I love Arch because it doesn’t use non-default file paths for config files for the programs that I install. I am always confident when making a config file that it will simply work
I love Arch because its manual install process opened my eyes to the beauty and elegance of the Linux file system. I have gone from someone who didn’t care to keep their system clean or customize anything before, to someone who has a clean system management habit, but also has all kinds of cool scripts, hotkeys, and cronjobs for my use and abuse,
I love Arch because it’s bleeding edge, yet it has yet to break. Why is it so goddamn amazing? It’s like magic.
I love Arch because it’s sooo fast…did I mention it never breaks? It’s magic, I’m sure of it.
I love Arch because the community is also amazing.
I love Arch so much that I will never consider trying another distro again. Back in my .deb based days I was always jumping around. That was fun for a little bit, but now I have a clean, fast, awesome system complete with VFIO and everything else I’ll ever need.
Why do you love Arch?
‘Relying on complex tools to manage and build your system is going to hurt the end users. […] “If you try to hide the complexity of the system, you’ll end up with a more complex system”. Layers of abstraction that serve to hide internals are never a good thing. Instead, the internals should be designed in a way such that they NEED no hiding.’
Thou shall sing praises about the the Wiki and all wisdom contained within.
Thou shall not look at thou neighbor’s package manager but only use Pacman and AUR for thee shall bring you all things.
Thou shall refer to Wiki before asking questions as thou shall not commit the mutiny of asking questions already answered!
Ahem, closer to the OP topic.
After I have used Arch for almost a hear on almost all of my devices I can share some my experiences.
After hearing about how unstable Arch is my experience has been very different. The only “break” I have had was Virtualbox VM’s not starting up after a reboot. Turned out that host-modules update didn’t come through from the mirror I was using when I updated and that resulted in a partial update. Just ran an update again and the update came through - Problem fixed.
Pacman and the AUR has been awesome. Lots of people moan about the AUR but all them get problems cause of the use of AUR managers, this isn’t supported so if you encounter problems that is to be expected.
The amount of knowledge gained from setting things up yourself is invaluable. I have learned that all distro’s are essentially the same but all of them except for Arch and probably Gentoo (Have yet to do this) do allot of config and setup for you. This may make it easier for the average user but can make same config’s harder as you first have to figure out what the hell the distro maintainers did as a default config. This also makes troubleshooting harder because you have settings that you didn’t set and mostly these aren’t documented in a Wiki like the Arch Wiki.
But at the end of the day I now know that a distro is just a distro - it is a Linux system preconfigured in a certain way. Nothing more and nothing less and Arch leaves me alone to do what I want without the way someone else uses Linux bothering me.
I used Arch for the non-bleeding edge stuff (is Arch actually bleeding edge?). Ran some LTS and Apache software on there. Worked really well.
My experience on headless and desktop was dramatically different than my experience on a laptop. Apparently my hardware choice on mobile computers isn’t made for the bleeding edge.
