
Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015) - jonathasrr
https://jonathas.com/linux-and-me-why-I-fell-in-love-with-arch-linux/
======
KozmoNau7
I fell in love with Arch, after having used Gentoo for years, and Debian
before that.

The straightforwardness appealed to me, it's a binary distribution with a
rolling release cycle and no custom-finagled packages.

But after a while, I got tired of manually configuring _everything_ , doing
all kinds of weird house-keeping and having to randomly boot from a USB stick
to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences. And this was
while running the supposedly "stable" update branch. I also got tired of the
countless updates that required manual convoluted update procedures and Pacman
tricks to function correctly.

Maybe this was because my install was relatively old, and thus had stuff like
Pulseaudio and Systemd grafted on top of it, but I never had any issues
immediately after those updates.

So around a year ago when Linux Mint 18 was released, I made the switch and I
haven't looked back. I know it's a hackneyed phrase, but Everything. Just.
Works. I have not had to do anything at all on my refurbed T420, I just
installed it, and it just works, it's wonderful.

I cannot be arsed to mess around with configuration files and whatnot on my
computers anymore, I have much more interesting things to do than mess around
trying to keep my personal computer running correctly.

I was also a hardcore KDE-head for years, but Cinnamon has really grown on me.
It does what I need, the way I want it (I grew up on Win9x, so that's the
interface style I prefer), without getting bogged down in obscure
configurations or arcane frameworks.

Maybe this all marks me as fallen from the ranks of the Linux cognoscenti, but
I don't care. I just want to get on with my life. In the same way that I see a
lot of people gush about Mac OS, Mint simply gets out of my way and lets me
get on with stuff I actually want/need to do.

~~~
sevensor
> Maybe this all marks me as fallen from the ranks of the Linux cognoscenti,
> but I don't care. I just want to get on with my life. In the same way that I
> see a lot of people gush about Mac OS, Mint simply gets out of my way and
> lets me get on with stuff I actually want/need to do.

Interesting -- this is what I would say about Arch. I switched to Arch right
after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big opportunity for
breakage. But in those four years I've barely had to think about system
administration, beyond routinely running pacman -Syu. I used to have to do a
fresh install every six months when a new Fedora would break everything. I
don't think this makes me a member of the cognoscenti at all, and I think the
whole "Arch is for the l33t" meme is wildly inaccurate. Arch is by far the
easiest distro I've ever used.

~~~
lunchables
I agree, except for the installation. Manjaro I think would be a great
compromise.

~~~
OtterCoder
Argh. I spent most of yesterday trying to set up a dual boot with Manjaro and
nearly bricked my machine. It is really dependant on hardware I think.

~~~
mpwoz
Same! I've tried the community, kde, and xfce isos on a second drive and have
yet to achieve a bootable system. I'll probably tinker with it a bit more this
weekend since Manjaro sounds like the perfect distro for me, but I'm getting
close to giving up :/

------
s0l1dsnak3123
I fell in love with Arch about 5 years ago. I use it every day as my daily
work machine: One of the best things about arch is its documentation -
specifically its wiki. Arch lets you start off with a fairly simple
installation, but you always have the option of moving off the beaten path and
doing something different.

It's that flexibility which allows people to create arch installs with a very
low memory footprint, or crazy-fast boot times, or bleeding-edge software.

Another part of Arch's allure is its overall simplicity: it is possible to
learn how to administer the entire system within a day or two. The wiki makes
it easy to read up and learn about how to configure a portion of your system
should you want to, and the installation covers of your system covers most of
the fundamentals anyway!

Pacman (and pacaur!) are great, and having the latest packages is also great
(I've only needed to reinstall my Arch setup once in the 5+ years I've used
it, by the way), but these days we have Docker and VMs which are fast and
usable enough on commodity hardware that they can be used to safely compile
and run custom packages if you really need them, so it's not quite as cool as
it was back then, but having it integrated into your package management system
(and getting updates from AUR maintainers on packages based on git clones!) is
still very useful.

~~~
nextos
I usually describe Arch as the simplest possible binary distribution. It's
just a thin layer (pacman mostly) on top of vanilla packages. This reduces
complexity a lot. I understand most of what is going on in my install because
I explicitly configured everything, and packages don't contain weird patches.

While I love Arch's ethos, I think the next step in distributions is to
embrace declarative configuration, non-destructive actions and reproducible
packages. NixOS & GuixSD provide this. And luckily there's still a lot of Arch
ethos in their implementations. Namely, that your base system is totally
barebones and you need to add (declare!) whatever you want to have.

