Yeah thats kinda my problem with arch… ive never found it easy to use or useful. Every actual usecase other than it being “cool” is filled by distros much more adapted. Actually want a system from scratch? Gentoo. Want to make it deployable and dependable? Nixos. Want something rock stable? Debian. Arch never had any appeal for me(focus on me here).
You want little bit of the ability to customize everything without having to compile from scratch every time? You want a well documented system that has excellent documentation and a community that digs into most edge cases? You want upstream fixes ASAP because your team of volunteers are struggling to backport fixes?
It has its place. I’m saying this as someone who uses Debian and red hat derivatives extensively.
To me slow roll, tumbleweed and fedora were good contenders for the same slot but none of them let you completely fuck around with the design like Arch does.
Yeah i get that, but also it has some huuuge problems. A very large part of arch users rely on the aur which is horrible from a security standpoint and in general for usability. If arch made its package distribution better it would be a really solid distro with a lot of merits. Of course if you get arround the package management woes its a good system to use. As for nix you dont actually re-build your system every time you change something cause you also do that technically when you boot, tho not in the sense of building software from source, it just links everything so its accessible.
Yeah thats kinda my problem with arch… ive never found it easy to use or useful. Every actual usecase other than it being “cool” is filled by distros much more adapted. Actually want a system from scratch? Gentoo. Want to make it deployable and dependable? Nixos. Want something rock stable? Debian. Arch never had any appeal for me(focus on me here).
I like it because im new to linux and it is VERY well documented. Ive learned more in the last year than the last 20 on windows
Edit: also v lightweight. I dont mind doing a little extra work to know what my pc is doing
Yeah the documentation is just amazing. Even on nixos i often use the arch wiki to find things cause a lot of it applies to linux generally.
You want little bit of the ability to customize everything without having to compile from scratch every time? You want a well documented system that has excellent documentation and a community that digs into most edge cases? You want upstream fixes ASAP because your team of volunteers are struggling to backport fixes?
It has its place. I’m saying this as someone who uses Debian and red hat derivatives extensively.
To me slow roll, tumbleweed and fedora were good contenders for the same slot but none of them let you completely fuck around with the design like Arch does.
Yeah i get that, but also it has some huuuge problems. A very large part of arch users rely on the aur which is horrible from a security standpoint and in general for usability. If arch made its package distribution better it would be a really solid distro with a lot of merits. Of course if you get arround the package management woes its a good system to use. As for nix you dont actually re-build your system every time you change something cause you also do that technically when you boot, tho not in the sense of building software from source, it just links everything so its accessible.
arch is a little bit of each of those things