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 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 editor hat 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.