~~~
Already__Taken
Nix and Guix node packages are 8.2 and 8.1 respectively. Nix can't seem to
find a couchdb package and guix is 1.6.1

Arch package have node 8.5.0 and couch is 2.1.0

When I read blogs about new software and I can't just packagemanager
install/update it on I don't really see any more value than living on windows
installing exe's from websites.

Every distro I've used except arch has a real case of documentation not living
up to what's actually happening. I've used fedora a lot and it's sometimes
hard to find current version docs. But what's worse it hard to know if 2+
versions ago docs are ok because that particular bit hasn't changed.

~~~
DiThi
Nix has node 8.4 in its unstable channel, and it seems very easy to change[0].

I don't know about couch but it has 2.0 and the change to 2.1 shouldn't be
big.

[0]
[https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/c699694cbf4400480fe4...](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/c699694cbf4400480fe4267b7bee33b77747db07#diff-4b80ae6efa51ec8f097344602afa5b0c)

~~~
hedning
Yes, with nixos it's easy and _safe_ to install packages from unstable while
running a stable system as default (installing stuff never breaks your
system).

There's also a fairly new feature called overlays which are used to fully
track upstream releases (there's overlays available for rust and Firfox
Nightly for instance).

------
foepys
The post is from 2015. Since then the abs tool has been deprecated (use asp
from AUR instead) and the i686 version is nearing end of life and will be
unsupported by November 2017. If you still need 32-bit Arch Linux, you can use
archlinux32 [1].

1: [https://archlinux32.org](https://archlinux32.org)

~~~
Foxboron
abs has been deprecated, yes. But asp has been promoted to [extra]

------
bartkmq
I'm a big fan of the Arch User Repository (AUR). But Arch itself takes too
long to configure and breaks from time to time so I switched to Manjaro which
is based on Arch but has its own repos with more config files already prepared
for you. Also it's not rolling release but updates once a week which allows
the maintainers to check for errors before they reach the users.

Because of the AUR I actually think Manjaro can be more user friendly than
distros like Ubuntu. While using Ubuntu I remember constantly having to deal
with PPAs which were broken/outdated after every update. On Manjaro I can just
hit 'Install' in the GUI and don't have to worry about PPAs. I even found a
package specific to my university that sets up the Wlan and other things. On
Ubuntu finding such an unknown, rarely used package would be much harder.

~~~
Ig0rK
Same thing with the rolling release breaking the system happens frequently
with manjaro. The latest update broke my system for example. If you google
"manjaro update system broken" you will see that this happens at least once a
year which is not fun.

------
catpolice
I used to love Arch wholeheartedly. The systemd transition left a bad taste in
my mouth, and I haven't felt like I've had full control of my system since
then, but I periodically try other Linux distributions but I always end up
coming back to Arch. My experience with other distributions always goes
something like this:

Oh this is nice and easy

Hm, there isn't a package for this thing I love. I guess I'll build it
myself...

[Several hours pass]

Ok, looks like I just need to get XYZ working and I'm good, lemme google how
to do that for this distro

It looks like this is automatically configured using some Windows-style
control panel hidden somewhere. Google suggests seven different places I could
look for this option, corresponding to previous versions of the distro...

Wouldn't editing a config in /etc/ be easier than this? I'm reinstalling
Arch...

~~~
levesque
So what is the issue with systemd? Any strictly better alternative out there?

~~~
catpolice
Last time I did the research there wasn't a striiiictly better alternative to
systemd, which is rather unfortunate. There are flame wars beyond number on
the subject and I'd rather avoid starting another one. For my two cents: I
don't like how it's gobbling up all the functionality that used to be owned by
separately maintained and tried/tested processes, in a way that seems to limit
my ability to put together a minimalistic system, and the developers' attitude
toward security and how they've handled criticism is not so great. I'll use
it, but I don't like it.

