askchapo

I know the question is partially a meme but since you posted in this comm, I'm gonna answer sincerely.

People like Arch because it comes as stock as possible to function as a computer. It doesn't come with any/many installed programs, codecs, drivers, etc. All the stuff that other distros and Windows include so that the average user doesn't wonder why the hell their videos won't play or they don't have any image thumbnails.

It gives you near full control over what you put on your system and what you don't. That's baked into the ideology of its development. As more services are turned into subscription only garbage and Microsoft has tried to control what people are allowed to do with their devices, that desire becomes stronger.

The other part is because its "anti-bloat" as opposed to stuff like Windows and Ubuntu that come with tons of software and services installed you may not even use. Think "why would I want Candy Crush preinstalled on my phone if I'm never going to play it?" It doesn't really matter that it only takes a negligible amount of space. You never asked for it.

With the arch install script, its not really hard to get up and running today, so has lost some of its elitist perception. Some people still insist you install it manually, which won't "teach you about Linux" and is just nerd cope for those who like maximum control.

It's a good distro and tbh I had fewer issues with it than Fedora Workstation, once I knew what to install to fix my problem. But I don't really recommend people use it if you're newly coming from Windows because there are products like Bazzite or even EndeavourOS which is based on Arch but comes with everything else someone would expect as a basic function of their OS.

And with things like Distrobox allowing you to make containers out of any distro that seamlessly integrate with your desktop, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have something relatively less stable as your base distro.

Edit: it also has something called the Arch User Repository (AUR) that allows you to install almost anything that may not typically be packaged for your distro. But in reality its full of unsupported and buggy packages from random developers and also doesn't have many advantages over something like Flatpaks or Appimages that are also distro agnostic. But it's a core piece of why people like the distro, because everything is made by the community, rather than corporations like with Fedora and Ubuntu.