Linux

It's the IKEA effect. You tend to like something more if you built it yourself.

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.

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.

• 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.

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 Then one day, for some stupid reason (an out-of-date library for a side project in the Debian repo) and out of curiosity I tried arch.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.

So you can tell people you use Arch btw

Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte?

No, not really.

Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?

This is IMHO the most important aspect. The thing they're trying to optimize isn't performance, though, it's more "usability", i.e. making the system work for you. When you get down to it and understand all the components of the OS, and all the moving parts within, you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly.

The more you want it to work your way, the less you want a prebuilt solution, and the more you want a rock solid package management system and repo setup. Debian derivatives work in a pinch, or for a server, not so great for a PC you want to do a lot of things on.

I think for many people, whether they're tinkerers or programmers or whoever, enjoy the freedom that comes with Arch.

Ease of use.

I’ve run the same CachyOS partition for 2 (3?) years, and I don’t do a freaking thing to it anymore. No fixes, no tweaking. It just works.

…Because the tweaks and rapid updates are constantly coming down the pipe for me. I pay attention to them and any errors, but it’s all just done for me! Whenever I run into an issue, a system update fixes it 90% of the time, and if it doesn’t it’s either coming or my own stupid mistake.

On Ubuntu and some other “slow” distros I was constantly:

• Fighting bugs in old packages

• Fighting and maintaining all the manual fixes for them

• Fighting the system which does not like me rolling packages forward.

• And breaking all that for a major system update, instead of incremental ones where breakage is (as it turns out) more manageable.

• I’d often be consulting the Arch wiki, but it wasn’t really applicable to my system.

I could go on and on, but it was miserable and high maintenance.

I avoided Fedora because of the 3rd party Nvidia support, given how much trouble I already had with Nvidia.

…It seems like a misconception that it’s always “a la carte” too. The big distros like Endeavor and Cachy and such pick the subsystems for you. And there are big application groups like KDE that install a bunch of stuff at once.

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.

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

I never found using endeavour any more trouble than using Ubuntu or fedora, and I've used both in school or work so, my question back to you, why do people choose corporate coded distros like fedora or Ubuntu when easy to use, up to date and free as in freedom distros like endeavour exist?

I'm going extra silly: why do you wear bikinis when swimsuits exist? Dunno, preferences. People have them.

I don't think that currently there is much difference in terms of performance, unless you are using a very bloated distro.

Personally I prefer Arch compared to Ubuntu, Fedora or similar (including Endeavor, Manjaro etc...) because I simply want to build my OS, piece by piece.

There is basically nothing else about it, I just like feeling the system I am running as something I created (kinda) and knowing exactly what is running and why it's there.

Obviously you could achieve the same with other distros (and even go deeper with things like Gentoo or Guix) but Arch makes it very easy to do it.

EDIT: oh and being rolling release too, as another user mentioned. I would never go back to a fixed release distro.

Because it comes with a nice BTW

Newer software is nice, it's not too much trouble.

The Arch Wiki is probably the sungle most useful documentation for any Linux user; I don’t even use Arch and it’s still extremely helpful.

I could see the benefits of using Arch just so almost every function my system has is near-perfectly documented in Arch Wiki.

As for the distro itself, it has the newest packages, and often good repos with interesting packages that Debian and others may lack. It also expects you to choose and install the components you want, whereas the Debian installer will usually just install defaults; you can use Debootstrap for a minimal Debian install, but that’s not as well supported for installing Debian due to the way tools as set up on the install medium.

The reason I choose Debian over Arch is because if I don’t use a device for several months and have to install updates (like my school laptop over the summer), Debian Stable is more likely to survive that than Arch; I’ve destroyed several Arch VMs by trying to update them after not using them for months. I’m sure I could have salvaged them if I tried, but I’d rather just make a new VM.

It's not "trouble" if you're already familiar with Linux. It's not the way I would go as a user of 20+ years, but it's not just for desktop use.

If you're looking to build a platform for something, it's perfect. Look at why Valve switched to use to for SteamOS. You have an underlying framework of a stable system, and you just create automation to slap it all together into the base layer of all the things you want without having to worry about specific things breaking the stack you're building on top of it.

It's like a blank page instead of a notebook with line guides.

It helps make more sense if you think of everything you've got to build on it already existing in a git repo. Merge > Build > Release. Makes perfect sense, and you save yourself creating an entire distro to maintain from scratch.

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

Honestly, the AUR and arch wiki are amazing. Every other distro I've used I've had to rely on out of date or unreliable support forums. Anytime I want to install something I don't have hope it already has a package, because someone has usually already built an AUR package that either compiles from the latest source for you or comes pre-pcompiled.

Being on the most up to date version of the kernel and all software is a good thing in my book. I certainly haven't had issues caused by this.

