May be a mean sounding question, but I’m genuinely wondering why people would choose Arch/Endevour/whatever (NOT on steam hardware) over another all-in-one distro related to Fedora or Ubuntu. Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte? Is there something else I’m missing? Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?
Because it is less trouble.
I read comments here all the time. People say Linux does not work with the Wifi on their Macs. Works with mine I say. Wayland does not work and lacks this feature or this and this. What software versions are you using I wonder, it has been fixed for me for ages.
Or how about missing software. Am I downloading tarballs to compile myself? No. Am I finding some random PPA? No. Is that PPA conflicting with a PPA I installed last year? No. Am I fighting the sandboxing on Flatpak? No. M I install everything on my system through the package manager.
Am I trying to do development and discovering that I need newer libraries than my distro ships? No. Am I installing newer software and breaking my package manager? No.
Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.
When I read about new software with new features, am I trying it out on my system in a couple days. Yes.
After using Arch, everything else just seems so complicated, limited, and frankly unstable.
I have no idea why people think it is harder. To install maybe. If that is your issue, use EndeavourOS.
Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.
Honestly, house of cards is a good analogon for the whole boot chain.
yay! Everything is up to date and working better than ever. Manjaro and Endeavour seem okay, too. Sounds like SteamOS 3 will be Arch-based, which would be great news!
Oh, also, AUR is life. And worth mentioning, KDE Wayland, NVidia 3090, Pipewire, and UKI generation. 👌
SteamOS 3 is arch based but that doesnt mean its anything like arch. It builds from a snapshot of arch and ships that to users as an immutable. So it will be extremely out of date compared to arch.
SteamOS already is Arch based.
Wayland is a great example.
Debian user? You may have spent the last two years complaining that Wayland is not ready, that NVIDIA does not work, and that Wayland is too focussed on GNOME. You may move to XFCE if GNOME removes X11 support.
Arch user? Wayland is great and Plasma 6 works flawlessly. There have not been any real NVIDIA problems in a year or two. Maybe you have been enjoying COSMIC, Hyprland, or Niri.
I have been using Plasma 6 on Wayland on Debian for way longer than 2 years with no issues.
Awesome.
Not installing Plasma from the default repos on Debian Stable though obviously.
When I say “Debian”, I mean “Debian Stable” which is what I think most people mean when they Debian without qualification.
That’s ok but it’s a bit cheeky to compare something meant primarily to be used as a stable system against a rolling release.
Everything I wanted to say in a single comment.
It really just werks™With how much talk of breaking your install goes around, I assumed it would be a challenge. I run pacman -Syu almost every time I update lmao.
On occasion I have broken it to the point that I needed to chroot from live USB, but I just chroot and sudo pacman -Syu a couple of hours later and everything sorts itself out. And even if that sounds like a hassle, I can tell you every issue was hardware, I was running endeavor on a USB (not a live env) which is not something I would recommend, because pacman degrades flash memory integrity very quickly, and the only other times I broke it badly enough had to do with nvidia drivers
It’s the IKEA effect. You tend to like something more if you built it yourself.
spoiler
… and you understand it more when you build something by yourself, so it’s easier for you to fix it when it’s broken.
you understand it more when you build something by yourself, so it’s easier for you to fix it when it’s broken.
For me, this is a big selling point. Instead of trying to figure out why someone did something or wrestling with their decisions, I know what I did, why I did it, and if necessary, and I can change it.
In a perfect world, yes.
In reality, i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now, and it takes me 2 hours of searching/fiddling until i remember that weird thing i did 2 years ago…
and it’s still totally worth it
Oh or e.g. random env vars in .profile that I’m sure where needed for nvidia on wayland at some point, no clue if they’re still necessary but i won’t touch them unless something breaks. and half of them were probably not neccessary to begin with, but trying all differen’t combinations is tedious…
i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now
Hahaha, true. This is why I try to keep as many notes as possible, leave lots of comments, add READMEs, links, and otherwise document what I did and why.
