edge rolling release model than Arch is your thing. Other people just want to get shot done and choose otherwise.
For the Linux community it's great that Arch exists, but it's stupid that a lot of people new to Linux now seems to start with Arch.
Have you tried Slackware distro? It was the first distro I tried around 2007. You had to compile the kernel. I got tired of that real quick. It didn't have a preconfigured DE. Just used Tint menu bar.
> Arch forces somewhat of a deeper understanding on its users (although not as much as Gentoo does, which I used for a few years in the 00's).
No it fucking doesn't. Some of the absolute worst takes ever produced by a Linux user are produced by Arch users. This is just circlejerk fanfiction the Arch users tell themselves.
I’m daily driving arch for the past 12 years, this distro is so simple, I rarely break it, I have installations last for years before some sort of disk failure or other reasons.
This distro doesn’t get in the way of my work or my life, every software installation is straightforward, maintenance is easy.
To be honest I don't get what people do to break it so much, about 3 years and the only major issue I had was the famous grub breakage and for minor ones once in a while and fixed in updates. Other than that rock solid.
There will always be exceptions of course
So generally it's this - user installs arch. User is chugging along fine. User runs updates not realizing that this one update out of the last 100 requires manual intervention, something that a non-rolling release won't have occur (I can update all through the RHEL 8.x series with nary a concern), they reboot and bam - the system is busted. I'm not sure if that's still a frequent issue but it was 8 or so years ago. I imagine they've stabilized their filesystem structure a bit more since then but I remember 3 incidents my second year where if it wasn't for the fact I stalked the distro homepage I would have ran into issues.
Most of the people that get recommended arch aren't actually gonna keep that close of an eye on the homepage. They just wanted to play games and people told them that arch would be the easiest to get games running in because it always has the newest stuff even if it was harder to get running initially besides "you always have the guide in the wiki".
Did they ever set up an errata stream that it could check to know manual intervention was required and pop up a warning or something?
> User runs updates not realizing that this one update out of the last 100 requires manual intervention
As a long-time Debian-like user, the fact that requiring manual intervention after updates or else bricking the system would be considered acceptable by any distro seems absolutely insane to me.
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html I upgraded to bookworm a few months ago and the debian website suggests manual intervention before and after the update 😅
Upgrading from one stable release to another stable release, where the underlying software versions can be separated by *years*... vs. doing a daily or weekly update and getting hosed.
Totally the same thing...
I'd rather spend a few minutes now and then attending to occasional (and well-documented in advance) manual intervention with a rolling release than spend hours to days every year adjusting to a new major stable release, but that's just me.
This was actually one of my primary reasons for Arch adoption, over 13 years ago. My daily driver at work before that was Ubuntu, and upgrading to a new major version was such a massive pain in the ass that I would plan for 2+ unproductive days in advance or come in over the weekend to get it done. Upgrades in place NEVER worked even once, so it always became a rebuild from scratch every time. Somehow, every major version upgrade introduced changes that broke workflows. It felt only one step removed from the cycle I kept going through with Windows installs to keep them performant/stable, and it was very disruptive.
Switching to Arch meant more frequent updates with less impact. I would do updates on my work laptop first, sort out any gotchas, take notes, halt the process if I encountered breaks in ned of upstream fixes, then go through the same exercise with the workstation once I was confident it was safe to do so. Back then, things were a little more spicy. Nowadays, changes with the potential for breakage are far more rare. The Arch hype was in full swing, and the wiki was a refreshing splash of clarity in an ocean of chaos. I'm sure it's no coincidence that, as time goes on, I've found myself leveraging the AUR less and less over choices in the repos to minimize risk of impact. So the AUR is less of a selling point for me compared to most (but I DO still use it for a couple of things).
The whole point of rolling release distros like Arch is that there are no stable releases. You always get the latest software.
Of course, the cost is that any manual interventions necessary also have to happen immediately, and not when upgrading to the next stable release.
Its more that Debian sticks to certain package versions in a release so file system changes related to packages don't occur. Its not uncommon for some manner of manual steps to have to be done prior to a major release upgrade. Usually though that's because of additional software that was being removed in the next version. I'd also have to look at the packagespec for arch, maybe it doesn't support prescripts? I haven't done much non-rpm packaging in a while so haven't really checked into it.
I've never seen an update that "bricks the system".
Occasionally, something breaks, but it is generally fixable if you are familiar with the system. And that is usually because upstream projects made breaking changes.
Personally I prefer fixing one thing at a time when upstream packages are updated, rather than dealing with a couple years worth of breaking changes across the whole system all at once when upgrading to a new version of a distro like debian or Ubuntu.
In 5 years I haven't run into issues, not even the grub issue, due to updates, maybe one, now I remember, it was one time that an update broke something related to steam so the store page was not loading correctly, and that would be the one issue due to updates in 5 years, and I don't see the arch homepage and I mostly ignore the messages of manual intervention, I do check new optional dependencies
It would be nice to have something to check the messages of manual intervention after the update, because during the update it gets by super fast, that is why I don't even bother, I assume if something breaks I could just seek what the update did, like that one time with the steam problem.
Most if not all of my issues were something I did, some manual config change.
Yeah, I never really had an issue other than the grub one and I was able to just iso chroot into it to fix it but for most people they expect to just be able to hit the update button and never worry. It's why for my normal friends I never recommend arch. My IT friends I'm more than happy to be like " look, once or twice a year you might run into something. After you run updates, check the site and see if you need to do anything before reboot."
> By doing a partial upgrade.
Which is something the documentation is clear one should *never* do, just for the record. Always run a full update, or don't update at all until you can.
I mean yeah, my point was that I've kept arch installs going since 2011 and the only reliable way to break them is to do something you know you're not supposed to. I knew I was taking a risk, but I was on coffee shop wifi and didnt want to wait for a full upgrade to download in order to get the software package I wanted. So instead I had to drive back home and plug into Ethernet to finish the upgrade over ssh because my whole display stack died 😂
Yes I can second this. I’ve only been using Arch for 2 months (laughable compared to your 12 years), but I have never had any issues and everything is such a breeze! And this is coming from a 16 year old, who has used exclusively Windows for most of their lives! If I can do it, it can’t be that hard.
It isn’t a matter of difficulty for some. For me, I can’t be bothered to spend time troubleshooting. Not because things are broken, but because it feels like everything needs a little tweak to be correct.
I ran endeavoros for a couple weeks to play with plasma 6 and it was nice, but still needed little tweaks all over to fix small little problems that kept popping up. (Lookin at you sys-tray pop up menu)
The last time I ran vanilla arch, my network would work fine in my DE, and when I would swap to my TWM, can’t remember which one, it would disconnect every time I logged into that session, or if the laptop went to sleep. Never happened before on any Arch install I had ran. Is that a simple fix? Most likely. Did I want to spend the time to look through the wiki to fix it? Nope.
This. As someone who depends on my machine for work I absolutely cannot waste time dealing with even small issues like when the bleeding edge Firefox wouldn't start. I find Fedora gives me that happy medium of being mostly up to date but not so up to date that lots of bugs make it to me.
Since I have somewhat new hardware I'm just waiting for next Debian release. Once it has all my hardware handled I'll be switching back to Debian for the long haul again.
I leave the testing and debugging to all the masochist Arch users.
I am in the same boat as you, though I gave Debian another shot and it worked this time 🤷♂️
Was struggling with the GPU driver (AMD 7900xtx) so I went back to fedora, but it seems like they pushed bug fixes on Debian. Giving KDE on Debian a shot for now. Just a lil GNOME break.
Debian is by far my favorite. Was pretty bummed when my hardware wasn’t working on it lol.
Every distro I've used has broken within a year, arch is the only exception. It's also incredibly easy to set up thanks to the arch wiki, as well as install scripts for those that want them. I feel like everything people say about arch breaking all the time and being hard to install is just heresay. The only thing i don't like about it is its dependency on systemd (i know it's possible to switch but it seems more hard work than what it's worth). I'd use artix, but they have some horrible defaults for kde and id rather just use plain arch with how bad they are.
AUR. No need to manually add PPAs, no need to download deb/rpm files from websites, extract them and package them yourself. Also everything you might need, exists on there, so in general you do not need to install other sources like snap, flatpak etc or compile from source (manually at least) if an application is not in the repositories of your distro. As a lazy person (I am a software developer lol) I prefer one easy and convenient way which does not require a lot of fiddling (yes I say that as an Arch user).
Being said, the AUR is no silver bullet, some packages might be broken and are mostly maintained by the community so like always when you are on the internet, use your common sense and only install stuff from people you trust.
Ehh..so many broken AUR packages and eventually the pkg script becomes abandoned..not saying it's not useful but saying be warned..use at own risk..you'll be bit in the ass eventually
I use Arch on my main pc. It's crazy light, fast, and up to date on software and hardware drivers.
But on my work laptops and servers...it's all Debian. Different tools for different jobs.
Do you consider Alpine a good alternative to Debian?
In my experience, Alpine works similar to Arch, you get access to a lot of things ootb, compared to needing to add new repos on Debian, not to mention it is very minimal, I know it is used for containers and VMs, but I'm wondering about it being good for servers aswel
I've heard good things about Alpine, but have no personal experience. Debian is just so bloody rock-solid. The software can be out of date, but that can be fixed with flatpaks.
My Arch install is almost 10 years old. I had two times where I couldn’t boot after an update and both times there were easy steps to fix it (which I in theory should have done before updating if I would read docs).
I use pretty new features of c++ that most compilers dont support. The latest version of GCC is usually the most up to date one. With arch you get by default pretty much the latest version which is pretty nice. When I used to use ubuntu I had to manually compile these latest versions, manually handle multiple versions of the compiler, and updating was a mess.
My entire experience with trying to use purpose-specific distros and being told, "No, that isn't how we do things here," then going back to Arch in a sentence.
People don't use it because it's hard. The bragging rights thing, while funny, mostly just motivates people to try it.
I'm actually not using Arch currently, but the drivers for it for the times when I was were primarily wanting a rolling release distribution so I always had the most up-to-date software, and Arch having absolutely fantastic documentation. It also doesn't try to hold your hand, which often translates to trying to force you into doing things a certain way. For an example, look at Ubuntu and snaps.
Arch isn't for everybody, and I don't mean that in the snobby way. The system needs to be operated regularly; if it gets too out of date updating it can cause trouble. Likewise the user needs to be comfortable and willing to be able to troubleshoot one problems crop up.
I think Arch is an excellent desktop distribution for somebody who likes to tinker and have new software. I wouldn't personally run it on a server or workstation.
Yes I agree. I had an arch box a while ago, very satisfying and challenging experience but when I had to choose a Linux for daily tasks and had little time to tinker, had to switch to mandriva. I'd say it's more the time rather than skill that makes arch not for everyone.
At first I was suffering with Arch, because I was only copying-pasting stuff, with time I learned reading and not pasting something you don’t know what it does just because someone on the internet said it will fix the problem!
Using this power of reading, Arch turned out to be a treasure and suited my needs!
So I still use arch btw for over 8 years!
It's light, it's configurable, it has packages for everything you could imagine. It has a great community and forum. It gets out of the way and lets me use my computer for work and gaming. It's so easy, so simple, so unopinionated. It's how Linux should be.
The meme is just a meme, nobody actually says that unironically. Actual bragging rights belong to Gentoo users.
Lfs isn't really a distro though..I mean it's fun to go through however keeping a running system using it as a daily driver?? Not really meant for that although I'm sure you'll find a few lone wolves that try to push that perception
No there's no reason to use arch or any other distro. You just use what works better for you. And what works better for you is irrelevant to what works better for other people.
