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 suffering

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.

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.

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!” :)

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.

because they haven’t been privied to install gentoo yet😀

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

• 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.

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.

After using Debian, mint and Ubuntu off and on for years. I am so much happier running endeavoros. I’ve had no issues with it. It’s stable. I don’t feel like I’m dealing with dependencies and random config battles that I did on mint. It’s been great.

What trouble? archinstall makes it dead simple to get on your computer, then at that point it’s not much different from any other distro?

I’d sooner ask why people choose shit like Ubuntu where you’re stuck dealing with snaps out-of-date packages, and bloat.

I used Debian and Ubuntu for like 20 years and just got sick of packages being forever out of date, and the Archwiki always having exactly what I needed.

I started using Linux in a time when package management was barely usable, and I had a broken distro as a first distro. Too often I was chasing down answers all over the internet when there were few to share, and the diy aspect of arch is rather nostalgic for me.

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

It isn’t any trouble. Rarely an upgraded service requires user intervention. This is usually documented and if not it is easy to search for a fix. I find arch faithfully follows upstream packages and provides a very pure linux experience. As much as I love the Debian community, their maintainers tend to add lots of patches, sometimes exposing huge security flaws. Most other distros are too small to be worthwhile or corporate controlled or change the experience too much.