For me, there are ecosystem/adoption reasons for why any alternative is a
tough sell - any distro basically has to have the startup system baked into
their package manager, if you're going to be able to install packages that
depend on daemons, etc. So if updated package availability is a concern (and
it is for me), I need a popular enough distro. And basically all the popular
distros use systemd. So unless I want to make some pretty big compromises or
do a ton of work, I'm stuck with it.

------
erikbye
I've been a Linux user since early Slackware. Arch is the only distro I will
recommend, and, contrary to its image as a tinkerer's distro, it's the only
Linux install I've had that "just works" and works. Install once, and never
again. Minimal, stable. Packages are updated promptly, and I never had a
problem using user repo packages.

~~~
Thaxll
You're recommending a rolling distro? I remember some people at work using
Arch they did it for couple of month and then switch back to Ubuntu because
random things would break afters updates, dhcp, printing, X server ect ...

Arch is great for home / hack stuff, for work you want something stable.

~~~
pavanky
I have been using archlinux for close to a decade now. Updates were never a
problem as much as people make it out to be. But even then I don't notice as
many issues since I switched to an LTS kernel on my machines.

If your hardware is old enough, I recommend using the LTS kernel and kernel
modules.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
I'm running linux-lts on my kaby lake i7-7700k and it works fine. I haven't
used linux-lts in the past, but I opted to do a ZFS on root install so I
wanted it to be more stable.

------
apetresc
The best feeling in the world is running `ps aux` on a fresh Arch installation
and having the output all fit on half the screen, and you can precisely
identify why every single thing line is there. And then having that still be
true two months later.

------
keenerd
Volunteer from Arch Linux here.

I ask this whenever a big thread comes up: are there any packages in the AUR
that you'd really like to see be made into an official package?

~~~
AsyncAwait
Hi, Arch user here, thanks for your work.

I'd love to see VSCode[1] in the official repos, Atom is there and VSCode is
arguably becoming even more popular now.

1 - [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/visual-studio-
code](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/visual-studio-code)

~~~
calcifer
Hi, I'm the maintainer of that package! Unlike building from source [1], that
package uses the official binary distribution and is _not_ MIT licensed. So it
might be a better idea to move the source build [1] to [community].

[1] [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/visual-studio-code-
oss](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/visual-studio-code-oss)

~~~
AsyncAwait
Cool, yeah, definitely looks like a better package for inclusion. Thanks for
maintaining the package!

------
vortico
Doesn't look like this has been mentioned, but the package _names_ in Arch are
beautifully done. No more `libwhatever-2dev` or `whatever9.6-libs`. Just
`whatever` and everything you need is installed. That package manager is also
one of the fastest of all the distros I've tried.

------
rantanplan
I briefly considered Arch, a few years back that I was having a relationship
crisis with my Fedora.

Unfortunately it was a no-go for me for the following reasons, but the
situation may have been improved since then:

1) Back then it was only recently that they had instituted package signing and
verification for their official packages. Ouch! That was something that most
distros had for years back then. So security wasn't their primary concern.

2)There were 2 or 3 package managers. pacman was the one, don't remember the
others and I didn't understand their purpose.

3)They were touting abundance of packages, but these were mostly AUR packages.
AUR packages, back then at least, were completely unvetted, arbitrary packages
provided by... anyone basically. And the official Arch documentation was
crystal clear that they don't support them and that the user, individually,
should inspect each one for their integrity or possible malicious intentions.
Uh, no thanks.

Hope the situation has improved because I was planning to give it one more try
at some point.

~~~
Latty
I think all of the 'other package managers' are just wrappers around pacman to
give more functionality. I haven't seen any competing completely different
package managers.

Packaging, yeah, some stuff is only AUR, but that's generally a better
starting point than "well here is the source". In general, 99% of what I use
is available in proper packages. Obviously that'll depend on what you use.

~~~
rantanplan
> generally a better starting point than "well here is the source"

Definitely _not_ when it comes to security. We are talking about _packages_ ,
which means even legit, well-intended programs can be weaponized by the
_packager_.

That's a hell of an attack vector.

~~~
Latty
I meant more as in "as someone wanting to use something", rather than the
security aspect.

