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Personally, the biggest appeal of Arch is the great wiki, a large number of up to date packages without snap/ppa whatever else Ubuntu makes you do, and the AUR

by frfl 3y ago

Personally, the biggest appeal of Arch is the great wiki, a large number of up to date packages without snap/ppa whatever else Ubuntu makes you do, and the AUR for anything else that isn't available in the regular package repos. I've only used Ubuntu for work, and typically the versions of things are quite out of date. Where as Arch, for all it's warts and costs (setup, maintenance etc) gives you those things for free. I haven't found Arch that much more difficult to work with. For 2 years I used it on a work laptop without issue. Only recently messed up something while updating firmware drivers which requires more than 5 mins/week/month to diagnose.

vdfs 3y ago
Arch wiki is a great resource even if you are on an other distro, only difference is config file location in most cases. Having up to date packages also mean having new bugs you have to deal with, for some users having a stable things outweigh having cutting edge. Never understood people obsession with distro, whatever work for you is fine, they are all linux+open source tools
- captn3m0 3y ago
  The Arch Wiki has the advantage of only having to manage documentation for (mostly) a single set of packages. Every non-rolling distro ends up maintaining separate websites for each releases.
- memefrog 3y ago
  Having up-to-date packages means having old bugs fixed as much as it means new bugs introduced. In my experience, most programs get more stable over time, and not less. They fix older bugs, add features that resolve old limitations, etc. 'Stability' is an overloaded and confusing term. In the world of Linux distributions and their variants, 'stable' doesn't mean 'less likely to crash', but just 'unchanging'. Arch Linux isn't less 'stable' in the sense that it is more prone to bugs or glitches. It's less stable in the sense that it's always up to date. The main benefit of stable distributions is that proprietary software works better on them. Hardware that only has drivers for particular kernel versions work forever. That sort of thing. They're not actually more stable in the sense that they're more reliable, at least not just because they don't update. I think they tend to have more bugs, because they tend to patch the software more and the upstream is usually better at doing that than the random Debian maintainer (or whatever) is. >Never understood people obsession with distro, whatever work for you is fine, they are all linux+open source tools Yeah there are differences though. The people that distrohop between a bunch of distros only to install the same big GNOME or KDE stack every time... I don't get it at all. On the other hand, Gentoo and Arch and Debian, for example, are all very different in the way they organise and install packages. The user experience at the end of the day isn't really so different though. It matters far more which desktop environment you use (if any) than what distro you run.

by frfl 3y ago

vdfs 3y ago

Arch wiki is a great resource even if you are on an other distro, only difference is config file location in most cases. Having up to date packages also mean having new bugs you have to deal with, for some users having a stable things outweigh having cutting edge. Never understood people obsession with distro, whatever work for you is fine, they are all linux+open source tools

captn3m0 3y ago
The Arch Wiki has the advantage of only having to manage documentation for (mostly) a single set of packages. Every non-rolling distro ends up maintaining separate websites for each releases.
memefrog 3y ago
Having up-to-date packages means having old bugs fixed as much as it means new bugs introduced. In my experience, most programs get more stable over time, and not less. They fix older bugs, add features that resolve old limitations, etc. 'Stability' is an overloaded and confusing term. In the world of Linux distributions and their variants, 'stable' doesn't mean 'less likely to crash', but just 'unchanging'. Arch Linux isn't less 'stable' in the sense that it is more prone to bugs or glitches. It's less stable in the sense that it's always up to date. The main benefit of stable distributions is that proprietary software works better on them. Hardware that only has drivers for particular kernel versions work forever. That sort of thing. They're not actually more stable in the sense that they're more reliable, at least not just because they don't update. I think they tend to have more bugs, because they tend to patch the software more and the upstream is usually better at doing that than the random Debian maintainer (or whatever) is. >Never understood people obsession with distro, whatever work for you is fine, they are all linux+open source tools Yeah there are differences though. The people that distrohop between a bunch of distros only to install the same big GNOME or KDE stack every time... I don't get it at all. On the other hand, Gentoo and Arch and Debian, for example, are all very different in the way they organise and install packages. The user experience at the end of the day isn't really so different though. It matters far more which desktop environment you use (if any) than what distro you run.