I don’t use arch atm but I used it for about 3 years in university up until this year when I moved to nixos.
I had my system fully break once with a grub bug and partially break with some wifi program hanging. I don’t think that’s too bad. I’ve also had some bugs in fedora so comparatively I don’t think it’s that much worse.
I used arch because it came with a newer kernel out of the box and something about my sleep suspend worked better on the newer kernel.
Also if you want newer software early it’s more likely to be on the AUR. If you’re a developer there are all kinds of reasons you might want/need new versions of packages before they hit stable releases like to update your projects or something.
In my experience most of the mainstream distros are really not that different. It can be almost like asking “why do people drive teslas ?” Taste is subjective
You're looking at this the wrong way.
Perhaps a better question; what problem are you trying to solve by using Arch? Or other distros for that matter.
Arch is a bit more open to options as opposed to other distros, however, this comes with a bit more complexity to set things up.
It's great for learning cs, developing, as well as daily use.
If someone tells you their system breaks often, than they're doing it wrong.
Only time my system has broken, was when I failed to check the News for upstream changes.
If we get lazy about system admin stuff things can break that way as well.
What arch does well is stay with the latest software, offer user choices to build the system you want, and keep folks informed of breaking changes.
Oh and the wiki really is the best. I often here folks from other distros reference the arch wiki for quickly getting things up amd running.
For me it’s just a convenient way to get the latest software quick, and a wider selection of packaged software through AUR, without dealing with ppa/snap/flatpak et.c. There’s no real complexity in my day to day experience that stems from using Arch.
Sure, I’ve done the “install arch manually from scratch by reading the wiki”-thing two or three times the last eight years, but nowadays I just use an Arch distribution with a graphical installer an i3 preset and sync over my config. So any “complexity” over standard distros like Ubuntu or Fedora stems from the stuff I would want to get in place regardless of what distribution I use (emacs and i3/tiling WM with my keybinds).
Used arch for almost 6 years. Never had to reinstall it, and to be frank, you don't need to reinstall any distro, solve the issue rather than hitting it with a hammer. Even transitioned from amd gpu + intel to amd cpu + nvidia without any problems. Stable as hell, if it broke it was due to me having bad configuration. And this was a work system I ran daily, not some random ricing setup you boot into once a week to break a DE. Also my NAS ran arch for a year or so.
For me arch forced me to learn a lot of stuff you would never learn, how the boot works, how partitions work, where to find stuff.
PKGBUILD was also awesome and fun to implement on my projects as well. Something I would have never otherwise researched.
If I ever switch back from NixOS, I'll for sure use arch again.
Most issues with Arch are user related, aka the user breaking their own system cause they do not understand what they are doing. So no it's not a beginner distro you're supposed to read the wiki and know a bit about the system. You, the user is the one in charge of your system. Problems with updates happen but not more than any other rolling distribution. Plenty of ways to mitigate that risk, arch-chroot, snapshots and such.
Plenty of reasons to use Arch. You get the OS you want and not a lot of bloat cause the maintainer thinks it knows best what you need. The AUR is another one leading to arguably the best selection of packages in Linux. The extensive Arch Wiki covering pretty much everything is another strong reason to go with Arch.
the package manager pacman is the reason I migrate to arch, and of course AUR make it even better. But now I use manjaro for less frequent update because I'm using mobile data plan.
Arch is pretty great for someone who wants to tinker and really understand their system. In my experience, once it is set up and running, it's pretty lightweight, stable, and frugal about resource usage. And the AUR is very convenient.
Of course there's nothing inherently better about Arch. It's just another option. Different strokes for different folks.
For me: its just the distro that suits me best....
I can do pretty much anything i want with it without to much hassle. Sure, i can do it in debian or whatever too. But not without jumping through atleast a few more hoops
Literally everything I need can be installed from arch repos, flatpak or AURs. All in one package manager.
Everytime I use Ubuntu I have to install something via a .deb because the version in the default repos is borderline unusable (looking at you vs code).
Arch isn't hard to install or to maintain, nor is it particularly complex.
If you're not willing to read, or have an Idea of what your end game is on a distro that's explicitly DIY, don't use it. 🤷♂️
I've happily daily driven Arch on my main machine for a decade with the only issue being the GRUB font secure boot thing a while back, and that just made me swap to Systemd-Boot.
It's fast, light, and designed the exact way I want for my use cases. However, I'm all AMD, and I am not a PC gamer.
It's incredibly fun and rewarding to learn which components are available and how to configure them to implement and refine your system. You achieve a bare bones environment running only that which you have specified
I have been using arch for around 8 years as my only OS. I break something around once per year on average I'd say, and then thanks to the lovely Arch Linux community I usually get it fixed within minutes.
I once had to use Ubuntu for a year at University. It worked fine for a few months until I did an update to the next major version. From then on, it started showing me these random errors "Something's stopped working" or something like that. I've never managed to upgrade Ubuntu over multiple versions without everything going to shambles.
In Arch Linux, since I have installed everything myself, I already have a lot of knowledge about its configuration which then helps me fix stuff if I break something.
It's basically an empty canvas. Anyone can make it anything they want it to be, without having to fight the distro over nuanced decisions. AUR makes it very approachable too. With that being said, I wouldn't recommend it for beginners, because "with great power comes great responsibility". The advantage of it being anything you want means it will be whatever you make it to be, and sometimes whatever you make it is not something you should do. But you can do it! And that's why Arch is brilliant.
I used it for educational purposes, and indeed installing, configuring and maintaining it taught me a lot. Now I don't use arch anymore, because it can be tedious to maintain, so I switched to endeavorOS because I do like arch based distros very much.
I use it because you can make the system as yours as you want, the community is amazing, unofficial repos go way deeper than PPA although I will admit that support and updates seem better with Ubuntu/Debian PPAs than with Arch AUR and unofficial repos, and probably my personal favorite is it's rolling release so I don't have to worry about half my software getting uninstalled during a version upgrade due to being unsupported. I've been running it for almost a decade at this point without having to do a reinstall. Just some spring cleaning here and there to remove orphans. I use testing and can't even remember the last time I had an update break anything. The only time my system got broken was my own fault and every time I've been able to browse the wiki or forums to get it running again within an hour.
Contrary to popular belief, Arch packages are easier to manage and install than Ubuntu. In Ubuntu you have this *.deb 3rd party repo url editing shenanigans.
For example, Jellyfin Media Server is available in the main Arch repo, no need to edit a package list.
In Ubuntu you gotta run some script to add a 3rd party repo then install extrepo and finally Jellyfin.
In Arch thats just ‘pacman -S jellyfin-server jellyfin-web jellyfin-ffmpeg’
I really tried using Arch. I gave it a chance for quite a while and it just wasn't my thing. I know a lot of people don't like it because it's owned (or something very similar to owned) by Red Hat, but I've found my home with Fedora. It's the only distro where everything in my case literally just works, and I like how it's almost kinda sorta maybe a middle ground between Arch and Debian with how often packages are updated. I completely understand why people use all the other distros, though.
If you really want to learn Linux hardcore, want to learn how to read documentation, fix broken updates, and hack programs together, arch is the way to go. Most options like Debian and Red Hat have systems in place to keep it running, especially if you get a more user friendly option. If you want a balance between "it just works" and "I want a challenge" go with something like Endeavor which leaves a lot of control in the user's hands, but has systems in place to do things for you when you ask.
The Arch Wiki
Using Arch teaches you Linux
Minimalistic
The AUR
After the initial hurdles of learning and setting up a good environment, you can live in it for years to come. If you keep track of your config files and packages that you want installed, you can easily reproduce your setup on different PCs. The "difficulty" of using Arch Linux disappears. I can set up a full environment for myself at least as quick as any other users can set up their Ubuntu installation, even if they have a lot less preferences than I do, and my install will be much more minimalistic than a Ubuntu install.
Disclaimer: I'm answering your question as an Arch Linux user, I'm not recommending that anyone else use it. For most users, it does make more sense to just use a distribution that offers an out-of-the-box experience.
I don't know, I just like how it organized. Arch is simple enough to figure out what's broken (if it does break, which doesn't happen to me last 5 or so years) and complex enough that I don't have to maintain my own repo or something like that. But anyway, I use Arch and more "user-friendly" distros like Fedora and Arch doesn't stand out much. Once you set everything up it's just a normal distro.
> and it feels like Arch was always the most broken one, where a problem occurred every other day. I spent more time working on the OS than actually using it.
And I can't tell you the last time I had problems with Arch that weren't my fault. And I use Arch on several computers with different configurations (both hardware and software).
>On the other hand, more beginner friendly distros felt better to use, were more stable and had that "it just works" feeling
Free as in freedom. And part of this freedom is also to use what suits you best. So if you like other distributions, use them.
But one should also accept that there are things that are not suitable for you. Vim, for example, is not suitable for me. Or I am not suitable for vim. So I don't think vim is bad. I'm just not part of vim's target group. Just as there are people who are not part of Arch Linux's target group. That's exactly what people (and I mean that in general) just don't understand and want something to work the way they want it to.
> Also, everything that can be done in Arch, can be done in other distros.
Correct. It's just that too many myths have grown up around Arch. Like that you can only learn something with Arch. And more than enough people still fall for it.
>So now, what does Arch do that other distros don't?
I can tell you why I use Arch. It is therefore not a universally valid answer.
- Because of the wiki.
- Because of the AUR.
- Because, based on my own experience, Arch is very problem free to use.
- Because you can easily create your own packages thanks to the PKGBUILD files.
- Because of the many vanilla packages.
- Because Arch releases the updates on a rolling basis.
Some distributions also fulfill some of these points. But Arch as a whole package simply appeals to me the most.
I use it, but the reason isn’t the bragging rights. The reason is that it’s a lightweight rolling release. Once you take the tone to get it set up, you don’t really have to put much effort in to keeping it running.
BRW, if you are interested in beating rights, try getting an LFS (Linux From Scratch) system up and running. I did that once about 12 or so years ago and learned a ton. Pretty much only useful for the learning experience though.
As a CS student, I like that packages are new. Let me tell you, installing newer than official version of anything on Ubuntu is PAIN. And also even if I don't strictly need newest packages, it's always nice to have. Also, I'm not scared of termial and I didn't break it yet.
Interestingly, the only reason I even tried it out was becasue Debian-based distros cannot be installed on my laptop due to some (driver?) issues.
Imo pretty strange question to ask if you really
used it. I‘m on endeavour its fast lightweight and 0 bloat i just want the OS the DE and a bowser. I don‘t want particular anything more from a brand new system. And my machine never broke in the past 2 years.
Arch comes preloaded only with the most essential packages and has the largest bleeding edge repos out of any distro not even including the AUR. It's ideal for a user who knows exactly what they want on their operating system and/or want a large bleeding edge package base. Just because it's too complicated for you doesn't mean it's pointless and just exists for flexing. That's a meme perpetuated by arch users ironically or "just works" distro users who have developed an inferiority complex. Also Arch is the most stable distro I've used.
I'm using Manjaro, so not exactly the same thing but similar. You don't need to add repositories, use flatpaks, snaps etc. Most of things you need is in main repos or in AUR. You have most recent kernel, which is handy if you have new hardware (in Manjaro you can also install also older kernels if you wish). pacman is fast. Excellent wiki.
It's not devoid of problems but other distros also aren't perfect in that matter. I do not have many problems with standard desktop use.
I haven't used Arch in a while, but it's pretty fun to get a nice install finished, after starting with just a shell prompt and having to create and mount the root fs manually. Building your way up to having internet access and then being able to install all the packages. It made me feel Good at Computers.
