I kinda have a love-hate relationship with Arch (well, I’m kinda neutral at this point). What I want on my Pi 4 is Void Linux. I have built an aarch64-musl version for it, but it uses some Pi 3 hackeries from a Void contributor in void-mklive (Void’s ROOTFS and image building tool). The problem with it is that I can’t seem to get video acceleration at all (I tried adding both in the /boot/config file, both the kms and the fkms options, but Sway wouldn’t detect any video acceleration and would ask for kms option in boot and JWM would startx, but freeze on startup). But the good people at Void are already working for official RPi 4 support, I’m following them on GitHub.
As for Arch, I just don’t want to update everyday or every 2-3 days anymore. I’m doing Ubuntu updates on my Pi twice or three times a month. Last time I had Arch was on my work laptop and because of the best merge between software bugs and hardware issues, Arch managed to screw the ext4 file system (something related with the PC date, but the date in the BIOS was ok). I don’t remember the exact error, I had no time to waste, I had to get work done, so I wiped Arch and installed Fedora (and been using Fedora on my work laptop ever since, from Fedora 30 to now Fedora 33). I almost had Void going, but couldn’t get some stuff working in time and had no time to waste. That laptop, when I gave it to someone else with Windows on it, had countless BSODs, even after a fresh reinstall, so I know it wasn’t Arch all by itself that managed to screw the file system, but I just don’t want to go through that anymore. This could have happened with anything else really, I’m aware, but Fedora worked ok for the time I used it on that defective laptop (around 2 months before I gave it away). And I kept my mSATA SSD on another laptop, so the SSD wasn’t the issue.
Again, I remember my time with Arch on my work laptop as updating very frequently and rebooting every time after an update, just so that I’d be sure nothing got screwed up. XBPS is so much better and I’ve got all I want in the main repo (well, I wasn’t using the AUR on Arch at all, but I would have probably used it when I found out about Abduco and DVTM, which I am now very dependent on). I guess I could try Arch on my Pi 4 just for testing (I’m running Ubuntu from a 32gb SD card). Once Void is ready, I will be installing it on a 2gb SD card (the boot partition) and an USB M.2 SSD (I already had Void installed like this, boot times were on-par with my PC, around 9 sec from cold to the tty, poweroff in 3 seconds, but I just couldn’t get video acceleration and hadn’t had time nor the motivation to fix that).
Edit: the file system breakage happened after an update, after I rebooted the system.