Most AUR packages I have seen have been incredibly easy to read - if you
really don't want to use them, it's still a good framework for making your own
packages much more easily, so you can install from source without dumping
unmanaged stuff into your system.

~~~
rantanplan
I think Debian has a better process in which they vet packagers. It's a bit
more tedious but I'd put my trust more easily in such a system.

> Most AUR packages I have seen have been incredibly easy to read

It's not about quality, but rather more about quantity. I don't have the time
to vet every package.

~~~
striking
Vetting a package is as easy as reading through its PKGBUILD. Here's a sample
one:
[https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=pacau...](https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=pacaur)

makepkg pulls source files and possibly patches, and then compiles them and
installs them according to the instructions. It makes life simple.

------
blux
I have been using Arch both for my work and private desktop for about ten
years now. It is an absolute joy to work with. The biggest drawback is the
_very_ occasional breakage after doing a system upgrade. I would estimate such
an upgrade breaks the system once or twice every year on average, although
everything is much more stable for the last few years. I upgrade my system at
least once per week.

Overall, highly recommended distribution, even for beginners, assuming you are
willing to read and understand the excellent installation guide.

~~~
tbrock
Subscribe to the breakages mailing list and this will never happen again. Will
get <10 emails a year.

~~~
blux
Do you have a link? I could not find it here:
[https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/](https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/)

------
mac01021
>I’ve configured the compiler once to work in an optimized way for my specific
CPU, then compiled all the LXDE packages from ABS and installed them. I
noticed they were running a little bit faster after that.

I would love to hear about what configuring the compiler to work in an
optimized way for your specific CPU entails.

~~~
jcelerier
In arch the compile flags are set in /etc/makepkg.conf.

Got my system compiled with

    
    
        CFLAGS="-march=native -O3 -flto -pipe -fstack-protector-strong --param=ssp-buffer-size=4"
    
        CXXFLAGS="-march=native -O3 -flto -pipe -fstack-protector-strong --param=ssp-buffer-size=4"
    
        LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O3,--sort-common,--as-needed,-z,relro,-flto"
    
        MAKEFLAGS="-j16"

~~~
mac01021
Interesting.

So how does this set of options tend to differ from those used by the guys who
build the normal binary packages?

~~~
jcelerier
Default is

    
    
        CFLAGS="-march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector-strong -fno-plt"
        CXXFLAGS="-march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector-strong -fno-plt"
        LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1,--sort-common,--as-needed,-z,relro,-z,now"
    

which ensure that it would still work with an AMD Athlon64 from 2003, but you
don't get any "new" things such as SSE4, AVX, etc. unless the developer hand-
codes specific cases for these CPUs.

------
harrygeez
A lot of pros and cons thrown around here and there, with each of them having
their merits. I like Arch because it lets me piece up _the OS_ that I _want_
to use.

Of course, it has its limits and it probably isn't 100% to your liking, but
it's pretty much there, and the best thing is since I tweaked everything
myself, I know what's wrong when things go wrong.

Like most people, I had my fair share of bad surprises after updates, but
these errors don't go unnoticed and so far I am able to solve them all
following the solutions posted in the forums, it's not that hard. Pacman also
cache your old packages so downgrading is also relatively painless.

I recommend Arch to anyone who wants to get to know better how their computer
works. Some of its shortcoming are annoying, yes, but not a dealbreaker IMO.

------
pmilot
Been running Arch since March, and I have to say that, after years of trying
Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/openSUSE unsuccessfully, this is the one that finally
made me switch to desktop Linux.

The documentation is the main advantage for me. The Arch Wiki is a real
treasure trove. I have learned more about the internals of Linux in the past
few months than I have in the few years before that. And that's coming from
someone who did a full stage one Gentoo install back in 2007!

I was always very skeptical of rolling releases until I tried Arch. I always
feared an "unstable" system. In practice, however, I never ran into many
problems, and when I did, a full system upgrade a few days later usually fixed
the issue. The maintainers are very reactive.

------
emsy
I fell out of love with Arch after the 3rd time I had to fix my system after
an update (and this was NOT because I didn't read the release notes). I still
very much like Arch's approach, but I'm a bit of a burnt child and won't use
it on my main machine.

------
kristerv
For beginners [https://antergos.com/](https://antergos.com/) is a clean
version of Arch just with a simple installer. So you get all the benefits of
Arch with no bloat (like Manjaro) and don't have to learn installing the OS
manually.