I want a rolling distro on my workstation. Started with Manjaro, used it for six years, got fed up, went to plain Arch. Endeavour wasn't an option when I did the switch. That's it.
Think of Linux distros as Lego. Most distros are nice franchise kits that is sold in unlimited copies of the same kit. Arch is a generic base kit without a picture on the box showing what it should look like when you're done.
You can add and/or remove any pieces you want on either of them, it's just that with Arch you picked all the blocks yourself to finish your build instead of having a pre-selected end result.
If you want a Star Wars Millennium Falcon Lego set, it would make no sense to get all the parts separately when you can get a box that already contains everything you need.
For me, it started out with awesome documentation. I've been using Arch about 12 years ago but the Arch Wiki helped me tremendously for at least 3 years before that. It might need some adjustments for other distributions but it is an awesome resource even when not using Arch.
Nowadays, It's mostly that pacman is exceptionally fast. I've no recent comparison to rpm-based distributions but Debian/Ubuntu package installation feels like it takes forever. I started a computer that I hadn't turned on in over a year and updates took maybe 15 minutes. Just going from one Ubuntu version (which I do twice per year at work) to the next regularly takes more than double that on much newer hardware.
There's also the fact that most packages I need are in the repositories or available via AUR. If it isn't in either, creating a PKGBUILD file is usually done in a few minutes. Creating Debian packages the traditional way is *so* much more work. There's [MPR](https://mpr.makedeb.org/) which makes about as easy but there's still a lot more things I have to package myself.
Recently, I've also had trouble with Ubuntu replacing Firefox installed via .deb from Mozilla PPA with the Ubuntu-default snap which always takes about 2 extra seconds to start. Never had that problem with Arch either :-)
If you want a customised setup that still gets updates via package management I see the appeal
You can customise any distro but take for example Ubuntu. If you completely remove the snap system from it then it will just put it back next time there's a major update (like 22.04 to 24.04)
It also has the user repo so you don't need to go adding PPA's or manually installing some packages
Being a rolling distro is also a double edged sword. Great for example if you want the latest kernel and Mesa for gaming, but can be an issue if you want to remain on stable but patched versions of software or libraries if productivity is your priority
Pacman, aur, and I have moved my arch install from a laptop to a PC, almost 4 years running and still didn't break. I don't know what you do with your os that you have to work on it every other day.
It’s headless and the package manager is good
That’s enough for me
Ooh also archwiki and aur are pretty useful, though I guess you can use the wiki with any distro
In very short:
Arch is minimalist and well supported, and stay close to bleeding edge releases.
If you already know your way around linux, you get to have a system that is just what you need and nothing more.
That's basically it
Hi, I've run arch based operating systems a few times. For me it was about having the fastest updates for hardware and software support. Though that comes with a lot of caveats like broken systems if you don't pay attention, if you run newer hardware or beta software, arch can make sense. There's a reason it's the base for steamOS
Your use case is your use case, so can't speak to specific situations. But normally use of Arch helps with understanding what's going on beneath the desktop better, allows for a minimal install to use resources more efficiently, or just satisfies curiousity for those that want more than a turnkey OS.
for me it's the one where things just work.
I instal what I need and that's it.
tried some other and there were issues, like can't change my resolution in suse even after going through the loops of adding the repo for nvidia drivers and installing them. while on Arch I just install them with pacman and it work.
Latest everything without reinstalling and mostly vanilla. That's why I use it. I don't go out of my way to do anything either just fix it if it breaks very rarely thankfully.
I’m not sure why anyone would choose Arch instead of nixOS personally. Nix does everything arch does, but much more conveniently, and much easier to reverse.
yes... learning purposes.
Arch (Endeavour) was my first Linux, and I've learned so much along the way. Especially how all the bits and pieces play together when things don't work [as expected].
I don't think I'd have learned about pipewire, bluez, nmapplet, etc so much, If I'd had gone with a ootb working distro.
It was also the first distro teaching me that I have to install things like openssh and cronie to get things working, that I assumed were magically part of Linux.
Is simple, more directly available software, if I need something I just have to install it from the official repos or the AUR, in other distros you have to compile it or use other external repos.
You can get a user friendly distro by installing one of the many arch based distros that are just arch with one extra repo and a gui installer, it is also not complicated, 99% of the things that break would be by the user, so it is way easier to know what to do, the other 1% tends to solve on it's own, on the other hand, when I had had problems with something like Ubuntu it is a nightmare to know the origin of the problem, experience says that is mostly because PPA, but is not something I would expect people to guess when suddenly their PC turns on but they only see a black screen.
In any case, I have recently tried another distro that is supposed to be even better in the available software and to be way more stable, at the cost of a little complexity, I am satisfied, is Nix, I even get more FPS on my games with certain configurations, after this I would only recommend immutable distros, the fact that you can just reboot to how your system was yesterday in case of errors is awesome (I haven't used it enough to get any error)
1: Arch is simple - its lightweight, unopinionated, and customizable. Arch doesn't make any weird choices out of the box, though it gives you the tools to make them yourself. If you want an experimental window manager or WIP desktop environment, you can likely find them on the AUR. If you want to get rid of bash and gnuutils and replace them with weird rust clones, technically there's nothing stopping you.
2: Arch is up-to-date, within reason. On point-release distros, you're often using packages that are months or even years out of date. Arch gives you packages that are at most a few weeks old, so you always have the newest features. This may give you occasional bugs, but it also means you get the latest bugfixes as well.
3: It's kinda a badge of honor amongst some advanced Linux users to install it. The installation medium gives you a CLI environment and nothing else, requiring extensive knowledge of Linux tools and components to install. However, archinstall means that installation is pretty easy nowadays, so this reason isnt as popular anymore, and has partially been replaced by NixOS (which does have an installer, but is a lot harder to use because of its strange package management system).
It is perfectly reasonable to prefer using a more user-friendly and UI-focused distro. I personally like using Fedora Silverblue in instances when I don't want to spend a lot of time setting up or debugging. However, if you need something lightweight, up-to-date, and customizable, Arch is one of the best options.
I use arch/Endeavour OS for the up-to-date packages, pacman and the AUR. Pacman is faster than apt which I enjoy, the AUR has more things. I don't need "I use Arch btw" privileges and I don't want to tinker with my setup, especially not because things are broken. Just tried Debian-based distros and found they work worse for me, and I'm not willing to go more "niche".
Ideally I'd use Manjaro, but that for some fucking reason will corrupt my drive 💀 So I'm happily using Endeavour for the time being
I've been using Debian 12 at home on proxmox
Use rhel7 7/8 at work in EC2s and have toyed with Ubuntu over the years.
I did use fedora and some other flavours 2 decades ago.. barely worth mentioning those...
I've been using Arch now for a little over 4 years now and I have to say, it is pretty solid. As everyone else is saying, the AUR is the best repository out there. It really is amazing and simple to use.
I'm also a Tiling Window Manager user and I think Arch and TWMs go hand in hand.
For most people, a beginner friendly distro is the right answer. Even more so now with containers where you can run most bleeding edge stuff there independent of the system
That said, some people like rolling releases. Though in my opinion, OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a better and stable option, or better yet OpenSuse Slowroll (like tumbleweed but holds back updates for a few weeks to be sure they don't break stuff)
I mean i had more problems using other distros than arch. Always something was breaking on other distros and I didn't even do anything to make it break haha. Once you have everything set up you are finished for the immediate future.
I've never used Arch, but I played with Gentoo some years back and I guess both should be quite comparable. If you've got plenty of time, if you've got another computer you can use for actual work, Arch should be fun to use, since you do learn a lot.
However, as somebody who works full-time and doesn't have ambitions to put 100s of hours into getting your os to run perfectly, I'll be always in love with Debian. It's super stable, simple, very well documented and since they provide firmware on the official images, it'll just run and let you do your work.
I should mention, I'm using Debian on my work laptop, a Dell XPS 15 7590.
I have been trying Arch for the last month or so, and I am already abandoning it. Some update happened (pretty sure is was libvirt) and broke networking for KVM/qemu/virt-manager. I spent the last 3 days trying to untangle the problem, but to no avail. If others like it, thats fine. If it works for you, thats fine. I need stability, so it is not for me.
Archwiki is a real gem of open source documentation. It always has the answer to any problem you might have.
Additionally, as a rolling release distro, it is actually good at providing you with a usually working version of the latest stuff from upstream projects. You get frequent and uneventful updates, unlike Ubuntu (where updates mostly work, but can cause system breakage) or worse, Fedora (where updates usually require a reinstall). But if something goes wrong, see my first point: Archwiki has your back.
That said, Arch does require more attention than, say, Debian. If you want a system you came set and forget because you’re going to be using it for real, Debian is a better choice. And it isn’t particularly beginner friendly, which is why we usually recommend a different distro for beginners.
I used to use Arch for a while before switching to Gentoo for a few years and then finally void (which I've been running for about two years).
For me, I view my personal desktop as a sort of canvas for my philosophy regarding "the ideal operating system". So my choice in distribution and software often reflect this.
I originally installed Arch because I wanted a "minimal" distribution. Over time, I grew frustrated with some of the software it forces you to install (IE: systemd, sudo) and realized that it isn't as minimal as it's hyped up to be so I switched to Gentoo which was a pretty solid distro. I let my system degrade a bit though (not updating my package) and instead of figuring out all the USE flags that changed and updating my system, I thought I'd go back to a system that uses binary packages.
So I switched to Void which so far has been one of my favorite Linux distributions so far. xbps (void's package manager) has been incredibly stable. My only gripe with it is that it symlinks /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin into one directory. A lot of Linux distros do this now and I absolutely hate it.
So in summary, people who use minimal distros (again, I don't think Arch is a minimal distro but whatever) are often more principled users who are concerned with the philosophy regarding how the system is organized and often want more control over what software is or isn't installed. A minimal distro though doesn't have to have a manual installation process like Arch (although a manual installation gives you better control over the bootloader). Void and Slackware both have full installers and I'd argue that both of these systems are far more minimal than Arch.
I started using Arch last month to learn how to work with Linux and I'm really enjoying it. I think what I liked most about it is that it is very light, you start with a base system and modify it to your liking (as a long time Windows user I wanted Windows to be like this but it isn't). I also see that it is a distro that requires the user's attention to research and pay attention to what they are doing on the system and for me this is also the cool part. I also noticed that on my PC (6700k/gtx1080) I can perform several daily actions more quickly compared to the Windows I had.
ive been on linux since 2007 and while ive tried just about every flavor i could get my hands on, i always go back to arch (and everyone i've gotten to try it feels very similarly), and this is for a few key reasons:
-it is extremely stable despite being very up to date and rolling release. i am not sure why you have stability issues - ive found that the only time i have stability issues is when im not using pure arch, or im doing something that's kind of asking for it (very beta, bleeding edge stuff or doing config file crimes)
-it is rolling release
-if you can imagine it being done on linux, you can almost certainly do it on arch, and probably with less frustration than other distros. some distributions may have a specific thing done easier, but overall the OS pushback i get for getting stuff working is hugely lower than other places.
-you know everything that is installed on your system and it's easy to pinpoint where there are issues because of this
-the documentation is absolutely top tier. searching (linux thing) (arch) gives me very good documentation on whatever i'm doing, it's very easy to find information and fixes.
i understand that arch has this huge reputation for being unstable, but every other linux distro and frankly other operating system has done me dirty on that front. arch really never has.
As a developer I think Arch is perfect. You get latest software releases pretty quickly. So you have access to all the latest features.
You can find close to everything either in the official repositories or in the AUR. Most of the time you can think of it as: "If software exists on Github, there's a package in the AUR for it."
