'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit's so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That's also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it's really good at that. There's always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn't care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.
After setup, though, it's not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug
Removing things others tell you not to do. Yes, that sounds familiar. Maybe I should try Arch sometime.
I've just finished my current version of my script to change ubuntu around to my liking. At 4:23 in the night/morning. I'm back on ubuntu because I can never seem to get the graphics working just right on other distro's. There's always that screen tearing happening whenever I play youtube videos in firefox. But in ubuntu it just works out of the box.
Fair. Though I will say (more for others who may see this in the future), that Arch's new installer is great and definitely reduces the load on new users. That said, it's never going to be explicitly designed for people who have no Linux experience.
Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.
Customizing all-in-one distros is a shitty uphill battle that isn't worth the trouble, so I get how Arch is worth the work there. But recommending a kit car when people are asking for a commuter just bugs me.
I think reality lies somewhere in the middle. Yes you have to read and yes you have to configure things but the docs are all on the wiki. There’s a point where this is easier than figuring out how to undo the defaults on, say, Ubuntu and do your own thing without official documentation on it.
I don’t find this the case at all. I barely change the wallpaper, I’m not spending time removing a bunch of stuff I don’t use it just sits there unused. I did my time with Arch and Gentoo (before Arch existed) for years, but I would rather someone else do the work and I will use it as long as it has sane defaults, for my actual work that doesn’t care.
And also, I have work to do... I don't like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.
All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.