Why do you use Arch

JetGum_386 · 2025-06-24 19:36:00

Once you experience a rolling release, it's difficult to get back to something different. And Arch is the rolling release *par excellence*. Plus, it's stable, it has the AUR, the wonderful Wiki... and it's fun.

joshthetechie · 2025-06-27 00:57:10

I was introduced to Arch about 13 years ago when I first started using Linux. While I have distro hopped over those 13 years I still find my way back to Arch as I feel more at home here.

Arch is specifically useful for me as I get to customize my installation exactly how I want it, and it has also taught me the inner workings of Linux. (The Arch Wiki is probably the best source of information for most Linux topics and issues.

souldrone · 2025-07-04 14:21:12

It works reliably.
Every mistake I make can be fixed by me.
Packages are new and special care is taken for new kernels.

I just don't have to fight with the operating system each day. It works.

athan · 2025-07-04 23:36:48

bodrah wrote:

I'm curious what attracted people to Arch vs other distros...

I really hate opinioned setups / distros which unfortunately most of today's ones are.
I also strongly prefer recent versions of kernel, system and userland applications and as close to their mainline as possible. Not patched, not modified, not “improved” in any way.
Arch is by no means perfect, but it brings together all of the above and that for me is more important than any of its negatives.

Last edited by athan (2025-07-04 23:40:06)

blinkingbit · 2025-07-12 10:21:58

I moved to linux after seeing the capabilities of linux in college. Linux shells are easier to learn and the scripting language of things like powershell were too close to programming, it felt like I were making a java or c# program rather than using a terminal.

I started using kbuntu with xfce (the distro installed in machines around uni), but it felt like a crappy desktop experience. I tried in my own laptop default ubuntu, but it felt sluggish with ram and cpu being wasted in god knows what.

To solve that slugginesh I moved to debian looking for stability and speed, this time I tried to customize a little bit the installation avoiding heavy desktop environments (I returned to xfce basically). This worked only because the change of desktop environment. Here was when I actually realize that all distros are almost the same thing, the only thing differentiating them is the defaults, the package manager and things that the average user don't even care about.

After all that journey I tried arch. I wasn't planning on staying with it. It was like a learning course about linux and after that I thought I would be able to customize one of the "stable ones" to fit my needs. But after trying it, the only bad thing about arch was its bleeding edginess... which wasn't that bad. My system broke, yeah, several times... BUT here is where it comes the fun part: everyone expects that your arch installation will have problems, so everyone its sharing their solutions. If a driver explodes, by the time I suffered it someone has fixed it before me. And the major problems I had were hardware/driver related that could have happen in other OS or distro anyways.

Most of my dramas have been solved by the same people tho. I don't know if my experience would be the same without seth lurking on the forums 24/7 helping people.

After solving all the inconveniences that I had, what I have on my hands? A full customizable system which I mostly understand. Everything running is on purpose and I don't have programs that I don't need.

TL;DR: I use arch because it has the best feedback loop problem->learning->customization->problem. My system improves with me. That means that it starts as bad as I'm currently are but can improve beyond what default installations have. I think it already is on that stage. I could accomplish the same thing if I moved away from it, but the feedback loop would stop or slow down.

UncleAlyx · 2025-07-19 15:50:59

Arch works.

Tiikerihai · 2025-07-30 13:42:29

In theory I don't like arch because the installation is too complicated (I like GUI) and there's way too many things I have to configure to make it work as I want, which most distros would do for you automatically during installation... but every time I use something else, even if it's based on Arch, it doesn't work out well. I just can't figure out what is wrong or how to fix it. Somehow it's only on Arch where every action I take has the expected outcome.
Feels strange to say that Arch is the easiest to use distro (for me).

xεn0η · 2025-08-14 20:42:40

When I was a teenager and started to gain interest in Linux operating systems, I've read about Arch and everybody was saying "the hardest to learn Linux distro". And I'm simply the type of dude that thinks "fuck yeah, I can master anything, I will master Arch".

Wasn't that hard tho.

fijarom · 2025-08-14 21:25:07

xεn0η wrote:

Wasn't that hard tho.

Try gentoo :*

fijarom · 2025-08-14 21:28:21

Because I bought my computer with my money, I want it to do what I say, not some guys with funny hats say.

Happ3y · 2025-08-21 00:50:38

bodrah wrote:

I'm curious what attracted people to Arch vs other distros such as Debian (and the varying flavors). For me, it was the relatively unstable nature of Arch with the more aggressive release cycle. I wanted things to break so I could learn how to fix them. And boy I've made so many mistakes and broken I'd say around six Arch installs (and arch flavored distros). But after about a year and a half, I finally think I've learned enough lessons that I can say I do not regret using arch.

Oh boy! I have broken a lot install I made. It was frustrating to restore them but after the struggle it was the relief you made it. I like the simplicity of arch and when I freshly installed it. No bloatwares and unnecessary apps. Just installed the apps I only need nothing else. Main point is why would you want to have some apps that you were not gonna use anyway. Arch all the way

close2zero · 2025-08-22 11:46:34

fijarom wrote:

xεn0η wrote:
Wasn't that hard tho.
Try gentoo :*

Regarding Gentoo: Same thing: Just read the documentation and follow the instructions. It is, as with Arch Linux, the system manual.

I use Arch Linux because it just works well with my hardware.

