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 And it was always out of date.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.

because it’s less work. i don’t have to strip out what a distro thinks i want. i don’t have to worry about major distro releases that might have changes that need manual intervention. if there are updates that need manual intervention, they’re small, easy to deal with and usually do not effect me. everything is well documented and standard. packages are installed with default settings/config (to my understanding), so i can easily read upstream documentation and not have to deal with weirdness. getting packages that are obscure is easier. i don’t have to worry about upstream having a fix, or supporting something that i need but my distro not having the update in their repo. it’s just simpler and easier to manage (for my use case)

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.

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 they haven’t been privied to install gentoo yet😀

Because it comes with a nice BTW

I use Artix (fork of Arch with init freedom)—the main reason why I prefer an Arch base specifically is for the AUR. The reason why I prefer a minimalistic distro in general, is because I want to be able to choose what software I install and how I set up my system. For example I don’t use a full DE so any distro that auto-installs a DE for me will install a bunch of software I won’t use. You also usually get a lot more control over partitioning etc with minimalistic distros—lets me fuck around with more weird setups if I want to try something out.

To be clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using distros that have more things “pre-packaged”. It’s a matter of personal preference. The category of “poweruser” makes sense—some users want more fine-grained control over their systems, whilst some users don’t care and want something that roughly works with minimal setup. Or perhaps you do care about fine-grained control over your system, but it just so happens that your ideal system is the same as what comes pre-installed with some distro. Do whatever works for you.

Not a mean question at all. I haven’t had more difficulty keeping a working system than I did on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc. I get everything I need in Arch and the packages are always fresh off the grill. I also like the emphasis on text config files and a ground-up install. That helped me better understand my system and how it works.

No idea about performance. My performance recommendation is “don’t run Windows!” :)

I use Garuda. Yes, it’s Arch based, but it’s also all set up for gaming and newbie friendly. I started on Bazzite, then switched to Garuda, it’s just as easy.

haven’t tried arch but afaik it’s a distro that lets the user control everything, like gentoo or slackware. that’s actually an easier system to manage if you know what you’re doing and have something you want in mind.

or some people just enjoy tinkering and suffering

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 like learning and having control over my pc. But it’s mainly the learning part for me, followed the wiki a second time installing arch on my Thinkpad last week and felt just as satisfied as the first time. But no shame in using archinstall.

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

Arch is honestly pretty simple compared to what it was like to install Linux in the 90s…

That said, I mostly run Debian, and have a little smattering of arch. Much like running testing & unstable Debian on two of my machines, I have it there to check out new things and for testing purposes. Same goes for arch, I’m using it to test out new things.

I saw a gif about some cool hyprland dotfiles and i fell in love.

Instructions said it was designed for arch.

There are many more other reasons i stayed. Its great to actually feel in charge of my system.

Debian/ubuntu has its uses in server reliability but its missing snap for daily use.

Fedora is to close to corporate for my personal interest.