Why go through the trouble to use Arch?

The more you want it to work your way, the less you want a prebuilt solution, and the more you want a rock solid package management system and repo setup. Debian derivatives work in a pinch, or for a server, not so great for a PC you want to do a lot of things on.

I don't understand why Arch is associated with troubles. It was more complicated to fix my issues with Fedora and I don't like Ubuntu default choices. Having the desktop that I like is much easier with Arch and its derivatives.

I think for many people, whether they're tinkerers or programmers or whoever, enjoy the freedom that comes with Arch.

Because it comes with a nice BTW

I don't think that currently there is much difference in terms of performance, unless you are using a very bloated distro.

Personally I prefer Arch compared to Ubuntu, Fedora or similar (including Endeavor, Manjaro etc...) because I simply want to build my OS, piece by piece.

There is basically nothing else about it, I just like feeling the system I am running as something I created (kinda) and knowing exactly what is running and why it's there.

Obviously you could achieve the same with other distros (and even go deeper with things like Gentoo or Guix) but Arch makes it very easy to do it.

EDIT: oh and being rolling release too, as another user mentioned. I would never go back to a fixed release distro.

because they haven't been privied to install gentoo yet😀

I boot my laptop. it takes seconds, the memory footprint is like 600mb

With sway everything feels snappy and insanely responsive.

I haven't had any issues with arch on my laptop for like 5 years now.

Why would I use anything else ?

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 And it was always out of date.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. 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.

Honestly, the AUR and arch wiki are amazing. Every other distro I've used I've had to rely on out of date or unreliable support forums. Anytime I want to install something I don't have hope it already has a package, because someone has usually already built an AUR package that either compiles from the latest source for you or comes pre-pcompiled.

Being on the most up to date version of the kernel and all software is a good thing in my book. I certainly haven't had issues caused by this.

I'll admit the Arch can be a struggle to set up initially, so that's why I use EndeavourOS. EndeavourOS is just Arch with a GUI installer, a shortlist of tweaks all users would want anyway, it let's you choose your preferred Desktop Environment during install, and it feels like any other distro in terms of getting it ready for use. It doesn't come with any apps, other than core system tools and firefox, which is also good because you can then install whatever you want.and be free of anything you don't want. Also, all the usual hardware gets detected and works out of the box.

I won't go back to any other Linux.

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.

Arch really isn't very difficult to use these days for someone with a few years debian or similar use (don't try and use it when first trying linux).

Installing it is straightforward, and you can access preferences via the settings app.

It's not "trouble" if you're already familiar with Linux. It's not the way I would go as a user of 20+ years, but it's not just for desktop use.

If you're looking to build a platform for something, it's perfect. Look at why Valve switched to use to for SteamOS. You have an underlying framework of a stable system, and you just create automation to slap it all together into the base layer of all the things you want without having to worry about specific things breaking the stack you're building on top of it.

It's like a blank page instead of a notebook with line guides.

It helps make more sense if you think of everything you've got to build on it already existing in a git repo. Merge > Build > Release. Makes perfect sense, and you save yourself creating an entire distro to maintain from scratch.

I've tried several distros before, none of them feel the same as arch linux, I keep coming back to it. It is simple and just works. The other distros feel too bloated out of the box, which immediately demotivates me. I don't want to go through the hassle of removing everything I don't need by hand, so arch is just perfect.

Though I think I shouldn't have went with arch in my vps. I miss the automated security updates of Fedora.

After using Debian, mint and Ubuntu off and on for years. I am so much happier running endeavoros. I’ve had no issues with it. It’s stable. I don’t feel like I’m dealing with dependencies and random config battles that I did on mint. It’s been great.

Some people are enthusiasts that want to take the training wheels off and challenge themselves. I use CachyOS, which is Arch-based, because it thrashes everything else almost every time in speed tests. Thus far, it hasn't proven to be more complicated than the Debian-based distros I've used. I also wasn't expecting better features in Arch with certain programs. Being able to get the absolute newest version of a package at all times has proven to be much more useful to me than detrimental.

I am a software developer, on work computers I have debian, on my personal I have arch.

I would never use fedora as I am not here to troubleshoot bullshit for red hat, and would never use ubuntu because of their snap bullshit. It can be avoided but in both cases it is an indicator of the motivations of the company that controls them not being aligned with my interests.