It’s not perfect, it’s often tedious, and I don’t always do it, but when I come back 2 years later wondering why I set some random option, it’s pretty nice having at least some hint.
- It’s amazingly stable even though it’s a rolling release.
- Up to date.
- Maintained by many many knowledgeable people.
- Arch Wiki
- 99% of software you need is packaged, and then there’s AUR too.
That’s about it, but its my daily driver on desktop and laptop.
I think another factor for some is that it’s a community-driven project rather than a product with corporate backing. This is also a big reason why some use Debian over Ubuntu LTS
I don’t understand why Arch is associated with troubles. It was more complicated to fix my issues with Fedora and I don’t like Ubuntu default choices. Having the desktop that I like is much easier with Arch and its derivatives.
I wanted a rolling release distro, and Arch has an amazing wiki. That’s why I chose it. Though I ultimately moved on to CachyOS (Arch based), because it’s a lot more pre configured than Arch.
People swear there’s secret sauce in the Cachy kernel too.
Placebo is a hell of a phenomenon though lol
There are some benefits, but its situational and only affects you while your hardware is very new. Eventually the base kernel catches up in most cases.
I’ve observed some notable improvements when benchmarking with the CachyOS kernel on NixOS via Chaotic’s Nyx using moderately old hardware:
https://programming.dev/post/38304031
Haven’t yet tried replicating the same comparison on newer hardware, but would be interested to see what others have tested. Any observations?
because they haven’t been privied to install gentoo yet😀
Some people are enthusiasts that want to take the training wheels off and challenge themselves. I use CachyOS, which is Arch-based, because it thrashes everything else almost every time in speed tests. Thus far, it hasn’t proven to be more complicated than the Debian-based distros I’ve used. I also wasn’t expecting better features in Arch with certain programs. Being able to get the absolute newest version of a package at all times has proven to be much more useful to me than detrimental.
Funnily enough, I thought like you and was rocking Debian and various derivatives for years. Then one day, for some stupid reason (an out-of-date library for a side project in the Debian repo) and out of curiosity I tried arch.
Honestly have not looked back since for a bunch of reasons.
First, the package manager (pacman) is just awesome and extremely fast. I remember quickly ditching fedora in the past because, in part, of how goddamn slow dnf was.
Then, it’s actually much lower maintenance than I’d initially believed. I maybe had to repair something once after an update broke, and that was expected and documented so no problem there. Plus the rolling release model just makes it easier to update without having version jumps.
Talking of documentation, the wiki is really solid. It was a reference for me even before using arch anyways, so now it’s even better.
People also tend to value the customisability (it is indeed easier in a sense), the lack of bloat (like apps installed by default that you never use), and the AUR.
And, to be fair, a good share of people are probably also just memeing to death.
So I don’t know whether you’re missing something, it depends what you think Arch is like. If you believe it to be this monster of difficulty to install, where you essentially build your own system entirely etc etc… then yeah, you’re missing that it’s become much simpler than this. Otherwise if having more up-to-date software, easier ways to configure things and a rather minimal base install so you can choose exactly what you want on your system does not appeal to you, then likely arch is not going to be your thing.
I don’t really understand the question. All you have to do is run archinstall and then add a desktop environment like KDE and that’s like 80% what other distros do.
I think arch used to be hard to get started but not anymore. That’s reserved for gentoo now
I use Arch via Manjaro distribution. Yes, there’s some quirks coming from Ubuntu, but basically installing OSS/propreitary software using Pacman/Yay/
Add/Remove Softwareis such a breeze, and it’s main selling point to me of Arch so I stay with the distro and say good bye to Debian-based one.More software I wanted was packaged for Arch than Ubuntu.
My main reason is, it’s not a dependengy hell. If I want to build software, I don’t have to go through 5 iterations of being told something is missing, figuring out what that is (most annoying part), installing that and retrying. On Arch-based distros, it’s 2 or less, if it even happens.
Also, AUR.
