Is “it works” the average experience of an Arch user?
Edit: Folks, I know it wasn’t clear, but this was rhetorical. I love the passion that motivates all of you to share your personal experiences - it’s what keeps Linux moving forward… But you beautiful bastards need to chill.
Base Arch can be fussy, but that’s because there’s a lot to set up, so many opportunities to forget things and only discover them later.
I ran Artix on a laptop for about a year; that was a constant PITA, although I still value their goals.
But EndeavourOS has been an entirely different matter. It’s a “just works” Arch derivative.
I had so many fewer problems with Arch that I went through the effort to convert my 3 personal cloud servers from Debian to it. I went through a lot of work to replace thee default Mint on an ODroid to Arch, and it’s been so much better. I put Endeavor on the last two non-servers I installed. So, yes, I personally find out far more reliable and easier to work with than Ubuntu, Debian, or Mint.
That said, I had dad install Mint on a new computer he bought because I had to do it over the phone and he never, ever, upgrades his packages, and almost never installs anything. If all I’m going to do is install it once and then never change anything, Mint is easier. But for a normal use case where I’m regularly updating and installing software, Arch is far easier and more reliable.
I say it’s rather a „it mostly works” experience, but as a twist, if anything goes wrong, you can fix it very easily
Personally my arch install is almost boring me with how stable it’s been - and if anything goes wrong, it backs itself up before and after every single update plus on every boot just cuz, so I can roll back to wherever I want. I’ve put a lotta work into building out all these redundancies I’m happy with, and arch has been so goddamn stable I haven’t even had an excuse to use them. The process of getting a complete install was absolutely not “it works” - but now that I’m there, yeah, it really does just work. My only complaint is that I don’t have any reason to tinker with it more.
Yep. That’s why I stopped distro hopping years ago.
Once set-up it just works™.
My former colleague was an Arch user and barely a week passed without him having major issues. My guess would be “no”.
He probably haven’t read the wiki
You mean the one that helps you unfuck things… after the OS has started having issues again.
The one that tells you what you can do and how to fix things if you messed up. It’s a DIY distro.
Arch generally works (based on the 3 machines I’ve tried it on) unless you change something and if you messed something up you can always roll it back if you’re smart enough to have planned ahead and didn’t wipe your backup.
I made a major mistake that bricked my system, all my fault, but I was able to plunge my arm into the smoldering pit it fell into and drag my install directly from the gates of hell. Still working great like half a year later and I now know not to do what I did before that broke it all.
Arch is so great, bro! The AUR has everything!
With yay, it’s so easy, bro!
Update Arch
yay breaks
stays broken for daysAny other distro that had a broken package manager for 3 days, ever?
What’s wrong with wanting a community supported distro?
Not sure why the hate on arch.
The hate is towards the community members that spam “arch btw” and telling new users to install arch.
There’s no hate for anybody or anything, I just realised some distros have marketing, most have at least a pretty website, but for arch, you need to search for the download button when you want to install it, and the only thing that spreads archlinux is the word of mouth(or something similiar in the comment section), and this mostly involves spamming „arch btw”
Turns out having a value proposition beyond “we bundled a lot of software together that you can get on any distro” has allure.
I use NixOS, FWIW