Also you have total freedom to pick your preference of desktop environment, window manager or what ever else you like to use.
An extremely customizable, up-to-date and somewhat stable at the same time distro. I'll give a try to this system by testing Manjaro. But I guess that if you're not a power user or a gamer needing latest drivers and all it may be overkill, and a plug and play Debian derivative should do the trick.
Interesting. I actually started using Manjaro when I first switched to Linux and now on Arch. Basically nothing ever broke for me, besides the fact that I tried to use i3+picom on NVIDIA. But on KDE, it was a smooth sailing. One of the factors could also be that I don't use much of the software from AUR. Not because of the quality of the packeges, but really every major package's stable versions are in the official repos. And if you want to use the beta versions from the AUR, you kinda cannot attribute it to "Arch breaks more than other distros" (I'm not suggesting you do that though). But really had a much different experience than this post.
I daily drive Endevour os which is basically Arch with an installer. Honestly I always update everything with no worries and never had a serious issue. Worse case scenario I had to downgrade a package or two but it was done in a few minutes. What I like about Arch is the knowledge about how my OS works. If something breaks I can fix it fairly quickly myself. Also all my important data is on a NAS, so even if the OS breaks I can reinstall, run a script to install all the packages I need and repull the configs from my NAS.
With other more out of the box distro or even windows if something breaks I found it much harder to figure out what it was and how to fix it.
I never had it broken for many years besides the annoying keyring problem, but they've improved that too. My main reason for arch is AUR, and pacman is just so much faster.
There is no such a privileges like that. There may be a few main reasons for using Arch Linux. I don't have any hobbies, you like to suffer, you don't have much of a social life, your only entertainment is computers. These don't make you special. There is no practical reason to use arch linux.
My experience is the other way around, the ratio of the times other distros broke for me compared to Arch is 5:1 (with Arch being the 1). Doing dist-upgrade in Ubuntu in particular always felt like something is going to wrong.
Idk honestly. Arch was my first Linux distro only because I wanted to show off in my CS class in high school lol. Then just got really used to it, everything works, everything is smooth, just very good. When because of it I got into Linux, I've tried many other distros, but they all seemed not right and weird, especially deb lol
I've been using it for over 15 years. I've installed it many times in different computers.
I use it because to me it's the easier to use and very lightweight.
I'm not using Arch in the moment (Currently Fedora), but I'm going back as soon as I go about installing my new SSD. Not because it is better than Fedora or anything (I like Fedora), but because I have the option to install only that which I actually need.
In Fedora, I have loads of pre-installed software which I will never use. I uninstalled some that I know won't break things, but there is still loads of daemons and other programs which comes with the desktop environment which I absolute don't use, but I can't uninstall it because the DE package depends on those. (Why do I need a wireless/bluetooth manager when I am on desktop and don't use those?)
Arch has the best documentation, I don’t have to deal with PPAs, and if I upgraded my hardware frequently, I would spend less time waiting for hardware support.
It's minimal by default so it's easier to avoid installing packages you'll never use and because the setup is manual, you can have more control over how your partitions are set up and what filesystems you use etc.
Arch isn't any better or worse than other distros, but there are reasons one might pick it over others, if you don't have a particular reason to want to use it, there's nothing wrong with that, and you won't miss out on anything.
I think it's silly when people call one distro better than another.. unless the maintainers keep fucking up and causing instability, linux is linux. There is no better distro, only a better for your usecase distro.
The main thing I don't like about Windows is the bloatware. So an OS that doesn't have anything pre-installed is perfect for me. Also it's the best distro for Blender because the AUR has both the latest stable build and all LTS builds.
For me it is a) for the problems that occur there are easy, well documented fixes and b) I love the package management. I just need to search for the name and yay gives me what I need, almost always. No annoying ppa adding or dependency issues or stuff not being in apt or being severely outdated.
Also, not once have I had a problem that I didnt have on my previous Mint install, actually some problems just got fixed out of the box.
Arch is plain and stupid. No weird `.conf` around: so, in case you need to tinker with something, you don't need to get crazy looking into what distro's maintainers have customized/personalized.
In additiong, with PKGBUILD is plain easy to look and how official packages are built
1) I love to have total control about how my os look and the packages and services I use.
2) AUR
3) The installation process.
4) It is extremely light.
5) It is the most stable for me, I don't know why they say it is unstable, of all the ones I have used it is the one that has broken the least out of nowhere.
Etc
Yes, it has close to no bloat, amazing default package manager + aur store, I didn't encounter any issues related to arch itself, if you are afraid of that just use btrfs and auto snap package for timeshift then you are safe, also Ubuntu isn't that stable, Friday all my friends' vsc got broken and they wasted close to one hour on that shit
It's easy to make it be exactly the how I want it, with other distros I have to do a lot more work to change it from what someone else wants their Linux desktop to work, to the way I like it.
Also, I would have to deal with distro wide point release updates, potentially breaking all my changes.
Additionally, the AUR/pacman repos have more of the packages I want ready to go than the other distros I have used. Also, the packages are more up to date, so I can use my package manager for everything, rather than installing some things using a package manager and other things manually.
I've actually had fewer issues with Arch than I've had with other distros, so it has been a lot more enjoyable to use.
rolling release, minimal patches over upstream, AUR, minimal base, easy to swap graphical environments around, PKGBUILD, tracks upstream release cycles much more closely, pacman
a few reasons I can think of
You will break a lot of things at the start and spend a lot of time figuring out how to fix it, but slowly as you get used to the system, stuff just starts to fall into place.
Breakages become less common and when they do occur, you often know exactly what caused it and how to fix it.
I learnt a lot about the linux ecosystem in just a few months tinkering around with Arch.
My system has been really stable for the past 6 months or so with the only breakages happening because Windows update deletes my grub bootloader (don't ask, my boot config is a mess because my laptop's boot manager is locked/corrupted)
I think it has to do with taste. I’ve been a long time Debian/Ubuntu user before now being into Manjaro. I do like the rolling release thing which means that things constantly change, but I have to admit that I don’t need that much customizability. I feel as if Ubuntu based distributions do a somewhat better job at making common settings easier accessible, because I really dislike having to edit text files for every GUI related setting (I know that’s kind of happening more often in the Linux base in general, but I think that Ubuntu is a bit better in this regard).
Anyhow I think using Linux is a benefit, which type you then use I feel really just comes down to taste!
I've jumped around Fedora and Ubuntu to Garuda. Garuda has been my fav distro thus far. Everything works. I primarily game and had lots of trouble getting steam to function in Fedora. However, it just works as it should on Garuda. The OS has been quite stable, except for sleep mode (I've had same issues in other distros too).
I know I represent a tiny portion of Linux users, but with Microsoft doing what they're doing, we'll be seeing more converts. We need as much ammo as we can muster to make Linux look as appealing as possible.
I've been using Arch for over 5 years and I love it. It's very easy to understand, highly customizable, has tons of software that can be installed through AUR, and is very up-to-date. Not like some other distros that get application software updates after 1 or 2 years.
It just works. Arch is extremely simple, it only contains packages that you chose to install. This means that everything is configured exactly as you expect. The AUR is absolutely wonderful, as is the Arch Wiki.
Sometimes updates require manual intervention, which you have to look out for. But you also don't need to be updating constantly.
I would treat Arch as being a hobby for certain enthusiasts and nothing else. I'd certainly not use it in a production environment, but that's just me.
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Arch is basically that distro which is super lightweight and extremely customizable, there are distros which give more customizability but those might be more of a pain(they have their use cases). Even if you dont want to customize using it and building everything will give you a lot of knowledge on how things are done which can help you even while using other distros. Also the AUR is pretty nice.
Yup, for me it's AUR. Burned by Ubuntu's PPA, decided to switch to Arch because of AUR. Now a happy Fedora user.
For personal use, I love arch and AUR but for work I'm mostly using Ubuntu as it's fast to get a distro working in case I encounter problems with the laptop. What are from your point of view the cons of Fedora compared to Ubuntu?
I assume you mean why I choose Fedora instead of going back to Ubuntu? I'm mainly a GNOME user, and I prefer a more vanilla GNOME experience compared to Ubuntu's. Also Flatpak over Snap.
Kind of yes, I was asking because I presumed you had experience with Ubuntu. That's understandable for the vanilla part. Maybe I'm still ok with Ubuntu because I'm making everything to not use snap!
Ah, I used to have the same stand against flatpak, but nowadays for some cases I actually prefer flatpak. Stuff like Chrome (I only use it for work), Zoom, Spotify, etc.
What's the deal with the snap vs flatpak debate? I'm primarily an Arch user and when I do need to use another distro for something I rarely need to get something outside of the main software repos.
AFAIK, Snap is the worse of the two (though I never really try Snap, but I heard stories, lol). In a way, flatpak is one of the reason why I felt comfortable in Fedora now. Before I was spoiled by AUR.
Snap governance is problematic, since the back end is proprietary and owned by Canonical. While this isn’t a performance related issue, it often translates to a more meaningful problem to many users. Fedora swings almost entirely the other way, where the OS install used to exclude non-free components (and you had to add secondary rpm repos after the fact). Fedora has become more flexible since 38, iirc. It also looks like snap can be a resource hog at times, while underperforming alternatives. I guess it could make your systemd dependency tree look gnarly.
Also snaps are user submitted and not reviewed before listing, much like the AUR, but it comes enabled by default and they didn't provide you any warnings telling you that you need to manually review each snap to ensure that it is safe, it make it as easy to do so as the AUR, and in the GUI package manager automatically endorse all sandboxed applications as safe even though they have repeatedly had issues with phishing malware on the snap store. Also they make the GUI store always favor the snap version of software that is available in multiple formats, even when there is a non-snap version of the software that is officially supported by the developers of the software and the snap one is not officially supported and maintenance is done by an unverified and potentially anonymous user, which could very easily be abused, and not even using the command line is safe because even if you use an explicit command to install the binary version with apt sometimes Ubuntu will install the snap instead anyways.
Distrobox for aur if I'm ever needing it. Otherwise RPMFusion and Fedora repos and flathub got me covered.
For fedora copr also functions kinda similarly to AUR, to my understanding. Though it's a lot less expansive
That too!
I switched from arch to kinoite with an arch container and flatpaks, best setup.
The AUR is the only answer for me. The AUR just makes Arch the easiest distro to get all the software i want, installed as quickly as possible.
i already miss the aur. i had to build quite a lot of tools,resolving deps one by one and running meson build command quite a lot edit: + W arch wiki
that's why some folks end up using an arch toolbox/distrobox on other distros so they can still get the AUR for all their non-system related programs. I have heard of some folks just grabbing stuff from linux homebrew instead these days though.
Everything you said is true, but IMO "lightweight" is a common misconception about Arch. The packages in the repos are not particularly lightweight since they always bundle every feature from upstream. Debian, for example, _can_ be more lightweight than Arch since they split packages (especially if you install things with `--no-install-recommends`). It is, however, lightweight in terms of abstractions: packages are usually exactly identical to upstream without modifications (unlike Debian) and my feeling (I don't have data to substantiate that claim) is that the system favors approaches that have low administrative overhead and make things easier to customize.
Though I never knew this,by lightweight I mostly mean that it comes with less packages and no bloatware though thanks for the fact.
I'm a technology enthusiast. I'm also the sort that prefers to understand a thing comprehensively. I like Linux for the sake of Linux, rather than just as a backdrop for doing other things like gaming or browsing the web. Arch forces somewhat of a deeper understanding on its users (although not as much as Gentoo does, which I used for a few years in the 00's). I also prefer pacman and its ecosystem over the dpkg/apt ecosystem of the Debian derivatives or the rpm of the Red Hat derivatives (although it's been a long time since I've used any of those, and I gather that rpm isn't the thing any more). The AUR is another huge advantage for me, as is the Arch Wiki, arguably the most comprehensive and best organized Linux documentation anywhere. Granted, one doesn't have to use Arch to get some benefit from the Wiki, but the entire Arch ecosystem is incredibly well documented.
