Great wiki

The AUR

I was distrohopping for like a year or two when I first got into Linux desktop. As soon as I installed Arch for the first time that stopped. Now the thought of a distro pre-installing packages gives me the heebie jeebies. You don’t get to tell me how I sync with NTP servers!

I do real work. Dont have time to waste

PKGBUILDs

• Very stable, and can run the bleeding edge through Snap/Flatpack/Appimages, Distrobox, or VMs/Containers

• Community run distro

• Compatible with more devices than many distros

I love debian because it’s always there for you.

Lightweight.

Low resource footprint — smaller than EndeavourOS on my laptop. Stability is fantastic. Bookworm practically just came out, so the packages are all much newer than they were in Bullseye, making it a viable option for someone who wants an uneventful Linux distro that fades into the background and lets you get stuff done.

The new release bookworm solves most hardware/software problems

• Extremely customizable

Easy to set up, very helpful community. If you liked Manjaro or think Manjaro is sketchy but like the idea of a slightly pre-configured arch, check it out.

This, basically Arch but quick to install with all the most important things installed and ready without being bloated.

It’s arch. It just happened to be the composition i had my previous arch setup as. Yay for AUR stuff, KDE Plasma for DE. Includes a couple of useful tools and makes for a very solid OS.

Anyone who has been in the Ubuntu sphere of things with Linux, should take a moment to try arch. EndeavourOS is perfect for these people.

Same. I’ve done the vanilla Arch thing and it’s alright, but the quality of life enhancements that come with EndeavourOS make it a great daily driver.

It’s the only distro I could get DaVinci Resolve Studio, Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4k, and my Radeon RX 6750 XT working with, consistently.

The big advantage IMHO, is the out of the box BTRFS set up that lets you simply roll back to a non-broken state, right from the grub menu, should an update break your system. I haven’t had to use it yet, but it is a huge source of comfort knowing it is there.

Also, many people coming to opensuse remark how much snappier it is than other distros.

I had to scroll waaaaay down to find this. Mindboggling how underrated this distro is!

It’s incredibly well put together

Security by default. Firewall is set up blocking ports for UDP etc. so you are protected out of the box.

YaST

It’s rolling and reliable

Everything just works

It is up to date so you can often get newer hardware working due to newer kernels.

I agree, it’s great!

• image with baked in nvidia drivers which work out of the box without too much fuss
• if you encounter problems, you can refer to the system76 website or use a solution provided by the community, since it’s based on Ubuntu
• installation with full disk encryption enabled by default
• right now it uses a slightly customized version of GNOME as DE (with “normal”/traditional windows and optionally a tiling wm), but system76 is working on a Rust-based DE, named Cosmic DE

I’ve been using Pop for about 2 years. I have yet to run into an issue that I couldn’t fix. It’s the first distro that made ditching windows easy.

We cannot forget about the wiki, which is a great resource for not only the Arch distro, but for any Linux install.

Seriously, the ease of installing any and all programs from the main repo’s or the AUR is such an extreme advantage over all other distros!

And it makes keeping your system and programs updated a breeze.

Seriously, I realize this every time I have to install something on my server (running AlmaLinux). Now I’ve manually set up a personal LURE repo for some software that I use.

Easy and fearless updates

Rollbacks

declarative configuration

Dependency Hell, begone

Very good with containers and VMs

Reproducible

Single command to compile & install packages from many git repos

You get it for the low price of loosing all fun/motivation in setting up, customizing and mintaining machines with other distros

Can turn basically any distro into nixos in minutes

Home Manager + Stylix

Ez dev shells

Makes me feel cool again 😎

A great selection and amount of packages and modules to build/install/enable

Overlays

Many different and interesting community projects

Do it once, do it right. Save work be redeploying the same configuration (or submodules) on mutiple machines or the same machine multiple times.

