May be a mean sounding question, but I’m genuinely wondering why people would choose Arch/Endevour/whatever (NOT on steam hardware) over another all-in-one distro related to Fedora or Ubuntu. Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte? Is there something else I’m missing? Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?
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 And it was always out of date.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.