I'll admit the Arch can be a struggle to set up initially, so that's why I use EndeavourOS. EndeavourOS is just Arch with a GUI installer, a shortlist of tweaks all users would want anyway, it let's you choose your preferred Desktop Environment during install, and it feels like any other distro in terms of getting it ready for use. It doesn't come with any apps, other than core system tools and firefox, which is also good because you can then install whatever you want.and be free of anything you don't want. Also, all the usual hardware gets detected and works out of the box.

I won't go back to any other Linux.

I boot my laptop. it takes seconds, the memory footprint is like 600mb

With sway everything feels snappy and insanely responsive.

I haven't had any issues with arch on my laptop for like 5 years now.

Why would I use anything else ?

I had much more trouble with keeping my debian/ubuntu installs running for years back in the days. And it was always out of date. Whenever there was a bug, I would search for it, see that it was already fixed upstream and be frustrated that I'd only get that fix in half a year. And then after half a year, dist-upgrade borked my whole install and I had to reinstall from scratch. I remember all the lost weekends of fiddling with it and the stress from needing my pc in working order for my job.

With arch, I've broken it a couple times in the first 2 months, while doing my ideal setup. But now I have been on the same install for about 10 years. It survived being cloned to multiple new computers and laptops and just keeps updating and working. Been using it professionally of course. Rarely do I have to do a minor fix. 2024 was kind of bad iirc, there were 3-4 manual interventions I had to do. It took probably 8 hours of maintenance work in total for that year. 2025 was mostly super smooth sailing, iirc I had to do 1 or at most 2 small fixes that took less than 20minutes each.

But I must say, I've set it up in a very deliberate and failsafe way. I can't guarantee the same result if you do anything different from my setup - software choise and process wise. And I've seen pretty bad fuckups on the support forums again and again from other people that do their own approach with arch.

I guess thats the power of it. It can be molded into very different forms. With Ubuntu you just get spoonfed what canonical cooks for their corpo overlords.

Honestly it's the most problem-free distribution I've used. I've used fedora, ubuntu, opensuse, and they all are way easier to break and way harder to fix. Once you get arch working it works really reliably and when it occasionally breaks it's easy to fix. I used nixos for a while, and it is more reliable but it's just a little too much effort.

I am a software developer, on work computers I have debian, on my personal I have arch.

I would never use fedora as I am not here to troubleshoot bullshit for red hat, and would never use ubuntu because of their snap bullshit. It can be avoided but in both cases it is an indicator of the motivations of the company that controls them not being aligned with my interests.

I like arch because of the rolling release and because I like to control and understand all that happens on my machine. Optimization is not my main motivator.

I have almost nothing à la carte, i bulk-installed all that my DE wanted and use that plus alacritty and steam.

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.

I daily drive Debian now, but several years ago when a couple of my computers were still very new, I used Arch since it has bleeding-edge support for new hardware while being still thoroughly documented in the Arch Wiki.

The sheer volume of packages on the official repo and the AUR made it great for discovering which desktop environment I wanted to use and for software-hopping in general too. You can have as much or as little on your system as you want and nothing is forced on you.

I've tried several distros before, none of them feel the same as arch linux, I keep coming back to it. It is simple and just works. The other distros feel too bloated out of the box, which immediately demotivates me. I don't want to go through the hassle of removing everything I don't need by hand, so arch is just perfect.

Though I think I shouldn't have went with arch in my vps. I miss the automated security updates of Fedora.

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.

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.

to me the main difference was having to use a different package manager. so no biggie really. and arch has an awesome wiki. the documentation made things too easy so now I use nixos BTW

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 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

Yes and no to all of those reasons, and many others.

There isn't a right or wrong way to install/use Linux. As the saying goes "you do you". If going through the Arch learning curve doesn't appeal to you, don't do it. If you're the sort of person whose curiosity sometimes leads them to do silly things that aren't necessarily logical but that you find enormously fun and satisfying, then maybe go for it.

The thing stopping me from using Arch is that most programs come out as debs and you have to wait for them to show up in the AUR. Example: when Mullvad VPN first came out it was only available as a deb. How long did it take to show up in the AUR? Who made that available? Was it the Mullvad folks or someone else? That's the kind of thing that concerns me.

Im also wondering this.

I've tried installing it on 2 different pcs a few times and ive not gotten it to work yet lol. Granted I didnt spend a lot of time on it.

I appreciate you can build the system yourself but its almost choice overload for adhd me and ill end up installing every single package anyway that ill never need, which negates the point of arch.

I moved to arch because of rolling releases, ubuntu switching to unity fucked my laptop over. Yes the initial install is a bit more work, but the wiki is great and I feel like I have a better understanding of linux after going through the process. Also really not a fan of apt.