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?
No, not really.
This is IMHO the most important aspect. The thing they’re trying to optimize isn’t performance, though, it’s more “usability”, i.e. making the system work for you. When you get down to it and understand all the components of the OS, and all the moving parts within, you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly.
This is the most important thing. Over time, you develop opinions about software and methods of solving problems. I have strong opinions on how I want to manage a system, but almost no opinions on flags I want to switch when I compile software. This is why I’m on arch not gentoo. I’m sure I’ll make the leap eventually…
Before I switched back to Arch for my daily driver, I’d frankensteined my Fedora install on my laptop to replace power management, all the GUI bits, most of the networking stack and a fair chunk of the package system. Fedora, and Gnome in that case is opinionated software. That’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned, having a unified vision helps give the system direction and a unique feel. These days, I have my own opinions that differ in some ways from available distros.
I wanted certain bits to work a certain way, and I kept having to replace other parts to match the bits I was changing. When you ask the question, can I swap daemon X out for Y, the answer on fedora was, sure, but you’ll have to replace a, b and c too, and figure out the rest for yourself. Good luck when updates come along.
The answer on arch is, yeah, sure, you can do that - and here’s a high level wiki naming some gotchas you’ll want to watch out for.
I’ve also reached a stage in my computer usage that I don’t want things to happen automatically for me unless I’ve agreed them or designed them. For example, machines don’t auto-mount usb drives, even in gui user sessions, or auto connect to dhcp. I understand what needs to be done, and do it the way I want to do it, because I have opinions on networking and usb mounting.
My work laptop is a living build that I just keep adding to and changing every day. Btrfs snapshots are available for rollback…
I’ve got two backup machines - beelink mini me’s running reproducible builds created using archinstall. It’s running on internal emmc, and they have have a 6 disk zfs raidz2 on internal nvme drives, all of which are locked behind luks encryption,with the keys in the fTPM module, without the damn Microsoft key shim. On is off site. Trying to get secureboot working on Debian was an exercise in frustration.
I’ve modified a version of that same build for my main docker host on another mini PC.
My desktop runs nixos, but will be transfered to arch next rebuild.
I’ve got a steamdeck, which runs an arch based distro.
I used to run raspberry pi’s on arch because the image to flash the SD cards used to be way smaller than what was offered by the default pi is.
That’s all using arch. It’s flexible, has the tool sets I need, and almost never tells me ‘No, you can’t do that’.
That’s interesting; any particular reason? I went the other way around (Arch for multiple years -> Gentoo for a year or so -> NixOS for over a decade now), and never looked back.
Can you think of a quick example, out of curiosity?
For context, I’m using NixOS, not Arch, but it’s a similar enough idea. I have a tiling/tabbed WM configured just the way I like it, and a window switcher thingy, and it makes juggling hundreds of windows really easy and quick. Combined with a terminal-based editor, a custom setup for my shell, and direnv for easy environment switching, I can be switching between a dozen different projects within a single day (sadly a requirement for my work right now).
Whenever I look at how my colleagues with KDE/Gnome are managing their workflows, it makes me appreciate the work I put into my setup a lot.
Also, I have a whole bunch of shell aliases and scripts for tasks I do often.
Sure, you can configure any distro to do that, but things like Ubuntu or Fedora would get in the way. At some point, when you want to choose (or even write) every component of the system and configure it yourself, it’s easier to just build from scratch rather than start with a lot of pre-configured software and remove parts.