I like arch because of the rolling release and because I like to control and understand all that happens on my machine. Optimization is not my main motivator.

I have almost nothing à la carte, i bulk-installed all that my DE wanted and use that plus alacritty and steam.

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

I've just gotten used to knowing i can get the latest and greatest and AUR makes a lot of stuff easy when it comes to getting stuff not readily available on the package manager. There's not often i can't find something i want or need to not be on there.

I've used both base arch and cachyos. I've landed on cachyos for now because i didn't want to fiddle with games and wine and just wanted them to work and they just do on cachyos. Laptops that i don't expect to game on just get base arch with hyprland installed, just mostly so i can get my tinkering fix from modifying hyprland

It isn't any trouble. Rarely an upgraded service requires user intervention. This is usually documented and if not it is easy to search for a fix. I find arch faithfully follows upstream packages and provides a very pure linux experience. As much as I love the Debian community, their maintainers tend to add lots of patches, sometimes exposing huge security flaws. Most other distros are too small to be worthwhile or corporate controlled or change the experience too much.

Im also wondering this.

I've tried installing it on 2 different pcs a few times and ive not gotten it to work yet lol. Granted I didnt spend a lot of time on it.

I appreciate you can build the system yourself but its almost choice overload for adhd me and ill end up installing every single package anyway that ill never need, which negates the point of arch.

I moved to arch because of rolling releases, ubuntu switching to unity fucked my laptop over. Yes the initial install is a bit more work, but the wiki is great and I feel like I have a better understanding of linux after going through the process. Also really not a fan of apt.

More software I wanted was packaged for Arch than Ubuntu.

I use Arch via Manjaro distribution. Yes, there's some quirks coming from Ubuntu, but basically installing OSS/propreitary software using Pacman/Yay/Add/Remove Software is such a breeze, and it's main selling point to me of Arch so I stay with the distro and say good bye to Debian-based one.

I don’t really understand the question. All you have to do is run archinstall and then add a desktop environment like KDE and that’s like 80% what other distros do.

I think arch used to be hard to get started but not anymore. That’s reserved for gentoo now

The short answer is because I'm lazy. I might lose 30 min during the system setup instead of 20, and now I have a system that I don't have to worry about until the hardware gives up.

Arch is a rolling release distro, which means it's unstable, which doesn't mean what you think, instead it means that you can update your system indefinitely without worrying about "versions". For example, if you had Ubuntu 20.04 installed on your server, in may you had to update it to 24.04, and that's something that can cause issues. And in 2029 you'll need to go through that again. Arch is just constant updates without having that worry. Which means no library is safe from updates, ergo unstable.

Also the AUR is huge, and I'm a lazy ass who likes to just be able to install stuff without having to add PPAs or installing stuff by hand.

Also there's the whole customize the system, I use a very particular set of programs that just won't come pre installed anywhere, so any system that comes with their own stuff will leave me in a system with double the amount of programs for most stuff which is just wasteful.

Finally there's the wiki, while the vast majority of what's there serves you in other systems, if you're running Arch it's wonderful, it even lists the packages you need to install to solve specific errors.

Yes and no to all of those reasons, and many others.

There isn't a right or wrong way to install/use Linux. As the saying goes "you do you". If going through the Arch learning curve doesn't appeal to you, don't do it. If you're the sort of person whose curiosity sometimes leads them to do silly things that aren't necessarily logical but that you find enormously fun and satisfying, then maybe go for it.

What trouble? archinstall makes it dead simple to get on your computer, then at that point it's not much different from any other distro?

I'd sooner ask why people choose shit like Ubuntu where you're stuck dealing with snaps out-of-date packages, and bloat.

I used Debian and Ubuntu for like 20 years and just got sick of packages being forever out of date, and the Archwiki always having exactly what I needed.

It meets their needs and preferences, simple as that. I tried Arch in like 2008, and thought people were crazy for all the trouble it took back then. Nowadays there's a lot of nice distros built on it, so you can get the benefits (such as they may be) without all the low-level tinkering.

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.