~~~
trevordixon
I may try that next time. I'm a beginner and used [https://arch-
anywhere.org/](https://arch-anywhere.org/) to install. It was as easy for me
as installing Ubuntu.

------
catnaroek
Here is why I use Arch Linux:

(0) I'm somewhere at the middle in the spectrum between a noob and a power
user. My parents think of me as the latter, but most technically competent
people I've met think of me as the former.

(1) I'm lazy when it comes to computer stuff: If I'm given a bare-bones
system, I won't bother installing and configuring more than is strictly
necessary to start getting work done (not necessarily in the most efficient
way). And conversely, if I'm given a bloated system, I won't bother removing
what I don't need to use. Even worse, I often end up rationalizing that “I
might need it someday”.

(2) I want stuff to both just work and be easy to understand. Alas, software
that works automagically is usually complex, so a compromise is needed. The
compromise I've settled for is that I'm willing to put just enough effort into
learning from online guides and fora, so long as I'm not confronted with too
much complexity. If I can't learn how to configure your software in 30
minutes, I won't use it. (The only exception is Emacs.)

Arch fits my needs pretty nicely: It provides good defaults for the low-level
system stuff that I don't want to bother learning, and it provides no defaults
whatsoever for the user-facing stuff that I do want to control.

------
mariusmg
So why exactly is Arch a better Linux distro compared with the rest ? There's
no "sellingpoint" in the article except this "dig" at the other distros :

"apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk
breaking everything)"

~~~
zdkl
In my opinion, the selling point is that arch _requires_ you to take interest
into how it works and some level of understanding of the major parts.

To get a working arch install you'll be taken through The Install Guide that
summarises the steps necessary to have a base install with links to relevant
specialised articles. Once you have a bootable system, they provide links for
further customisation if your system.

The amazing thing is that by contrast to ubuntu et al. you're by default left
with the strict minimal bootable linux system and anything else you want/need
on your machine, it's explicitely your responsability to ensure proper
operation (dependency versioning, program specific configuration and
maintenance). It's fairly overwhelming initially, but the tools arch gives you
to cope with the "it's your mess" are second to none (pacman/yaourt is
_amazing_ )

~~~
ChrisSD
This is both the great strength and great weakness of Arch. I did use it for
awhile but in the end I got tired of playing sys admin on my home machine.

The nature of the system is that updates can absolutely bork the system at any
time so you have to keep up to date with potential issues before doing
updates. Many other distros do this work for you so you only have to worry
every couple of years (or six months if you want).

Don't get me wrong, Arch is great if you're willing to keep up the effort but
it does require more attention than more mainstream distros.

~~~
rocqua
Arch takes real care not to let the system bork at any time due to an update.
There is a very clear caveat to that. Check the arch news site before you do a
system update. About 4 times a year, they make a potentially braking change,
and inform users of this via that site.

------
CJefferson
I like arch Linux, I just wish they had a simple installer -- these days I
tend to have lots of vms hanging around, and I haven't found a super simple
way of making a quick arch VM. There doesn't seem to be any official vagrant
boxes for example.

I can believe the lack of a simple installer is what has kept the quality up
-- it is a way of signalling users should be prepared to use the terminal.