A cool logo, meaningful rolling release version names and stickers

Easily build packages with custom compile flags

As stable as you need it to be

immutability

Easy to mix and match package versions with different dependency versions

I have been thinking to give NixOS a spin but feel like it’s above my brain capacity for me to handle. Do you also use homemanager and Flakes? Homemanager kinda makes sense (manage packages for non root users) but what does Flakes do?

Stable

Only FOSS software and repositories unless otherwise enabled

Cutting edge application releases so I get the newest toys after they’ve been decently tested

Uses the latest tech in linux e.g wayland and pipewire.

Applies patches for better programs work under Wayland (SDDM with git patches before long awaited 0.20.0 release).

A lot of proprietary software is easier to install here

Shit just works

I can use the same OS on my servers

I don’t have time to fuck about, I use ubuntu mate because it gets out of my way and does what I expect it to do.

I love the stability of LTS

easy enough to use for me (I’m a linux newb) and I can setup steam on it!
edit: forgot to mention I can get hibernation working on Ubuntu when I couldn’t figure out how to do that in Fedora

For when I can’t get stuff to work on nixos 😅

I love the dock

It’s easy to use

Because it just works. Because it’s based on free Debian and not corporate RedHat. Because mainstream Linux needs a flagship distro and that distro needs to be used and supported.

Besides Wiki and AUR that all Arch derivatives share, they have their own wiki that documents the changes they’re made to Arch and a very good forum for help

Fish shell by default with auto-complete previews as you type and lots of great aliases

Post install wizard for easily adding common applications

Bootable Snapper snapshots enabled by default

Nvidia driver installation options that correctly set the mode setting, dkms drivers installed ootb, common apps like GreenWithEnvy ootb, great Nvidia support

A lot of people think it’s just Arch with an installer and lots of bloat and a neon theme but it’s a lot more than that.

The Arch Wiki is in a language made by users for users. Meaning that its easy to understand because the wiki allows to talk about issues, alternatives and more hints about each small topic, every other wiki has some structure where important details are missing or not taken seriously.

I always am going to run into heavy issues when using Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. On Arch, things also aren’t always smooth, but the issues are mild, always solvable and transparent.

Starting with a blank slate is so refreshing. It takes time to build everything up from scratch and I understand that you can get a great experience out of the box with other distros, but I love the simplicity of not having any bullshit I didn’t install myself.

Arch and KDE as a DE because I’m a borderline-obsessive tinkerer.

Although NixOS is tempting me, but I haven’t moved past the virtual-machine-specimen-jar phase with that yet lol.

Slackware gets a lot of hate, especially from the btw bros. People are spooked about having to manage their own dependencies. But I couldn’t agree with you more on simplicity and stability. I’ve been daily driving slackware since 99 or 00, and I don’t think I’ve ever broken something I couldn’t immediately roll back and fix.

I tried to install Ubuntu on a sbc recently. And within an hour of installing this and that with all the different dependencies, I had a completely unusable system. And I had no idea how to fix it. It was totally my fault but reminded me what I love about slackware.

Slack got me through undergrad on an IBM 600e ThinkPad (which was really old even then — around the time of the early 2.6 series kernels iirc). Great distro, fond memories.

• Packages are kept up to date so it’s often the first distro to support new hardware, APIs, etc.
• AUR provides a huge library of software that isn’t often in package manager repos.
• Rolling release so you don’t have to deal with repository upgrades every 6 months to 2 years.
• btw

My favorite too. For me on other distros I was typically running into bugs that I’d find had already been fixed upstream months previously - and then I had to either live with the bug or do some hack to manually install the newer version. Somewhat related to this, but as Linux gamer it was also frustrating to have the older Mesa drivers all the time because it couldn’t support the older kernel version the distro shipped or something.

My current isn’t vanilla arch, but Endeavour OS, because as an unexperienced user I wanted to have the least trouble while installing, … I regret it ever since, because I began with a Plasma desktop and ended up with i3, mainly because of tiling, problems with some utilities, keyboard switching, etc. In the end, I still love the system, one can get quite minimal with it.