I’m a little bit underwhelmed, I thought that based off the fact so many people seem to make using this distro their personality I expected… well, more I guess?
Once the basic stuff is set-up, like wifi, a few basic packages, a desktop environment/window manager, and a bit of desktop environment and terminal customisation, then that’s it. Nothing special, just a Linux distribution with less default programs and occasionally having to look up how to install a hardware driver or something if you need to use bluetooth for the first time or something like that.
Am I missing something? How can I make using Arch Linux my personality when once it’s set up it’s just like any other computer?
What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?
Now actually use it for a couple of years. Then you’ll see whats special about it.
For me personally, Ubuntu was breaking on every dist upgrade, the software was always out of date or not available in the repos. Been running arch for 5 years, same install, even transplanted it over to newer computers without issues. When some package is missing, I can throw together a PKGBUILD with chatgpt and put it on the AUR for others to use. It fucking rocks and is extremely sturdy while allowing me to do with it whatever I want.
But yeah, besides that, it’s just a linux. The individual things it does well are not even exclusive to arch. Ideally, you should not think about your OS at all and it should be out of your way, while you do something on it.
Yup, Arch is by far the distro I have had the fewest amounts of technical issues with. Yes, you need to know what you are doing or be willing to read docs, but there’s no magical bullshit, maintainer capriciousness and lack of planning happening like I have unfortunately witnessed all too often while using other distros.
Makes sense. Do you find that by having the same install for so long (including transplanting it) that you have accumulated a lot of bloat? One of the things I really enjoyed about a fresh install was that I knew there wasn’t a build-up of digital junk files, but with Arch fresh installing every once in a while just seems impractical.
I’ve been using Arch for about 15 years or so, and yes, I build up cruft… in my home directory ;-). The system itself is remarkably good at keeping tidy. The one spot to keep an eye on is /var/cache/pacman, as that’s where it stores every package you download before installation and it won’t delete it without you asking it to.
Any new config file will be saved with a
.pacsaveextension, so you’ll want to keep an eye out for those, but that’s basically itUbuntu installs upgrade well in my experience, unless you add weird and outdated software from external sources. A bit like manually installing pkgbuild files you found on Github. Stuff will break in the same way when dependencies don’t get upgraded.
That said, Arch installs will break when a random library decides to update, and Ubuntu will break years later when you decide to upgrade.
Except for maybe Gentoo, Arch is the most “gets in your way” OS I’ve seriously used. You need to be conscious of stuff like your bootloader configuration, the network manager you use, and sometimes the kind of Bluetooth daemon you’re running, or software may not work or break your boot. It’s pretty easy to use if you install Arch by picking the exact same software you can also find in other distros (i.e. the Ubuntu style grub+systemd+NetworkManager+Gnome set, or the Fedora systemd-boot+dracut+NetworkManager+Gnome set). Following the Arch guide without copying a preexisting software set will make your life very difficult, as I’ve found out.