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?
I use Artix (fork of Arch with init freedom)—the main reason why I prefer an Arch base specifically is for the AUR. The reason why I prefer a minimalistic distro in general, is because I want to be able to choose what software I install and how I set up my system. For example I don’t use a full DE so any distro that auto-installs a DE for me will install a bunch of software I won’t use. You also usually get a lot more control over partitioning etc with minimalistic distros—lets me fuck around with more weird setups if I want to try something out.
To be clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using distros that have more things “pre-packaged”. It’s a matter of personal preference. The category of “poweruser” makes sense—some users want more fine-grained control over their systems, whilst some users don’t care and want something that roughly works with minimal setup. Or perhaps you do care about fine-grained control over your system, but it just so happens that your ideal system is the same as what comes pre-installed with some distro. Do whatever works for you.
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.
More software I wanted was packaged for Arch than Ubuntu.
Because AUR.
the distro I’m daily driving uses arch as base so I just ride along
With Archinstall its really easy. You still need to be familiar with the Wiki, but its not hard. Tedious maybe. And running all vanilla software is nice. No distro modification.
I like the rolling updates, to be honest. Endeavour has been a wonderful and simple experience. Aside from some NVIDIA issues with Wayland it has been a blast.
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 like learning and having control over my pc. But it’s mainly the learning part for me, followed the wiki a second time installing arch on my Thinkpad last week and felt just as satisfied as the first time. But no shame in using archinstall.
haven’t tried arch but afaik it’s a distro that lets the user control everything, like gentoo or slackware. that’s actually an easier system to manage if you know what you’re doing and have something you want in mind.
or some people just enjoy tinkering and sufferingNot “everything”, and I wouldn’t say there’s any distro that lets you “control everything”. e.g. look at Alpine Linux, which uses musl, busybox, and OpenRC, whereas Arch uses glibc, GNU coreutils, and systemd. These three choices are “locked in” for Alpine and Arch—you can’t change them. And it’s unlikely for any distro to let you choose all these things because that creates a lot of maintenance work for the distro maintainers.
I suppose Linux From Scratch lets you “control everything”, but I wouldn’t call it a distro (there’s nothing distributed except a book!), and hardly anyone daily drives it.
Not a mean question at all. I haven’t had more difficulty keeping a working system than I did on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc. I get everything I need in Arch and the packages are always fresh off the grill. I also like the emphasis on text config files and a ground-up install. That helped me better understand my system and how it works.
No idea about performance. My performance recommendation is “don’t run Windows!” :)
As with many of these questions, it depends and it’s subjective. In my case I have a machine running Endevour to tinker with and dip my toes into Arch. The philosophy is different where you need to think more about where your packages come from and be able to validate them (especially the AUR). It’s fun to tinker and better understand the underpinnings and on this machine I have very little that I rely on working so am OK with the increased level of jank.
For work I need a system that I can rely on working like it did yesterday and last week as well as having wide support from vendors. For me that means Ubuntu LTS. In many cases there are tools and applications that I really don’t care about how they work internally, just that they can be easily installed and work in-depth.
After trying Ubuntu for a few days I decided to jump in head first and install Arch on my daily driver, it’s been a struggle but I learned so much about Linux I decided to work as a Sysadmin.
Isn’t bazzite Arch based? I like it cause I can throw it on almost any laptop and it just works. I’ve been slowly converting my family, and it is just a nice of of the box experience.
Bazzite is based on Fedora.
because they haven’t been privied to install gentoo yet😀