~~~
fyskij
Here you go: [https://antergos.com/](https://antergos.com/) In opposition to
Manjaro (which is an Arch fork), Antergos is Arch + install GUI with default
desktop env.

~~~
CJefferson
Thanks, I will give it a try!

------
nine_k
Void Linux[1] has a lot of the upsides of Arch, and many general similarities.
It feels "lighter", though, adopts LibreSSL by default, has a different
package manager, and is systemd-free. Most of the Arch wiki (which is a
_great_ asset) is more directly applicable to it than to e.g. Debian.

[1]: [https://voidlinux.eu](https://voidlinux.eu)

------
anotherevan
I love Arch, personally. Have been using it for quite a few years now as my
desktop and love the rolling release paradigm.

That said, when setting up machines for others I pick the current LTS release
of Kubuntu and install unattended-upgrades to ensure security updates get
maintained. It provides a much better ongoing maintenance story for machines
that are less "pets" and more "tools".

§

Due to a disk crash, I recently had to reinstall Arch for the first time in
quite a few years. IMO the install process has become more opaque. I seem to
remember the wiki use to have a newbie install guide which was really helpful
and explained a lot of things as you go, or at least what the common practices
were or the pros and cons of different options. That seems to be gone and
anything that may be an opinion seems to be excised from any install
instructions, and you're left to stumble around different pages a lot more,
which is a bit of a shame.

I guess that's were arch anywhere and similar ones mentioned may have filled
the gap. I will have to try them out.

------
ausjke
In the old days I played with gentoo, linux-from-scratch, redhat,
debain,ubuntu,slackware, even *BSDs...you name it. I was young and had time
then. Nowadays I settle down on ubuntu for the desktop, Debian for the server.
That's it. Good enough for everything I need, so I can focus more on the stuff
I need develop instead. It is also easier to coordinate with teams.

------
Crontab
I like Arch a lot, but these days, I prefer Debian.

That said, even if you don't use Arch, its wiki is a trove of information.

------
tscs37
I'm personally quite in love with Arch on my Desktop machine.

It's an almost pure developer setup, I quite regularly install bleeding edge
(-git from AUR) of various software, I tinker around. Arch makes that rather
easy.

When something goes wrong, I can usually rather easily tell what just
exploded, it's kind of like when you have build yourself a car and now you can
tell by the hum of the engine how much oil it has.

Though there are some issues with it; most notably, I hold back the kernel for
a long time because updating the kernel is always a bit of a hassle and
sometimes you need manual interventions, which you can easily be notified of
via email and RSS in advance.

On the other hand, my servers all run either CentOS7 or up-to-date Ubuntu
Server installs, I'm not __that __in love with Arch.

------
jryan49
I love Arch Linux. I'd say though there is a huge learning curve before you
become comfortable/productive. However, in the end it's the most comfortable,
because you are pretty aware how most things work, especially if you like to
heavily customize things.

------
teekert
I also love Arch, the only thing off putting is how hard it its to realize
full disc encryption. I used Arch Anywhere but it works only with when
choosing bios emulation and full disc encryption didn't work, Antergos makes
too many choices for me, the base Arch image is to much work to install (where
I have Solus or Ubuntu running in 20 min).

I did like it better when they still had their own minimal installer. I don't
mind installing X and a DE but setting up encryption and partitioning manually
is too much for me.

I love it most that you can really do anything with Arch, the wiki is very
very good on any subject. Any suggestions on good Arch installers that just
give you a working encrypted system (like Arch Anywhere but working)?

~~~
whois
I have this wiki page where I documented everything I did to setup my arch
system. Disk encryption included: [https://github.com/Noah-
Huppert/.dotfiles/wiki/System-Instal...](https://github.com/Noah-
Huppert/.dotfiles/wiki/System-Install)

~~~
teekert
Thanx, I will try and follow your steps. At the moment I'm having a short
affair with Solus (Budgie although I prefer their Mate implementation I didn't
get acpi working there) which may turn into a full relationship by the looks
of things. But if she lets me down Arch is always there for me.

------
towb
I was using Arch with bspwm for a few years, until ~a month ago when I wanted
a clean system. But this time I wasn't up for the whole installation process.
I know what I need, I know how to do it, and I can do it pretty fast. But it
is still a lot, so this time I went with Antergos. I had this idea that using
Arch with a minimal window manager and nothing more would keep me off
distractions from annoying UI features, but it was a lot of work for very
little reward. It is easier to just ignore what you dislike in gnome, I don't
even think that I dislike anything about it anymore (compared to when I was
new and came straight from OS X). Learnt a lot on the way though, totally
worth it!

~~~
erikbye
Why didn't you just use Arch-Anywhere? [https://arch-
anywhere.org/](https://arch-anywhere.org/)

Besides, the manual installation process of Arch does not consist of that many
steps; it takes but a few minutes (perhaps not the first time). To shorten it
further you can write your own installation script or use extant ones, of
which there are many (Arch-Anywhere being one).

I harp on Arch-Anywhere because Antergos != Arch and Arch > Antergos and other
derivations.

~~~
axaxs
Antergos IS Arch, depending on how you look at it. It's not like the
Ubuntu->Debian relationship. Installing Antergos gives you a fully functional
Arch install.