EJSnow · 2025-08-23 17:13:23

Good question. For me, I got into Linux in general last summer because I was using an ancient Dell Latitude laptop that was slow on Windows 10 (even with an SSD) and had no hope of running Windows 11 at usable speeds. I started with Linux Mint, but Mint didn't quite satisfy me, and I ran into some strange issues dual-booting Mint and Windows, so I abandoned Linux for a while. Then this January I came back to Linux, and while hunting for distros that could be better than Mint for me, I found Arch. At first I dismissed it as too complicated, but then I tried it in a virtual machine. To my surprise it wasn't nearly as complicated to install Arch as I'd expected, and though it took another few months to start actually using Arch (it wasn't until the end of March that I installed it on my PC) I had been convinced. Arch is the best. (lol) I loved how the rolling release model gives you a system that you can install once and upgrade forever, and after learning Pacman, I almost can't go back to any distro that uses APT. I've also enjoyed finally being able to idle at 0% CPU usage (Windows 10 idles at 3-4% CPU usage) and not have my computer get slammed to 100% CPU utilization just while booting up (Windows 11, I'm glaring at you). I also wanted an OS that could game and Arch can actually do that quite well, and in many cases noticeably faster than Windows.

To sum all of that up with a quick TL;DR: I ended up using Arch because it's the most flexible distro that I can configure to my needs and end up with a system perfectly tailored for ME, that is fast, reasonably stable, does everything I want it to do, and is infintely better than Windows (which can TECHNICALLY do everything I want it to but does it pretty badly). Also, Pacman is the best package manager (not least because it's named after a funny computer game).

EDIT: I realized I already posted here . Oh well. This post is much more informative than my last one anyways so yeah. Consider this a follow-up after having used Arch for five months now.

Last edited by EJSnow (2025-08-23 17:21:13)

ReulMapu · 2025-08-27 06:11:08

I use Arch, because i want full control over my system, i want to be able to do what computers where supposed to be doing, not what "they" want me to do and use.
I came to Arch after being laughed at by my good friend for years. I use Arch because I like to know what my machine is doing.

sekret · 2025-08-30 13:30:34

I've done it … I wanted to make my Laptop more secure, getting closer to my GrapheneOS smartphone. So I tried Secureblue. Good system, no doubt, they are doing a great job! But … I can say without any regrets, that I'm an addict. Arch is the best. Switching back, reinstalling the system, setting it up quite differently (Secure Boot, usage of TPM2, X -> Wayland, dwm -> river, …), but it immediately felt like home. It's interesting to set it up again in this new environment, but I want to have it as closely as possible to the way I had it before. Sway on Secureblue was okay, but I got kind of homesick. I've been using dwm for 10 to 15 years and Arch for 15 to 20 (I guess).

Last edited by sekret (2025-08-30 13:30:48)

Xylerfox · 2025-09-02 19:24:36

Honestly, I use Arch because I wanted to see a few things:

1 - Is it really that hard?
2 - Is it really that unstable?
3 - Wanted to learn more about Linux, and what better place to force that learning process than with an OS that forces you to get comfy with it!

What I discovered with Arch:

No, it isn't that hard. And no, it isn't unstable. Seems those with stability issues are those who neglect their systems, have the "never update" mentality, and don't use "pacman -Syu" before installing something!

Arch is Arch. It does not hold your hand, but that's because it lets you be in control. My Arch install is my own. I like KDE as a DE, so I simply install KDE. I install as many or as little of the KDE Apps as I want. My laptop has never ran better than when I swapped it to Arch proper (before had Garuda, an Arch fork).

That is why I am such a fan of Arch now. I get it. Arch is yours. Like Gentoo is yours. You install what you need, not what someone else thinks you need. I even installed Arch as a server OS for some server duties... mostly again, as a test to see how viable it would be. Not only did Arch perform better than the Ubuntu server that held the previous role the Arch Server VM is holding now, it's so much more lightweight.

Daedalus24 · 2025-09-03 06:18:03

My first encounter with Linux distributions dates back in 1998, when I have tested Debian 2.x, RedHat 5.0 and Linux Caldera. At the beginning of 2002 I discovered FreeBSD and it was love at first sight. Until 2004 I was a network administrator in my institute (which performs fundamental and applied research in laser and plasma physics), running a Web and mail (postfix) server. I also tested NetBSD as a desktop distribution. I was very satisfied at that time with FreeBSD as a desktop OS, because it had support for numerical simulation suites such as Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. After 2006 - 2007 this support was discontinued, so I tested other distributions such as Ubuntu, Sidux (Siduction), Mandrake, Linux Mint, etc.

In Dec. 2012 I tested ArchLinux for the first time and stayed with it since. It has excellent support for a large portfolio of applications that I use, starting with Spyder, Codeblocks (Python, C and C++ programming at a basic level), Apache and PHP, LaTeX (professional editing for publishing papers or writing books) - Texlive, Texstudio and Kile, LibreOffice for office stuff. Support for Maple, Mathematica and Matlab is again great, as well as graphics and photo applications, such as Gimp. I find ArchLinux rock solid (as I also consider FreeBSD), the wiki is fantastic work of a group of enthusiasts, while forum support is quick and helpful .

Arch Linux

#76 2025-06-24 19:36:00

Re: Why do you use Arch

#77 2025-06-27 00:57:10

Re: Why do you use Arch

#78 2025-07-04 14:21:12

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#79 2025-07-04 23:36:48

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#80 2025-07-12 10:21:58

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#81 2025-07-19 15:50:59

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#82 2025-07-30 13:42:29

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#83 2025-08-14 20:42:40

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#84 2025-08-14 21:25:07

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#85 2025-08-14 21:28:21

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#86 2025-08-21 00:50:38

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#87 2025-08-22 11:46:34

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#88 2025-08-23 17:13:23

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#89 2025-08-27 06:11:08

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#90 2025-08-30 13:30:34

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#91 2025-09-02 19:24:36

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#92 2025-09-03 06:18:03

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