Honestly it's the most problem-free distribution I've used. I've used fedora, ubuntu, opensuse, and they all are way easier to break and way harder to fix. Once you get arch working it works really reliably and when it occasionally breaks it's easy to fix. I used nixos for a while, and it is more reliable but it's just a little too much effort.

It's a misconception that is any "trouble". I'm using CachyOS, which is basically Arch but with additionally optimized repositories and settings. You just install it an use it, like Mint or Ubuntu. It just works, but it's also faster for performance related tasks (especially gaming, but also others), importantly and explicitly without any tinkering.

Quite the opposite, actually: there much less tinkering required to get gaming specific things to "just work", as the tweaks are all there by default. This includes running Windows programs often considered hard to run (through Wine).

I do happen to enjoy and want a rolling release. There's a new kernel released, and I can install it like a day later. New KDE comes out, update is there for me in a few hours. Software is generally up to date, which was such a refreshing experience as I'm used to running Debian server side. Oh what a contrast.

Maybe I like the misery.

Not a mean question at all. I haven't had more difficulty keeping a working system than I did on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc. I get everything I need in Arch and the packages are always fresh off the grill. I also like the emphasis on text config files and a ground-up install. That helped me better understand my system and how it works.

No idea about performance. My performance recommendation is "don't run Windows!" :)

the distro I'm daily driving uses arch as base so I just ride along

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"

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.

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.

It's a good question and years ago I might have asked the same thing. I'm a minimalist and I really dislike all the extra crap that comes with all-in-one distros these days. Not just installed programs, but also daemons and services that start by default. I hate the idea that I have to go in and manually turn them all off on new installs. I used Ubuntu for a long time but slowly got more and more annoyed at the bloat. The snap situation was the final straw that pushed me to explore other distros. I landed on Arch and really liked it. A new Arch install can be incredibly clean, basically providing nothing more than a command prompt from which you can install what you need. The only stuff running on your machine is what you explicitly put on it. There are a couple things I get annoyed with in Arch, like some baked-in drivers for hardware I don't have, however it's minor enough that I can let it go. I also played with Gentoo but couldn't get comfortable enough to make it my daily driver. Arch is my personal best-balance between cleanliness and effort.

I initially started using it because I needed the newest drivers and back ports on Mint was taking to long, since then I've stuck with rolling release so I don't have to deal with driver hell. I stick with Arch over say Debian Tumbleweed at this point mostly from momentum.

Because AUR.

I use Artix (fork of Arch with init freedom)—the main reason why I prefer an Arch base specifically is for the AUR. The reason why I prefer a minimalistic distro in general, is because I want to be able to choose what software I install and how I set up my system. For example I don't use a full DE so any distro that auto-installs a DE for me will install a bunch of software I won't use. You also usually get a lot more control over partitioning etc with minimalistic distros—lets me fuck around with more weird setups if I want to try something out.

To be clear I don't think there's anything wrong with using distros that have more things "pre-packaged". It's a matter of personal preference. The category of "poweruser" makes sense—some users want more fine-grained control over their systems, whilst some users don't care and want something that roughly works with minimal setup. Or perhaps you do care about fine-grained control over your system, but it just so happens that your ideal system is the same as what comes pre-installed with some distro. Do whatever works for you.

because it's less work. i don't have to strip out what a distro thinks i want. i don't have to worry about major distro releases that might have changes that need manual intervention. if there are updates that need manual intervention, they're small, easy to deal with and usually do not effect me. everything is well documented and standard. packages are installed with default settings/config (to my understanding), so i can easily read upstream documentation and not have to deal with weirdness. getting packages that are obscure is easier. i don't have to worry about upstream having a fix, or supporting something that i need but my distro not having the update in their repo. it's just simpler and easier to manage (for my use case)

Believe it or not, it's still less work than NixOS (at least for a daily-driver OS)

I wanted my computer to be secure but headless. Suse, fedora both had supposed instructions but in classic Linux style they had a bunch of out of date commands and software and it didn't work. Fedora always required a human to enter a password on boot, suse just bricked.

Endeavarch had instructions (a maze of unclear gibberish, to be honest) that actually worked and did what I wanted with minimal fuss and it's been operating well for 2 years.