~~~
erikbye
[https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/4uzev2/antergos_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/4uzev2/antergos_arch_help_the_antergos_community/)

~~~
axaxs
Antergos installs arch. It has a repo to provide certain packages that aren't
provided by Arch repos.

Support I agree with. If you have a problem installing Antergos or one of its
packages, ask us, not the arch forums.

------
nurettin
I fell in love with arch for a year. Then a system update broke glibc. Then I
gave up. (2012)

------
lettergram
Ive gone through a lot of distros Mint, Ubtuntu, Debian, Fedora, mint (again),
Debian (again), etc.

However, when I finally got to Arch I did so because I had no choice. I
recently bought a new graphics card and it was the only one supporting many of
the new features out of the box. The Linux kernel is always up-to-date, and I
haven't had an upgrade problem in the 2 years I've been using it.

It's been interesting, because my second Debian computer which I keep around
as a server has way more issues. It appears Arch supports more hardware, and
in general (due to minimialist style) works a bit better on machines.

Idk just my two cents

~~~
KozmoNau7
Arch and Debian use the exact same kernel (Linux...), so they support the
exact same hardware.

~~~
lettergram
Except, Debian doesn't regularly release updates for theirs - where Arch is
always up-to-date.

~~~
diffeomorphism
Debian backports has 4.12:
[https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=kernel&searchon=...](https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=kernel&searchon=names&section=all&suite=stretch-
backports)

Arch also has 4.12 and 4.13 in testing:
[https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=kernel&maintaine...](https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=kernel&maintainer=&flagged=)

Doesn't seem like an appreciable difference.

------
t3h2mas
Arch has my heart. It taught me everything I know about the various pieces
under the hood that come together to make a desktop experience. I've tried
many distributions over the years and Arch came out on top for me.

------
thomastjeffery
Arch was my favorite distro for a _long_ time. The Arch and Gentoo wikis are
still my go-to for linux-related information.

Arch was my favorite distro right up until I installed NixOS. NixOS is the
first distro that has truly _innovated_ since Debian.

While I could maintain an Archlinux install for several years without _much_
effort, I am _guaranteed_ to be able to maintain my NixOS install _longer_
than I could possibly want to. I am _guaranteed_ a clean, working system. If
something breaks, I need only reboot, and pick the last derivation in GRUB.

------
mcgrath_sh
I have been running Arch for 9 months. The only re-install I had to do was
when I wiped the drive completely to get rid of the Windows partition. I have
been running that install for about 7 months now. I have not had a single
breakage. Granted, I am probably a light user (XFCE, lots of Docker
containers, a couple other small programs), but I have never had a breakage. I
-Syu once a week or every other week.

------
tgummerer
> It just works and during all these years my system was never left broken
> after an update

I find that very hard to believe. While I am still running Arch (gotta love
those shiny new features), updates did break something minor fairly frequently
due to occasionally incompatible updates, e.g. a missing symbol in a shared
object.

Luckily there was only one time where something major broke which took me a
few hours to fix.

~~~
keenerd
> _updates did break something minor fairly frequently due to occasionally
> incompatible updates, e.g. a missing symbol in a shared object._

That should never happen with official packages and full updates. I've seen it
happen maybe twice in 10 years and it was fixed within an hour.

If you shoot your foot off by performing a partial update (pacman -Sy foo bar
baz) or forget to rebuild your AUR packages, then it might happen. But that is
on you, not the distro.

------
tejohnso
I've been using Arch as my daily dev / personal machine for years now. No
complaints, it just works (Thinkpad Carbon X1).

------
Ig0rK
Archlinux based distros are cool, until updating to a supposed "stable
package" and the system is broken and you have to solve it to be able to boot
again. When this happens the 3rd time you just give up on rolling releases and
move onto something like Debian for stability.

------
SadWebDeveloper
Does Arch still releases unsigned packages? remember that in the old days that
was my deal breaker but surely for a desktop pc is miles better than Ubuntu.

~~~
Foxboron
Everything is signed these days. The current goal nowdays is reproducable
builds.

------
UK-AL
Used to love arch Linux when I was younger but every other major update when
break the x-server.