Other points include
- Small install (I use archinstall though, because more convenient.)
- rolling release.
- Arch wiki
My installs never broke either, so it doesn’t feel unstable to me.
I like it more than ther distros because
- Debian is a dependency hell, otherwise fine. Older packages. I still use raspian though.
- Fedora has too much defaults that differ from my preferences. I don’t want btrfs, I don’t want a seperate home partition, dnf is the only package manager that selects No by default. dnf is also the slowest package manager I’ve seen. Always needs several seconds between steps for seemingly no reason at all. Feels like you can watch it thinking “Okay, so I’ve downloaded all these packages, so they are on the disk. That means - let’s slow down here and get this right - that means, I should install what I downloaded, right. Okay that makes sense, so let’s do that. Here we go installing after downloading”. I also got into dependency hell when trying something once, which having to use dnf makes it even worse. - I guess you can tell I don’t like Fedora.
- Love the concept of NixOS,
don’t like the lack of documentation
- Debian is a dependency hell, otherwise fine.
I agree on the older packages (I don’t need cutting edge), but what do mean about “dependency hell”?
Side note, I laughed a bit at this, I haven’t heard the term “dependency hell” since the old rpm Redhat days before yum.
TL/DR it’s about boulding software yourself. I’m describing the process and my thoughts.
Alright, everything downloaded, let’s build this software. Oh, it fails because… wait a second, what does this mean? Okay, so I’m missing a component. This component is in - well, I don’t know. This post here - no, that’s about coding. The second thread is coding too. Oh, the third one helps. Okay, so I need to install this package.
Nice, the error message changed. Now I go through the whole loop again and - no, the post didn’t help at all, I still have the same problem.
[some hack later that I never remember]
So, the next thing - great, I cannot install it because of some incompatibility with another thing I’d like to keep on my system.
[solution differs here]
Oh, of course I don’t have everything yet, why would I? So I’m missing - nothing, the library is literally right there in this package that’s already installed, but the compiler is too stupid to find it. What’s wrong with you!?
I give up.
That’s the procedure most times when I have to compile something on Debian and there’s no prerequisites list. Dependency problems can obviously happen on Arch, but it’s not 7 iterations, it’s more like 2. Or I use an AUR Script and don’t care.
EDIT: I now see that I am repeating myself a little.
I build software manually about twice a year, and I’ll be honest, I can’t really say I’ve had that experience in many years. Whether I’m using debuild to generate a deb package or a simple make/make install, the stdout feedback points exactly to the issue 99% of the time.
Sorry you had that happen, must be frustrating.
Believe it or not, it’s still less work than NixOS (at least for a daily-driver OS)
The short answer is because I’m lazy. I might lose 30 min during the system setup instead of 20, and now I have a system that I don’t have to worry about until the hardware gives up.
Arch is a rolling release distro, which means it’s unstable, which doesn’t mean what you think, instead it means that you can update your system indefinitely without worrying about “versions”. For example, if you had Ubuntu 20.04 installed on your server, in may you had to update it to 24.04, and that’s something that can cause issues. And in 2029 you’ll need to go through that again. Arch is just constant updates without having that worry. Which means no library is safe from updates, ergo unstable.
Also the AUR is huge, and I’m a lazy ass who likes to just be able to install stuff without having to add PPAs or installing stuff by hand.
Also there’s the whole customize the system, I use a very particular set of programs that just won’t come pre installed anywhere, so any system that comes with their own stuff will leave me in a system with double the amount of programs for most stuff which is just wasteful.
Finally there’s the wiki, while the vast majority of what’s there serves you in other systems, if you’re running Arch it’s wonderful, it even lists the packages you need to install to solve specific errors.
Honestly, in the long term it has been less effort.
If you’re an “out-od-the-box” comouter user (web browser, maybe one or two apps, and office suite, then stick with the more conventional distros. If you are very dynamic with your OS, especially 8f you play with a lot of different OSS applications, then Arch get’s easier.