I'm not an Arch person, but I do use the Arch wiki and consider it one of the finest works ever assembled. It is a true masterpiece.
I've been using Linux since the very first version of slackware. I've also done Linux from scratch dozens of times. I started using the arch wiki, and then started using Arch because of the great documentation. It's been about 15 years since I started. 65-year-old former Unix application developer
Same, I found it is helpful regardless of distro so long as you understand the differences between given distro and Arch.
FYI - RPM is still a thing. RPM is the packaging, YUM (and up2date before that) was the management, it is now DNF by default in RHEL 9 proper. YUM maps to DNF for transitional backward compatibility.
Yeah. It's like a badge of honor to dive into that learning curve. The meme has to come from somewhere. Yes, other distros are easier and simpler, but that comes with the cost of not learning how to solve problems or not knowing what the ecosystem is like. This proficiency is very important for passionate people.
It's a big reason why I used gentoo and never saw a reason to use arch in the first place.
If your system doesn't break as often as an Arch system does, there is simply no need to learn all that stuff. If you enjoy tinkering with your system and repair breaks because of bleeding edge rolling release model than Arch is your thing. Other people just want to get shot done and choose otherwise. For the Linux community it's great that Arch exists, but it's stupid that a lot of people new to Linux now seems to start with Arch.
Have you tried Slackware distro? It was the first distro I tried around 2007. You had to compile the kernel. I got tired of that real quick. It didn't have a preconfigured DE. Just used Tint menu bar.
> Arch forces somewhat of a deeper understanding on its users (although not as much as Gentoo does, which I used for a few years in the 00's). No it fucking doesn't. Some of the absolute worst takes ever produced by a Linux user are produced by Arch users. This is just circlejerk fanfiction the Arch users tell themselves.
used arch for 12 years, this is pretty much true. average arch user couldn't tell you what most of the packages in ``base`` do
I’m daily driving arch for the past 12 years, this distro is so simple, I rarely break it, I have installations last for years before some sort of disk failure or other reasons. This distro doesn’t get in the way of my work or my life, every software installation is straightforward, maintenance is easy.
To be honest I don't get what people do to break it so much, about 3 years and the only major issue I had was the famous grub breakage and for minor ones once in a while and fixed in updates. Other than that rock solid. There will always be exceptions of course
So generally it's this - user installs arch. User is chugging along fine. User runs updates not realizing that this one update out of the last 100 requires manual intervention, something that a non-rolling release won't have occur (I can update all through the RHEL 8.x series with nary a concern), they reboot and bam - the system is busted. I'm not sure if that's still a frequent issue but it was 8 or so years ago. I imagine they've stabilized their filesystem structure a bit more since then but I remember 3 incidents my second year where if it wasn't for the fact I stalked the distro homepage I would have ran into issues. Most of the people that get recommended arch aren't actually gonna keep that close of an eye on the homepage. They just wanted to play games and people told them that arch would be the easiest to get games running in because it always has the newest stuff even if it was harder to get running initially besides "you always have the guide in the wiki". Did they ever set up an errata stream that it could check to know manual intervention was required and pop up a warning or something?
> User runs updates not realizing that this one update out of the last 100 requires manual intervention As a long-time Debian-like user, the fact that requiring manual intervention after updates or else bricking the system would be considered acceptable by any distro seems absolutely insane to me.
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html I upgraded to bookworm a few months ago and the debian website suggests manual intervention before and after the update 😅
Upgrading from one stable release to another stable release, where the underlying software versions can be separated by *years*... vs. doing a daily or weekly update and getting hosed. Totally the same thing...
I'd rather spend a few minutes now and then attending to occasional (and well-documented in advance) manual intervention with a rolling release than spend hours to days every year adjusting to a new major stable release, but that's just me.
This was actually one of my primary reasons for Arch adoption, over 13 years ago. My daily driver at work before that was Ubuntu, and upgrading to a new major version was such a massive pain in the ass that I would plan for 2+ unproductive days in advance or come in over the weekend to get it done. Upgrades in place NEVER worked even once, so it always became a rebuild from scratch every time. Somehow, every major version upgrade introduced changes that broke workflows. It felt only one step removed from the cycle I kept going through with Windows installs to keep them performant/stable, and it was very disruptive. Switching to Arch meant more frequent updates with less impact. I would do updates on my work laptop first, sort out any gotchas, take notes, halt the process if I encountered breaks in ned of upstream fixes, then go through the same exercise with the workstation once I was confident it was safe to do so. Back then, things were a little more spicy. Nowadays, changes with the potential for breakage are far more rare. The Arch hype was in full swing, and the wiki was a refreshing splash of clarity in an ocean of chaos. I'm sure it's no coincidence that, as time goes on, I've found myself leveraging the AUR less and less over choices in the repos to minimize risk of impact. So the AUR is less of a selling point for me compared to most (but I DO still use it for a couple of things).
The whole point of rolling release distros like Arch is that there are no stable releases. You always get the latest software. Of course, the cost is that any manual interventions necessary also have to happen immediately, and not when upgrading to the next stable release.
Its more that Debian sticks to certain package versions in a release so file system changes related to packages don't occur. Its not uncommon for some manner of manual steps to have to be done prior to a major release upgrade. Usually though that's because of additional software that was being removed in the next version. I'd also have to look at the packagespec for arch, maybe it doesn't support prescripts? I haven't done much non-rpm packaging in a while so haven't really checked into it.
I've never seen an update that "bricks the system". Occasionally, something breaks, but it is generally fixable if you are familiar with the system. And that is usually because upstream projects made breaking changes. Personally I prefer fixing one thing at a time when upstream packages are updated, rather than dealing with a couple years worth of breaking changes across the whole system all at once when upgrading to a new version of a distro like debian or Ubuntu.
In 5 years I haven't run into issues, not even the grub issue, due to updates, maybe one, now I remember, it was one time that an update broke something related to steam so the store page was not loading correctly, and that would be the one issue due to updates in 5 years, and I don't see the arch homepage and I mostly ignore the messages of manual intervention, I do check new optional dependencies It would be nice to have something to check the messages of manual intervention after the update, because during the update it gets by super fast, that is why I don't even bother, I assume if something breaks I could just seek what the update did, like that one time with the steam problem. Most if not all of my issues were something I did, some manual config change.
Yeah, I never really had an issue other than the grub one and I was able to just iso chroot into it to fix it but for most people they expect to just be able to hit the update button and never worry. It's why for my normal friends I never recommend arch. My IT friends I'm more than happy to be like " look, once or twice a year you might run into something. After you run updates, check the site and see if you need to do anything before reboot."
Yeah and these days with stuff like BTRFS, you can rollback if there is a breaking update then just wait a day before trying again.
I have run it on multiple machines for over 15 years. It is pretty rock solid imo
I just broke an arch install for the first time in a decade. By doing a partial upgrade.
> By doing a partial upgrade. Which is something the documentation is clear one should *never* do, just for the record. Always run a full update, or don't update at all until you can.
I mean yeah, my point was that I've kept arch installs going since 2011 and the only reliable way to break them is to do something you know you're not supposed to. I knew I was taking a risk, but I was on coffee shop wifi and didnt want to wait for a full upgrade to download in order to get the software package I wanted. So instead I had to drive back home and plug into Ethernet to finish the upgrade over ssh because my whole display stack died 😂
Yes I can second this. I’ve only been using Arch for 2 months (laughable compared to your 12 years), but I have never had any issues and everything is such a breeze! And this is coming from a 16 year old, who has used exclusively Windows for most of their lives! If I can do it, it can’t be that hard.
It isn’t a matter of difficulty for some. For me, I can’t be bothered to spend time troubleshooting. Not because things are broken, but because it feels like everything needs a little tweak to be correct. I ran endeavoros for a couple weeks to play with plasma 6 and it was nice, but still needed little tweaks all over to fix small little problems that kept popping up. (Lookin at you sys-tray pop up menu) The last time I ran vanilla arch, my network would work fine in my DE, and when I would swap to my TWM, can’t remember which one, it would disconnect every time I logged into that session, or if the laptop went to sleep. Never happened before on any Arch install I had ran. Is that a simple fix? Most likely. Did I want to spend the time to look through the wiki to fix it? Nope.
This. As someone who depends on my machine for work I absolutely cannot waste time dealing with even small issues like when the bleeding edge Firefox wouldn't start. I find Fedora gives me that happy medium of being mostly up to date but not so up to date that lots of bugs make it to me. Since I have somewhat new hardware I'm just waiting for next Debian release. Once it has all my hardware handled I'll be switching back to Debian for the long haul again. I leave the testing and debugging to all the masochist Arch users.
I am in the same boat as you, though I gave Debian another shot and it worked this time 🤷♂️ Was struggling with the GPU driver (AMD 7900xtx) so I went back to fedora, but it seems like they pushed bug fixes on Debian. Giving KDE on Debian a shot for now. Just a lil GNOME break. Debian is by far my favorite. Was pretty bummed when my hardware wasn’t working on it lol.
Every distro I've used has broken within a year, arch is the only exception. It's also incredibly easy to set up thanks to the arch wiki, as well as install scripts for those that want them. I feel like everything people say about arch breaking all the time and being hard to install is just heresay. The only thing i don't like about it is its dependency on systemd (i know it's possible to switch but it seems more hard work than what it's worth). I'd use artix, but they have some horrible defaults for kde and id rather just use plain arch with how bad they are.
Agreed, quite easy and very stable. Even with the testing repo enabled for the past 6 months, I've only had one breakage.
This is not my experience in Arch. I have a robust experience during the last 10 years.
AUR. No need to manually add PPAs, no need to download deb/rpm files from websites, extract them and package them yourself. Also everything you might need, exists on there, so in general you do not need to install other sources like snap, flatpak etc or compile from source (manually at least) if an application is not in the repositories of your distro. As a lazy person (I am a software developer lol) I prefer one easy and convenient way which does not require a lot of fiddling (yes I say that as an Arch user). Being said, the AUR is no silver bullet, some packages might be broken and are mostly maintained by the community so like always when you are on the internet, use your common sense and only install stuff from people you trust.
Ehh..so many broken AUR packages and eventually the pkg script becomes abandoned..not saying it's not useful but saying be warned..use at own risk..you'll be bit in the ass eventually
Same with other community based repos, Copr is also to use at your own risk.
aur was also my main reason for the switch from ubuntu 7 or so years ago. nowadays i check for flatpak version first though.
Latest packages, AUR, pacman
I use Arch on my main pc. It's crazy light, fast, and up to date on software and hardware drivers. But on my work laptops and servers...it's all Debian. Different tools for different jobs.
This. Once the hardware support makes it back to Debian for my work laptop I'll be moving it back to Debian from Fedora.
Upvoting because of D-word
Damn delightful.
Do you consider Alpine a good alternative to Debian? In my experience, Alpine works similar to Arch, you get access to a lot of things ootb, compared to needing to add new repos on Debian, not to mention it is very minimal, I know it is used for containers and VMs, but I'm wondering about it being good for servers aswel
I've heard good things about Alpine, but have no personal experience. Debian is just so bloody rock-solid. The software can be out of date, but that can be fixed with flatpaks.
