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?
It’s the IKEA effect. You tend to like something more if you built it yourself.
spoiler
… and you understand it more when you build something by yourself, so it’s easier for you to fix it when it’s broken.
you understand it more when you build something by yourself, so it’s easier for you to fix it when it’s broken.
For me, this is a big selling point. Instead of trying to figure out why someone did something or wrestling with their decisions, I know what I did, why I did it, and if necessary, and I can change it.
In a perfect world, yes.
In reality, i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now, and it takes me 2 hours of searching/fiddling until i remember that weird thing i did 2 years ago…
and it’s still totally worth it
Oh or e.g. random env vars in .profile that I’m sure where needed for nvidia on wayland at some point, no clue if they’re still necessary but i won’t touch them unless something breaks. and half of them were probably not neccessary to begin with, but trying all differen’t combinations is tedious…
i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now
Hahaha, true. This is why I try to keep as many notes as possible, leave lots of comments, add READMEs, links, and otherwise document what I did and why.
It’s not perfect, it’s often tedious, and I don’t always do it, but when I come back 2 years later wondering why I set some random option, it’s pretty nice having at least some hint.
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 And it was always out of date.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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I thought about this for a long while, and realised I wasn’t sure why, just that most of my work has gravitated towards Arch for a while.
Eventually, I’ve decided the reason for the move is because of three specific issues, that are really all the same problem - namely I don’t want to learn the nix config language to do the things I want to do right now.
I’ve read lots of material on flakes, even first modified then wrote a flake to get not-yet-packaged nvidia 5080 modules installed (for a corporate local llm POC-turned-PROD, was very glad I could use nix for it!) I still just don’t really get how all the pieces hang together intuitively, and my barrier is interest and time.
Lanzaboote for secure boot. I’m going to encrypt disks, and I’m going to use the TPM for unlocking after measured uki, despite the concerns of cold-boot attacks, because they aren’t a problem in my threat model. Like the nvidia flake, I don’t really get how it hangs together intuitively.
Home management and home-manager. Nix config language is something I really want to get and understand, but I’ve been maintaining my home directory since before 2010, and I have tools and methods for dealing with lots of things already. The conversion would take more time than I’m prepared to devote.
Most of the benefits of nix are things I already have in some format, like configuration management and package tracking with git/stow, ansible for deployment, btrfs for snapshots, rollback and versioning. It’s not all integrated in one system, but it is all known to me, and that makes me resistant to change.
I know that if I had a week of personal time to dig in and learn, to shake off all the old fleas and crutch methods learned for admin on systems that aren’t declarative, I’d probably come away with a whole new appreciation for what my systems actually look like, and have them all reproducible from a readable config sheet. I’m just not able to make that time investment, especially for something that doesn’t solve more problems than I’ve already solved.
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.
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.
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
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
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)
haven’t tried arch but afaik it’s a distro that lets the user control everything, like gentoo or slackware. that’s actually an easier system to manage if you know what you’re doing and have something you want in mind.
or some people just enjoy tinkering and sufferingNot “everything”, and I wouldn’t say there’s any distro that lets you “control everything”. e.g. look at Alpine Linux, which uses musl, busybox, and OpenRC, whereas Arch uses glibc, GNU coreutils, and systemd. These three choices are “locked in” for Alpine and Arch—you can’t change them. And it’s unlikely for any distro to let you choose all these things because that creates a lot of maintenance work for the distro maintainers.
I suppose Linux From Scratch lets you “control everything”, but I wouldn’t call it a distro (there’s nothing distributed except a book!), and hardly anyone daily drives it.
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 Softwareis 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.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.
Because it comes with a nice BTW
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.
