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Why go through the trouble to use Arch?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Because it is less trouble.
I read comments here all the time. People say Linux does not work with the Wifi on their Macs. Works with mine I say. Wayland does not work and lacks this feature or this and this. What software versions are you using I wonder, it has been fixed for me for ages.
Or how about missing software. Am I downloading tarballs to compile myself? No. Am I finding some random PPA? No. Is that PPA conflicting with a PPA I installed last year? No. Am I fighting the sandboxing on Flatpak? No. M I install everything on my system through the package manager.
Am I trying to do development and discovering that I need newer libraries than my distro ships? No. Am I installing newer software and breaking my package manager? No.
Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.
When I read about new software with new features, am I trying it out on my system in a couple days. Yes.
After using Arch, everything else just seems so complicated, limited, and frankly unstable.
I have no idea why people think it is harder. To install maybe. If that is your issue, use EndeavourOS.
yay! Everything is up to date and working better than ever. Manjaro and Endeavour seem okay, too. Sounds like SteamOS 3 will be Arch-based, which would be great news!
Oh, also, AUR is life. And worth mentioning, KDE Wayland, NVidia 3090, Pipewire, and UKI generation. 👌
SteamOS 3 is arch based but that doesnt mean its anything like arch. It builds from a snapshot of arch and ships that to users as an immutable. So it will be extremely out of date compared to arch.
SteamOS already is Arch based.
Wayland is a great example.
Debian user? You may have spent the last two years complaining that Wayland is not ready, that NVIDIA does not work, and that Wayland is too focussed on GNOME. You may move to XFCE if GNOME removes X11 support.
Arch user? Wayland is great and Plasma 6 works flawlessly. There have not been any real NVIDIA problems in a year or two. Maybe you have been enjoying COSMIC, Hyprland, or Niri.
I have been using Plasma 6 on Wayland on Debian for way longer than 2 years with no issues.
Awesome.
Not installing Plasma from the default repos on Debian Stable though obviously.
When I say “Debian”, I mean “Debian Stable” which is what I think most people mean when they Debian without qualification.
That’s ok but it’s a bit cheeky to compare something meant primarily to be used as a stable system against a rolling release.
Everything I wanted to say in a single comment.
It really just werks™
With how much talk of breaking your install goes around, I assumed it would be a challenge. I run pacman -Syu almost every time I update lmao.
On occasion I have broken it to the point that I needed to chroot from live USB, but I just chroot and sudo pacman -Syu a couple of hours later and everything sorts itself out. And even if that sounds like a hassle, I can tell you every issue was hardware, I was running endeavor on a USB (not a live env) which is not something I would recommend, because pacman degrades flash memory integrity very quickly, and the only other times I broke it badly enough had to do with nvidia drivers
Honestly, house of cards is a good analogon for the whole boot chain.