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 And it was always out of date.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.
learning.
Arch is honestly pretty simple compared to what it was like to install Linux in the 90s…
That said, I mostly run Debian, and have a little smattering of arch. Much like running testing & unstable Debian on two of my machines, I have it there to check out new things and for testing purposes. Same goes for arch, I’m using it to test out new things.
Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte?
No, not really.
Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?
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’.
My desktop runs nixos, but will be transfered to arch next rebuild.
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.
you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly
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.
to me the main difference was having to use a different package manager. so no biggie really. and arch has an awesome wiki. the documentation made things too easy so now I use nixos BTW
A rolling release means you get new versions of software almost as soon as þey’re released, instead of waiting for 6 mos for þe distribution to package and release it.
Even Arch’s LTS kernel is updated more frequently þan Debian’s. Þe trade-off is rebooting more frequently. I have personally also experienced less breakage upgrading software frequently þan big, all-in-one-shot upgrades. I won’t claim þis is þe common experience, but “dependency hell” for me was always Redhat, and þen Debian.
I use Garuda. Yes, it’s Arch based, but it’s also all set up for gaming and newbie friendly. I started on Bazzite, then switched to Garuda, it’s just as easy.
Newer software is nice, it’s not too much trouble.
It’s a some “trouble” to install, but it’s worth it. I spend like 2-3 days getting every little thing the way I like and then I’m set for basically the life of the hardware.
That’s true for any OS install I do for myself though :)
It works well for me.
Actually, I am a long-term Debian user (for 15 years) and use it in parallel with Arch, since about ten years, and I had less trouble with Arch: When upgrading from Debian 10 to 12, GNOME broke for me so that I could not log in any more. I spent a day or so to search for the cause - it is related to the user configuration but I could not figure out what it was and I had to time-box the effort, and switched to StumpWM (a tiling window manager, which I had been using before). I had no such problem with Arch, and on top of that I could just install GNOME’s PaperWM extension just to give it a try.
You could argue that my failure to upgrade was GNOME’s fault, not Debians, and in a way this is true. Especially, GNOME should not hide configuration in inscrutinable unreadable files, and of course it should parse for errors coming from backwards-compatible breaking changes.
But the thing is, for software making many small changes is very often much easier than a few big changes. For example because it is far easier to narrow down the source of a problem. So, it is likely that GNOME on Arch had the same problem between minor upgrades, and fixed it without much fuss.
But you also need to see that Arch is primarily a Desktop/end user system, while Debian is, for example, also a server system. Debian is designed for a far larger range of applications and purposes, and having many small breaking upgrades would likely not work well for these.
I agree with you on the “stability” of frequent small changes vs infrequent huge ones (release upgrades on distros like Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora).
However, I have had multiple Arch installs where I have not used the system for multiple years (eg. old laptops, dormant VMs). Other than having to know how to update the keyring to get current GPG keys, Arch has always upgraded flawlessly for me. I have had upgrades that downloaded close to 3 GB all at once with a single pacman command (or maybe yay) that “just worked”.
I currently use bazzite, but I learned more about Linux by installing arch from scratch than anything else I’ve ever done with my PC. It was a beautiful experience and I will never forget it.
I recently got a new laptop, and I’m considering installing arch again on the old one again to have a system available that is less restrictive. I’d probably use an installer this time around…but maybe not.
I use Garuda, it’s Arch and is just as easy as Bazzite.
EndeavourOS fits this description. Essentially an arch installer with nice DE theming.
I daily drive Debian now, but several years ago when a couple of my computers were still very new, I used Arch since it has bleeding-edge support for new hardware while being still thoroughly documented in the Arch Wiki.
The sheer volume of packages on the official repo and the AUR made it great for discovering which desktop environment I wanted to use and for software-hopping in general too. You can have as much or as little on your system as you want and nothing is forced on you.
Because all in one distros have mistakes or bugs, for which fixes are only available in the next release 6-12 months later.
Other times, I know exactly what the problem is and how to fix it, but due to the vendors shenanigans (Ubuntu) it’s ironically much harder to fix. Adding extra repos via ppas and managing them is harder than just pulling it from AUR.
Having problems due to a vendor’s mistake and being unable to fix them was exactly why I wanted to move away from Windows and macOS. All in one distros kind of fail at addressing that. Arch is basically “fuck it, I’ll compile it myself”
Because it comes with a nice BTW
Its like buying a pre-built PC vs a custom PC.
They do the same things at the end of the day, but the the custom PC converts the extra time investment into a result that gives better performance and is more suited to your needs.
It’s actually less trouble. Back when i used ubuntu based distros I ended up using the arch wiki anyway, and I never successfully upgraded from one ubuntu LTS to the next without problems anyway, so I figured why not try the distro that doesn’t have upgrades and has amazing docs. It’s much more stable.