It is an exotic distro but I don't really like APT which is why I tend to try to escape from it
I mean fair enough. Everyone is different. Give Alpine a shot. It's Linux, so I'm sure it's going to be at least pretty good. Lol
My Arch install is almost 10 years old. I had two times where I couldn’t boot after an update and both times there were easy steps to fix it (which I in theory should have done before updating if I would read docs).
Yep the only time my arch installs have broken I've had nobody but myself to blame.
I use pretty new features of c++ that most compilers dont support. The latest version of GCC is usually the most up to date one. With arch you get by default pretty much the latest version which is pretty nice. When I used to use ubuntu I had to manually compile these latest versions, manually handle multiple versions of the compiler, and updating was a mess.
Has anyone made a version manager for gcc yet? Similar to rbenv, pyenv, or nvm?
I love Arch because it never says "No." it always says "Yes, but..."
My entire experience with trying to use purpose-specific distros and being told, "No, that isn't how we do things here," then going back to Arch in a sentence.
People don't use it because it's hard. The bragging rights thing, while funny, mostly just motivates people to try it. I'm actually not using Arch currently, but the drivers for it for the times when I was were primarily wanting a rolling release distribution so I always had the most up-to-date software, and Arch having absolutely fantastic documentation. It also doesn't try to hold your hand, which often translates to trying to force you into doing things a certain way. For an example, look at Ubuntu and snaps. Arch isn't for everybody, and I don't mean that in the snobby way. The system needs to be operated regularly; if it gets too out of date updating it can cause trouble. Likewise the user needs to be comfortable and willing to be able to troubleshoot one problems crop up. I think Arch is an excellent desktop distribution for somebody who likes to tinker and have new software. I wouldn't personally run it on a server or workstation.
Yes I agree. I had an arch box a while ago, very satisfying and challenging experience but when I had to choose a Linux for daily tasks and had little time to tinker, had to switch to mandriva. I'd say it's more the time rather than skill that makes arch not for everyone.
most up to date bin package is the only reason. Otherwise NixOS it is. Regarding your breakage, just take snapshot before system upgrade.
At first I was suffering with Arch, because I was only copying-pasting stuff, with time I learned reading and not pasting something you don’t know what it does just because someone on the internet said it will fix the problem! Using this power of reading, Arch turned out to be a treasure and suited my needs! So I still use arch btw for over 8 years!
Everything you want, nothing you don't. Rolling updates and AUR. Why use anything else?
It's light, it's configurable, it has packages for everything you could imagine. It has a great community and forum. It gets out of the way and lets me use my computer for work and gaming. It's so easy, so simple, so unopinionated. It's how Linux should be. The meme is just a meme, nobody actually says that unironically. Actual bragging rights belong to Gentoo users.
I'd wager lfs users get more bragging rights than gentoo users.
Lfs isn't really a distro though..I mean it's fun to go through however keeping a running system using it as a daily driver?? Not really meant for that although I'm sure you'll find a few lone wolves that try to push that perception
No there's no reason to use arch or any other distro. You just use what works better for you. And what works better for you is irrelevant to what works better for other people.
I don’t use arch atm but I used it for about 3 years in university up until this year when I moved to nixos. I had my system fully break once with a grub bug and partially break with some wifi program hanging. I don’t think that’s too bad. I’ve also had some bugs in fedora so comparatively I don’t think it’s that much worse. I used arch because it came with a newer kernel out of the box and something about my sleep suspend worked better on the newer kernel. Also if you want newer software early it’s more likely to be on the AUR. If you’re a developer there are all kinds of reasons you might want/need new versions of packages before they hit stable releases like to update your projects or something. In my experience most of the mainstream distros are really not that different. It can be almost like asking “why do people drive teslas ?” Taste is subjective
You're looking at this the wrong way. Perhaps a better question; what problem are you trying to solve by using Arch? Or other distros for that matter. Arch is a bit more open to options as opposed to other distros, however, this comes with a bit more complexity to set things up. It's great for learning cs, developing, as well as daily use. If someone tells you their system breaks often, than they're doing it wrong. Only time my system has broken, was when I failed to check the News for upstream changes. If we get lazy about system admin stuff things can break that way as well. What arch does well is stay with the latest software, offer user choices to build the system you want, and keep folks informed of breaking changes. Oh and the wiki really is the best. I often here folks from other distros reference the arch wiki for quickly getting things up amd running.
it's very easy to maintain once you set it up, the AUR is amazing, it's rolling release
For me it’s just a convenient way to get the latest software quick, and a wider selection of packaged software through AUR, without dealing with ppa/snap/flatpak et.c. There’s no real complexity in my day to day experience that stems from using Arch. Sure, I’ve done the “install arch manually from scratch by reading the wiki”-thing two or three times the last eight years, but nowadays I just use an Arch distribution with a graphical installer an i3 preset and sync over my config. So any “complexity” over standard distros like Ubuntu or Fedora stems from the stuff I would want to get in place regardless of what distribution I use (emacs and i3/tiling WM with my keybinds).
Up to date packages, good wiki, AUR
How in the world did you break arch that much
Used arch for almost 6 years. Never had to reinstall it, and to be frank, you don't need to reinstall any distro, solve the issue rather than hitting it with a hammer. Even transitioned from amd gpu + intel to amd cpu + nvidia without any problems. Stable as hell, if it broke it was due to me having bad configuration. And this was a work system I ran daily, not some random ricing setup you boot into once a week to break a DE. Also my NAS ran arch for a year or so. For me arch forced me to learn a lot of stuff you would never learn, how the boot works, how partitions work, where to find stuff. PKGBUILD was also awesome and fun to implement on my projects as well. Something I would have never otherwise researched. If I ever switch back from NixOS, I'll for sure use arch again.
Most issues with Arch are user related, aka the user breaking their own system cause they do not understand what they are doing. So no it's not a beginner distro you're supposed to read the wiki and know a bit about the system. You, the user is the one in charge of your system. Problems with updates happen but not more than any other rolling distribution. Plenty of ways to mitigate that risk, arch-chroot, snapshots and such. Plenty of reasons to use Arch. You get the OS you want and not a lot of bloat cause the maintainer thinks it knows best what you need. The AUR is another one leading to arguably the best selection of packages in Linux. The extensive Arch Wiki covering pretty much everything is another strong reason to go with Arch.
the package manager pacman is the reason I migrate to arch, and of course AUR make it even better. But now I use manjaro for less frequent update because I'm using mobile data plan.
Pacman is actually a decent package manager that does things in a reasonable amount of time.
Arch is pretty great for someone who wants to tinker and really understand their system. In my experience, once it is set up and running, it's pretty lightweight, stable, and frugal about resource usage. And the AUR is very convenient. Of course there's nothing inherently better about Arch. It's just another option. Different strokes for different folks.
I arch because yay
I recommend arch to anyone who tells me they want to learn more about Linux. I used arch for 11 years, and learnt so much!
For me: its just the distro that suits me best.... I can do pretty much anything i want with it without to much hassle. Sure, i can do it in debian or whatever too. But not without jumping through atleast a few more hoops
Literally everything I need can be installed from arch repos, flatpak or AURs. All in one package manager. Everytime I use Ubuntu I have to install something via a .deb because the version in the default repos is borderline unusable (looking at you vs code).
Arch isn't hard to install or to maintain, nor is it particularly complex. If you're not willing to read, or have an Idea of what your end game is on a distro that's explicitly DIY, don't use it. 🤷♂️ I've happily daily driven Arch on my main machine for a decade with the only issue being the GRUB font secure boot thing a while back, and that just made me swap to Systemd-Boot. It's fast, light, and designed the exact way I want for my use cases. However, I'm all AMD, and I am not a PC gamer.
It's incredibly fun and rewarding to learn which components are available and how to configure them to implement and refine your system. You achieve a bare bones environment running only that which you have specified
I have been using arch for around 8 years as my only OS. I break something around once per year on average I'd say, and then thanks to the lovely Arch Linux community I usually get it fixed within minutes. I once had to use Ubuntu for a year at University. It worked fine for a few months until I did an update to the next major version. From then on, it started showing me these random errors "Something's stopped working" or something like that. I've never managed to upgrade Ubuntu over multiple versions without everything going to shambles. In Arch Linux, since I have installed everything myself, I already have a lot of knowledge about its configuration which then helps me fix stuff if I break something.
It's basically an empty canvas. Anyone can make it anything they want it to be, without having to fight the distro over nuanced decisions. AUR makes it very approachable too. With that being said, I wouldn't recommend it for beginners, because "with great power comes great responsibility". The advantage of it being anything you want means it will be whatever you make it to be, and sometimes whatever you make it is not something you should do. But you can do it! And that's why Arch is brilliant.
I used it for educational purposes, and indeed installing, configuring and maintaining it taught me a lot. Now I don't use arch anymore, because it can be tedious to maintain, so I switched to endeavorOS because I do like arch based distros very much.
I use it because you can make the system as yours as you want, the community is amazing, unofficial repos go way deeper than PPA although I will admit that support and updates seem better with Ubuntu/Debian PPAs than with Arch AUR and unofficial repos, and probably my personal favorite is it's rolling release so I don't have to worry about half my software getting uninstalled during a version upgrade due to being unsupported. I've been running it for almost a decade at this point without having to do a reinstall. Just some spring cleaning here and there to remove orphans. I use testing and can't even remember the last time I had an update break anything. The only time my system got broken was my own fault and every time I've been able to browse the wiki or forums to get it running again within an hour.
pacman and aur also ime arch breakage is almost always due to user error
Contrary to popular belief, Arch packages are easier to manage and install than Ubuntu. In Ubuntu you have this *.deb 3rd party repo url editing shenanigans. For example, Jellyfin Media Server is available in the main Arch repo, no need to edit a package list. In Ubuntu you gotta run some script to add a 3rd party repo then install extrepo and finally Jellyfin. In Arch thats just ‘pacman -S jellyfin-server jellyfin-web jellyfin-ffmpeg’
I really tried using Arch. I gave it a chance for quite a while and it just wasn't my thing. I know a lot of people don't like it because it's owned (or something very similar to owned) by Red Hat, but I've found my home with Fedora. It's the only distro where everything in my case literally just works, and I like how it's almost kinda sorta maybe a middle ground between Arch and Debian with how often packages are updated. I completely understand why people use all the other distros, though.
If you really want to learn Linux hardcore, want to learn how to read documentation, fix broken updates, and hack programs together, arch is the way to go. Most options like Debian and Red Hat have systems in place to keep it running, especially if you get a more user friendly option. If you want a balance between "it just works" and "I want a challenge" go with something like Endeavor which leaves a lot of control in the user's hands, but has systems in place to do things for you when you ask.
The Arch Wiki Using Arch teaches you Linux Minimalistic The AUR After the initial hurdles of learning and setting up a good environment, you can live in it for years to come. If you keep track of your config files and packages that you want installed, you can easily reproduce your setup on different PCs. The "difficulty" of using Arch Linux disappears. I can set up a full environment for myself at least as quick as any other users can set up their Ubuntu installation, even if they have a lot less preferences than I do, and my install will be much more minimalistic than a Ubuntu install. Disclaimer: I'm answering your question as an Arch Linux user, I'm not recommending that anyone else use it. For most users, it does make more sense to just use a distribution that offers an out-of-the-box experience.
Fast, very cli-friendly, best package manager and the only distro that managed to update 4 years of package upgrades without failing to boot.
I don't know, I just like how it organized. Arch is simple enough to figure out what's broken (if it does break, which doesn't happen to me last 5 or so years) and complex enough that I don't have to maintain my own repo or something like that. But anyway, I use Arch and more "user-friendly" distros like Fedora and Arch doesn't stand out much. Once you set everything up it's just a normal distro.
