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Exactly. Arch would have faded into obscurity if it didn't have the infamy of being a difficult challenge. People use it BECAUSE they want to feel like they've

Exactly. Arch would have faded into obscurity if it didn't have the infamy of being a difficult challenge. People use it BECAUSE they want to feel like they've accomplished something difficult. It would be nice if Arch could be made easy to use, and the community could be less hostile to new users, without falling into obscurity, but it's an impossible catch-22.

foerbert 5y ago
Really? I don't think that's why Arch is well known. If you gave me just that description I'd be very confident you meant Gentoo. In my mind, Arch's reputation is not that of a challenge, but more of an ongoing projects that you can soak up as over much time you'd like to dump into it. Basically the OS equivalent of a daily-drivable project car. Though to be fair, I think one of the pillars of that reputation is the quality of the wiki. And I've been increasingly finding the wiki not living up to my expectations over the last however many years. But (somewhat concerningly) the Arch wiki seems to be as strong as ever relative to other sources, so I'm not sure how that balances out. Maybe it doesn't, and I'm just behind the times.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  > But (somewhat concerningly) the Arch wiki seems to be as strong as ever relative to other sources, so I'm not sure how that balances out. This is a very troubling observation. I think that the open-source world would lose a truly great source of information should the Arch Wiki go away, and there is an clear problem with quality all across the Linux desktop space at the moment.
selfhoster11 5y ago
I use Arch because I just want a desktop that's fast while still being able to handle my requirements. I'm also looking into employing it for setups that have very non-standard boot sequences or hardware requirements (think vGPU gaming across multiple virtualised domains) that are impossible to achieve on mainstream distributions without making the ongoing operation of the OS too brittle.

foerbert 5y ago

Really? I don't think that's why Arch is well known. If you gave me just that description I'd be very confident you meant Gentoo. In my mind, Arch's reputation is not that of a challenge, but more of an ongoing projects that you can soak up as over much time you'd like to dump into it. Basically the OS equivalent of a daily-drivable project car. Though to be fair, I think one of the pillars of that reputation is the quality of the wiki. And I've been increasingly finding the wiki not living up to my expectations over the last however many years. But (somewhat concerningly) the Arch wiki seems to be as strong as ever relative to other sources, so I'm not sure how that balances out. Maybe it doesn't, and I'm just behind the times.

selfhoster11 5y ago
> But (somewhat concerningly) the Arch wiki seems to be as strong as ever relative to other sources, so I'm not sure how that balances out. This is a very troubling observation. I think that the open-source world would lose a truly great source of information should the Arch Wiki go away, and there is an clear problem with quality all across the Linux desktop space at the moment.

selfhoster11 5y ago

I use Arch because I just want a desktop that's fast while still being able to handle my requirements. I'm also looking into employing it for setups that have very non-standard boot sequences or hardware requirements (think vGPU gaming across multiple virtualised domains) that are impossible to achieve on mainstream distributions without making the ongoing operation of the OS too brittle.