1. Because I like to. 2. Because it still has the best flexibility for packages. 3. I like using cutting edge releases.

It is also extremely overblown just how "hard" arch is. Either way I know a lot more about my system and how it functions now.

Honestly, in the long term it has been less effort.

If you're an "out-od-the-box" comouter user (web browser, maybe one or two apps, and office suite, then stick with the more conventional distros. If you are very dynamic with your OS, especially 8f you play with a lot of different OSS applications, then Arch get's easier.

I get to set up a system precisely how I want it to work, when an update releases for something, I get that update and I am not at the behest of a maintainer to decide for me if I need that feature or bugfix at the moment. There’s no preconfigured “opinions” on how stuff should work that differ from the defaults in most cases, which means everything usually actually just works, vs some distros where the maintainers felt they were smarter than upstream and consequently broke shit.

I started using Linux in a time when package management was barely usable, and I had a broken distro as a first distro. Too often I was chasing down answers all over the internet when there were few to share, and the diy aspect of arch is rather nostalgic for me.

As with many of these questions, it depends and it’s subjective. In my case I have a machine running Endevour to tinker with and dip my toes into Arch. The philosophy is different where you need to think more about where your packages come from and be able to validate them (especially the AUR). It’s fun to tinker and better understand the underpinnings and on this machine I have very little that I rely on working so am OK with the increased level of jank.

For work I need a system that I can rely on working like it did yesterday and last week as well as having wide support from vendors. For me that means Ubuntu LTS. In many cases there are tools and applications that I really don’t care about how they work internally, just that they can be easily installed and work in-depth.

I like the rolling updates, to be honest. Endeavour has been a wonderful and simple experience. Aside from some NVIDIA issues with Wayland it has been a blast.

With Archinstall its really easy. You still need to be familiar with the Wiki, but its not hard. Tedious maybe. And running all vanilla software is nice. No distro modification.

After trying Ubuntu for a few days I decided to jump in head first and install Arch on my daily driver, it's been a struggle but I learned so much about Linux I decided to work as a Sysadmin.

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.

I saw a gif about some cool hyprland dotfiles and i fell in love.

Instructions said it was designed for arch.

There are many more other reasons i stayed. Its great to actually feel in charge of my system.

Debian/ubuntu has its uses in server reliability but its missing snap for daily use.

Fedora is to close to corporate for my personal interest.

I've tried Arch - it allows you to make a system that is exactly what you want. So no bloat installing stuff you never need or use. It also gives you absolute control.

On other distros like Fedora, you get a pre configured system set up for a wide range of users. You can reduce down the packages somewhat but you will often have core stuff installed that is more than you'll need as it caters to everyone.

Arch allows you to build it yourself, and only install exactly the things you actually want, and configure then exactly how you want.

Also you learn an awful lot about Linux building your system in this way.

I liked building an arch system in a virtual machine, but I don't think I could commit to maintaining an arch install on my host. I'm happy to trade bloat for a "standard" experience that means I can get generic support. The more unique your system the more unique your problems can be I think. But I can see the appeal of arch - "I made this" is a powerful feeling.

I’m a certified Linux professional of over 15yrs and I have never installed Arch. Not once, never needed it. It offers nothing I can’t either build myself or just install Debian and change what I need it to be.

I like learning and having control over my pc. But it's mainly the learning part for me, followed the wiki a second time installing arch on my Thinkpad last week and felt just as satisfied as the first time. But no shame in using archinstall.

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.

Rolling releases, great docs, great amount of software available with the package manager, especially with the AUR.

I went through the manual installation a few times and while the general process is annoying and error-prone, after setting up the basics many things worked great out of the box, even the printer I once had. I'm on Endeavour now which mostly does exactly what I want.

It's not really trouble. I use it since 2012 with a few intermediate installs of Debian and Fedora, but I really don't have many issues I can't solve in a few minutes. Rolling release means I never have to do huge upgrades.

Then again, I'm a studied CS expert with 20 years of Linux experience. Wouldn't recommend Arch to people who don't want to exactly know how their system works.

learning.

You need a complex system to do something simple. To simply press the gas pedal and fucking go you need an internal combustion engine that is nasty to look at, this confangled monstrosity, harder to manufacture than the batteries that will replace it. When you just drive your car you never have an inkling of the whole mechanism