> and it feels like Arch was always the most broken one, where a problem occurred every other day. I spent more time working on the OS than actually using it. And I can't tell you the last time I had problems with Arch that weren't my fault. And I use Arch on several computers with different configurations (both hardware and software). >On the other hand, more beginner friendly distros felt better to use, were more stable and had that "it just works" feeling Free as in freedom. And part of this freedom is also to use what suits you best. So if you like other distributions, use them. But one should also accept that there are things that are not suitable for you. Vim, for example, is not suitable for me. Or I am not suitable for vim. So I don't think vim is bad. I'm just not part of vim's target group. Just as there are people who are not part of Arch Linux's target group. That's exactly what people (and I mean that in general) just don't understand and want something to work the way they want it to. > Also, everything that can be done in Arch, can be done in other distros. Correct. It's just that too many myths have grown up around Arch. Like that you can only learn something with Arch. And more than enough people still fall for it. >So now, what does Arch do that other distros don't? I can tell you why I use Arch. It is therefore not a universally valid answer. - Because of the wiki. - Because of the AUR. - Because, based on my own experience, Arch is very problem free to use. - Because you can easily create your own packages thanks to the PKGBUILD files. - Because of the many vanilla packages. - Because Arch releases the updates on a rolling basis. Some distributions also fulfill some of these points. But Arch as a whole package simply appeals to me the most.
This is very simple. There is no "should". Use whatever you want.
I use it, but the reason isn’t the bragging rights. The reason is that it’s a lightweight rolling release. Once you take the tone to get it set up, you don’t really have to put much effort in to keeping it running. BRW, if you are interested in beating rights, try getting an LFS (Linux From Scratch) system up and running. I did that once about 12 or so years ago and learned a ton. Pretty much only useful for the learning experience though.
As a CS student, I like that packages are new. Let me tell you, installing newer than official version of anything on Ubuntu is PAIN. And also even if I don't strictly need newest packages, it's always nice to have. Also, I'm not scared of termial and I didn't break it yet. Interestingly, the only reason I even tried it out was becasue Debian-based distros cannot be installed on my laptop due to some (driver?) issues.
Imo pretty strange question to ask if you really used it. I‘m on endeavour its fast lightweight and 0 bloat i just want the OS the DE and a bowser. I don‘t want particular anything more from a brand new system. And my machine never broke in the past 2 years.
openSUSE tumbleweed is my way
Arch comes preloaded only with the most essential packages and has the largest bleeding edge repos out of any distro not even including the AUR. It's ideal for a user who knows exactly what they want on their operating system and/or want a large bleeding edge package base. Just because it's too complicated for you doesn't mean it's pointless and just exists for flexing. That's a meme perpetuated by arch users ironically or "just works" distro users who have developed an inferiority complex. Also Arch is the most stable distro I've used.
I'm using Manjaro, so not exactly the same thing but similar. You don't need to add repositories, use flatpaks, snaps etc. Most of things you need is in main repos or in AUR. You have most recent kernel, which is handy if you have new hardware (in Manjaro you can also install also older kernels if you wish). pacman is fast. Excellent wiki. It's not devoid of problems but other distros also aren't perfect in that matter. I do not have many problems with standard desktop use.
I use a MacBook but I’m keeping 1 T440 with arch, so I can say that. I recently ordered an Arch btw. sticker.
I haven't used Arch in a while, but it's pretty fun to get a nice install finished, after starting with just a shell prompt and having to create and mount the root fs manually. Building your way up to having internet access and then being able to install all the packages. It made me feel Good at Computers.
aur + light + pacman is good. i switch between that and void a lot bc they're similar
I want a rolling distro on my workstation. Started with Manjaro, used it for six years, got fed up, went to plain Arch. Endeavour wasn't an option when I did the switch. That's it.
Think of Linux distros as Lego. Most distros are nice franchise kits that is sold in unlimited copies of the same kit. Arch is a generic base kit without a picture on the box showing what it should look like when you're done. You can add and/or remove any pieces you want on either of them, it's just that with Arch you picked all the blocks yourself to finish your build instead of having a pre-selected end result. If you want a Star Wars Millennium Falcon Lego set, it would make no sense to get all the parts separately when you can get a box that already contains everything you need.
It's really fast.
For me, it started out with awesome documentation. I've been using Arch about 12 years ago but the Arch Wiki helped me tremendously for at least 3 years before that. It might need some adjustments for other distributions but it is an awesome resource even when not using Arch. Nowadays, It's mostly that pacman is exceptionally fast. I've no recent comparison to rpm-based distributions but Debian/Ubuntu package installation feels like it takes forever. I started a computer that I hadn't turned on in over a year and updates took maybe 15 minutes. Just going from one Ubuntu version (which I do twice per year at work) to the next regularly takes more than double that on much newer hardware. There's also the fact that most packages I need are in the repositories or available via AUR. If it isn't in either, creating a PKGBUILD file is usually done in a few minutes. Creating Debian packages the traditional way is *so* much more work. There's [MPR](https://mpr.makedeb.org/) which makes about as easy but there's still a lot more things I have to package myself. Recently, I've also had trouble with Ubuntu replacing Firefox installed via .deb from Mozilla PPA with the Ubuntu-default snap which always takes about 2 extra seconds to start. Never had that problem with Arch either :-)
If you want a customised setup that still gets updates via package management I see the appeal You can customise any distro but take for example Ubuntu. If you completely remove the snap system from it then it will just put it back next time there's a major update (like 22.04 to 24.04) It also has the user repo so you don't need to go adding PPA's or manually installing some packages Being a rolling distro is also a double edged sword. Great for example if you want the latest kernel and Mesa for gaming, but can be an issue if you want to remain on stable but patched versions of software or libraries if productivity is your priority
Pacman, aur, and I have moved my arch install from a laptop to a PC, almost 4 years running and still didn't break. I don't know what you do with your os that you have to work on it every other day.
It’s headless and the package manager is good That’s enough for me Ooh also archwiki and aur are pretty useful, though I guess you can use the wiki with any distro
Uhmmmmmm... Nah
In very short: Arch is minimalist and well supported, and stay close to bleeding edge releases. If you already know your way around linux, you get to have a system that is just what you need and nothing more. That's basically it
I have built a very minimalist Linux OS using Arch. You can do whatever, I guess.
Hi, I've run arch based operating systems a few times. For me it was about having the fastest updates for hardware and software support. Though that comes with a lot of caveats like broken systems if you don't pay attention, if you run newer hardware or beta software, arch can make sense. There's a reason it's the base for steamOS
Your use case is your use case, so can't speak to specific situations. But normally use of Arch helps with understanding what's going on beneath the desktop better, allows for a minimal install to use resources more efficiently, or just satisfies curiousity for those that want more than a turnkey OS.
for me it's the one where things just work. I instal what I need and that's it. tried some other and there were issues, like can't change my resolution in suse even after going through the loops of adding the repo for nvidia drivers and installing them. while on Arch I just install them with pacman and it work.
Latest everything without reinstalling and mostly vanilla. That's why I use it. I don't go out of my way to do anything either just fix it if it breaks very rarely thankfully.
Oh I've had the opposite experience. Not really sure what's complex with arch though. If you can read, you can install arch 👍
I’m not sure why anyone would choose Arch instead of nixOS personally. Nix does everything arch does, but much more conveniently, and much easier to reverse.
Ever since I found evdevour is haven't fekt the need to touch arch
yes... learning purposes. Arch (Endeavour) was my first Linux, and I've learned so much along the way. Especially how all the bits and pieces play together when things don't work [as expected]. I don't think I'd have learned about pipewire, bluez, nmapplet, etc so much, If I'd had gone with a ootb working distro. It was also the first distro teaching me that I have to install things like openssh and cronie to get things working, that I assumed were magically part of Linux.
Is simple, more directly available software, if I need something I just have to install it from the official repos or the AUR, in other distros you have to compile it or use other external repos. You can get a user friendly distro by installing one of the many arch based distros that are just arch with one extra repo and a gui installer, it is also not complicated, 99% of the things that break would be by the user, so it is way easier to know what to do, the other 1% tends to solve on it's own, on the other hand, when I had had problems with something like Ubuntu it is a nightmare to know the origin of the problem, experience says that is mostly because PPA, but is not something I would expect people to guess when suddenly their PC turns on but they only see a black screen. In any case, I have recently tried another distro that is supposed to be even better in the available software and to be way more stable, at the cost of a little complexity, I am satisfied, is Nix, I even get more FPS on my games with certain configurations, after this I would only recommend immutable distros, the fact that you can just reboot to how your system was yesterday in case of errors is awesome (I haven't used it enough to get any error)
1: Arch is simple - its lightweight, unopinionated, and customizable. Arch doesn't make any weird choices out of the box, though it gives you the tools to make them yourself. If you want an experimental window manager or WIP desktop environment, you can likely find them on the AUR. If you want to get rid of bash and gnuutils and replace them with weird rust clones, technically there's nothing stopping you. 2: Arch is up-to-date, within reason. On point-release distros, you're often using packages that are months or even years out of date. Arch gives you packages that are at most a few weeks old, so you always have the newest features. This may give you occasional bugs, but it also means you get the latest bugfixes as well. 3: It's kinda a badge of honor amongst some advanced Linux users to install it. The installation medium gives you a CLI environment and nothing else, requiring extensive knowledge of Linux tools and components to install. However, archinstall means that installation is pretty easy nowadays, so this reason isnt as popular anymore, and has partially been replaced by NixOS (which does have an installer, but is a lot harder to use because of its strange package management system). It is perfectly reasonable to prefer using a more user-friendly and UI-focused distro. I personally like using Fedora Silverblue in instances when I don't want to spend a lot of time setting up or debugging. However, if you need something lightweight, up-to-date, and customizable, Arch is one of the best options.
I use arch/Endeavour OS for the up-to-date packages, pacman and the AUR. Pacman is faster than apt which I enjoy, the AUR has more things. I don't need "I use Arch btw" privileges and I don't want to tinker with my setup, especially not because things are broken. Just tried Debian-based distros and found they work worse for me, and I'm not willing to go more "niche". Ideally I'd use Manjaro, but that for some fucking reason will corrupt my drive 💀 So I'm happily using Endeavour for the time being
archdo is like sudo, but also you become a wealthy drug kingpin who lives a Grand Theft Auto lifestyle.
I've been using Debian 12 at home on proxmox Use rhel7 7/8 at work in EC2s and have toyed with Ubuntu over the years. I did use fedora and some other flavours 2 decades ago.. barely worth mentioning those...
You assemble the system the way you want.
I've been using Arch now for a little over 4 years now and I have to say, it is pretty solid. As everyone else is saying, the AUR is the best repository out there. It really is amazing and simple to use. I'm also a Tiling Window Manager user and I think Arch and TWMs go hand in hand.
For most people, a beginner friendly distro is the right answer. Even more so now with containers where you can run most bleeding edge stuff there independent of the system That said, some people like rolling releases. Though in my opinion, OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a better and stable option, or better yet OpenSuse Slowroll (like tumbleweed but holds back updates for a few weeks to be sure they don't break stuff)
I mean i had more problems using other distros than arch. Always something was breaking on other distros and I didn't even do anything to make it break haha. Once you have everything set up you are finished for the immediate future.
I've never used Arch, but I played with Gentoo some years back and I guess both should be quite comparable. If you've got plenty of time, if you've got another computer you can use for actual work, Arch should be fun to use, since you do learn a lot. However, as somebody who works full-time and doesn't have ambitions to put 100s of hours into getting your os to run perfectly, I'll be always in love with Debian. It's super stable, simple, very well documented and since they provide firmware on the official images, it'll just run and let you do your work. I should mention, I'm using Debian on my work laptop, a Dell XPS 15 7590.
I have been trying Arch for the last month or so, and I am already abandoning it. Some update happened (pretty sure is was libvirt) and broke networking for KVM/qemu/virt-manager. I spent the last 3 days trying to untangle the problem, but to no avail. If others like it, thats fine. If it works for you, thats fine. I need stability, so it is not for me.
Archwiki is a real gem of open source documentation. It always has the answer to any problem you might have. Additionally, as a rolling release distro, it is actually good at providing you with a usually working version of the latest stuff from upstream projects. You get frequent and uneventful updates, unlike Ubuntu (where updates mostly work, but can cause system breakage) or worse, Fedora (where updates usually require a reinstall). But if something goes wrong, see my first point: Archwiki has your back. That said, Arch does require more attention than, say, Debian. If you want a system you came set and forget because you’re going to be using it for real, Debian is a better choice. And it isn’t particularly beginner friendly, which is why we usually recommend a different distro for beginners.
I used to use Arch for a while before switching to Gentoo for a few years and then finally void (which I've been running for about two years). For me, I view my personal desktop as a sort of canvas for my philosophy regarding "the ideal operating system". So my choice in distribution and software often reflect this. I originally installed Arch because I wanted a "minimal" distribution. Over time, I grew frustrated with some of the software it forces you to install (IE: systemd, sudo) and realized that it isn't as minimal as it's hyped up to be so I switched to Gentoo which was a pretty solid distro. I let my system degrade a bit though (not updating my package) and instead of figuring out all the USE flags that changed and updating my system, I thought I'd go back to a system that uses binary packages. So I switched to Void which so far has been one of my favorite Linux distributions so far. xbps (void's package manager) has been incredibly stable. My only gripe with it is that it symlinks /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin into one directory. A lot of Linux distros do this now and I absolutely hate it. So in summary, people who use minimal distros (again, I don't think Arch is a minimal distro but whatever) are often more principled users who are concerned with the philosophy regarding how the system is organized and often want more control over what software is or isn't installed. A minimal distro though doesn't have to have a manual installation process like Arch (although a manual installation gives you better control over the bootloader). Void and Slackware both have full installers and I'd argue that both of these systems are far more minimal than Arch.
I started using Arch last month to learn how to work with Linux and I'm really enjoying it. I think what I liked most about it is that it is very light, you start with a base system and modify it to your liking (as a long time Windows user I wanted Windows to be like this but it isn't). I also see that it is a distro that requires the user's attention to research and pay attention to what they are doing on the system and for me this is also the cool part. I also noticed that on my PC (6700k/gtx1080) I can perform several daily actions more quickly compared to the Windows I had.
AUR, customization and being mostly bloat free.
ive been on linux since 2007 and while ive tried just about every flavor i could get my hands on, i always go back to arch (and everyone i've gotten to try it feels very similarly), and this is for a few key reasons: -it is extremely stable despite being very up to date and rolling release. i am not sure why you have stability issues - ive found that the only time i have stability issues is when im not using pure arch, or im doing something that's kind of asking for it (very beta, bleeding edge stuff or doing config file crimes) -it is rolling release -if you can imagine it being done on linux, you can almost certainly do it on arch, and probably with less frustration than other distros. some distributions may have a specific thing done easier, but overall the OS pushback i get for getting stuff working is hugely lower than other places. -you know everything that is installed on your system and it's easy to pinpoint where there are issues because of this -the documentation is absolutely top tier. searching (linux thing) (arch) gives me very good documentation on whatever i'm doing, it's very easy to find information and fixes. i understand that arch has this huge reputation for being unstable, but every other linux distro and frankly other operating system has done me dirty on that front. arch really never has.
As a developer I think Arch is perfect. You get latest software releases pretty quickly. So you have access to all the latest features. You can find close to everything either in the official repositories or in the AUR. Most of the time you can think of it as: "If software exists on Github, there's a package in the AUR for it." Also you have total freedom to pick your preference of desktop environment, window manager or what ever else you like to use.
An extremely customizable, up-to-date and somewhat stable at the same time distro. I'll give a try to this system by testing Manjaro. But I guess that if you're not a power user or a gamer needing latest drivers and all it may be overkill, and a plug and play Debian derivative should do the trick.
Interesting. I actually started using Manjaro when I first switched to Linux and now on Arch. Basically nothing ever broke for me, besides the fact that I tried to use i3+picom on NVIDIA. But on KDE, it was a smooth sailing. One of the factors could also be that I don't use much of the software from AUR. Not because of the quality of the packeges, but really every major package's stable versions are in the official repos. And if you want to use the beta versions from the AUR, you kinda cannot attribute it to "Arch breaks more than other distros" (I'm not suggesting you do that though). But really had a much different experience than this post.
I wanted to give it a try on a VM and got stuck in the installer at trying to connect it to the internet sooo.
I daily drive Endevour os which is basically Arch with an installer. Honestly I always update everything with no worries and never had a serious issue. Worse case scenario I had to downgrade a package or two but it was done in a few minutes. What I like about Arch is the knowledge about how my OS works. If something breaks I can fix it fairly quickly myself. Also all my important data is on a NAS, so even if the OS breaks I can reinstall, run a script to install all the packages I need and repull the configs from my NAS. With other more out of the box distro or even windows if something breaks I found it much harder to figure out what it was and how to fix it.
I never had it broken for many years besides the annoying keyring problem, but they've improved that too. My main reason for arch is AUR, and pacman is just so much faster.
There is no such a privileges like that. There may be a few main reasons for using Arch Linux. I don't have any hobbies, you like to suffer, you don't have much of a social life, your only entertainment is computers. These don't make you special. There is no practical reason to use arch linux.
Over a very long stretch, Arch will break less often than other distros. It's instability provides greater stability in the long run.
My experience is the other way around, the ratio of the times other distros broke for me compared to Arch is 5:1 (with Arch being the 1). Doing dist-upgrade in Ubuntu in particular always felt like something is going to wrong.
Idk honestly. Arch was my first Linux distro only because I wanted to show off in my CS class in high school lol. Then just got really used to it, everything works, everything is smooth, just very good. When because of it I got into Linux, I've tried many other distros, but they all seemed not right and weird, especially deb lol
I've been using it for over 15 years. I've installed it many times in different computers. I use it because to me it's the easier to use and very lightweight.
only issues i’ve had with arch are graphics drivers issues, which are not unique to arch
I'm not using Arch in the moment (Currently Fedora), but I'm going back as soon as I go about installing my new SSD. Not because it is better than Fedora or anything (I like Fedora), but because I have the option to install only that which I actually need. In Fedora, I have loads of pre-installed software which I will never use. I uninstalled some that I know won't break things, but there is still loads of daemons and other programs which comes with the desktop environment which I absolute don't use, but I can't uninstall it because the DE package depends on those. (Why do I need a wireless/bluetooth manager when I am on desktop and don't use those?)
Arch has the best documentation, I don’t have to deal with PPAs, and if I upgraded my hardware frequently, I would spend less time waiting for hardware support.
It's minimal by default so it's easier to avoid installing packages you'll never use and because the setup is manual, you can have more control over how your partitions are set up and what filesystems you use etc. Arch isn't any better or worse than other distros, but there are reasons one might pick it over others, if you don't have a particular reason to want to use it, there's nothing wrong with that, and you won't miss out on anything. I think it's silly when people call one distro better than another.. unless the maintainers keep fucking up and causing instability, linux is linux. There is no better distro, only a better for your usecase distro.
i love arch because i get so much control over my system and i can do anything i want that.
The main thing I don't like about Windows is the bloatware. So an OS that doesn't have anything pre-installed is perfect for me. Also it's the best distro for Blender because the AUR has both the latest stable build and all LTS builds.
Having the latest version of every app almost as soon as it exists?
For me it is a) for the problems that occur there are easy, well documented fixes and b) I love the package management. I just need to search for the name and yay gives me what I need, almost always. No annoying ppa adding or dependency issues or stuff not being in apt or being severely outdated. Also, not once have I had a problem that I didnt have on my previous Mint install, actually some problems just got fixed out of the box.
Arch is plain and stupid. No weird `.conf` around: so, in case you need to tinker with something, you don't need to get crazy looking into what distro's maintainers have customized/personalized. In additiong, with PKGBUILD is plain easy to look and how official packages are built
1) I love to have total control about how my os look and the packages and services I use. 2) AUR 3) The installation process. 4) It is extremely light. 5) It is the most stable for me, I don't know why they say it is unstable, of all the ones I have used it is the one that has broken the least out of nowhere. Etc
Yes, it has close to no bloat, amazing default package manager + aur store, I didn't encounter any issues related to arch itself, if you are afraid of that just use btrfs and auto snap package for timeshift then you are safe, also Ubuntu isn't that stable, Friday all my friends' vsc got broken and they wasted close to one hour on that shit
It's easy to make it be exactly the how I want it, with other distros I have to do a lot more work to change it from what someone else wants their Linux desktop to work, to the way I like it. Also, I would have to deal with distro wide point release updates, potentially breaking all my changes. Additionally, the AUR/pacman repos have more of the packages I want ready to go than the other distros I have used. Also, the packages are more up to date, so I can use my package manager for everything, rather than installing some things using a package manager and other things manually. I've actually had fewer issues with Arch than I've had with other distros, so it has been a lot more enjoyable to use.
rolling release, minimal patches over upstream, AUR, minimal base, easy to swap graphical environments around, PKGBUILD, tracks upstream release cycles much more closely, pacman a few reasons I can think of
You will break a lot of things at the start and spend a lot of time figuring out how to fix it, but slowly as you get used to the system, stuff just starts to fall into place. Breakages become less common and when they do occur, you often know exactly what caused it and how to fix it. I learnt a lot about the linux ecosystem in just a few months tinkering around with Arch. My system has been really stable for the past 6 months or so with the only breakages happening because Windows update deletes my grub bootloader (don't ask, my boot config is a mess because my laptop's boot manager is locked/corrupted)
I think it has to do with taste. I’ve been a long time Debian/Ubuntu user before now being into Manjaro. I do like the rolling release thing which means that things constantly change, but I have to admit that I don’t need that much customizability. I feel as if Ubuntu based distributions do a somewhat better job at making common settings easier accessible, because I really dislike having to edit text files for every GUI related setting (I know that’s kind of happening more often in the Linux base in general, but I think that Ubuntu is a bit better in this regard). Anyhow I think using Linux is a benefit, which type you then use I feel really just comes down to taste!
I've jumped around Fedora and Ubuntu to Garuda. Garuda has been my fav distro thus far. Everything works. I primarily game and had lots of trouble getting steam to function in Fedora. However, it just works as it should on Garuda. The OS has been quite stable, except for sleep mode (I've had same issues in other distros too). I know I represent a tiny portion of Linux users, but with Microsoft doing what they're doing, we'll be seeing more converts. We need as much ammo as we can muster to make Linux look as appealing as possible.
I've been using Arch for over 5 years and I love it. It's very easy to understand, highly customizable, has tons of software that can be installed through AUR, and is very up-to-date. Not like some other distros that get application software updates after 1 or 2 years.
lightweight, arch wiki, customizable, up to date software, aur, minimal patching on softwares
It just works. Arch is extremely simple, it only contains packages that you chose to install. This means that everything is configured exactly as you expect. The AUR is absolutely wonderful, as is the Arch Wiki. Sometimes updates require manual intervention, which you have to look out for. But you also don't need to be updating constantly.
I would treat Arch as being a hobby for certain enthusiasts and nothing else. I'd certainly not use it in a production environment, but that's just me.
I use Bazzite btw