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.

Because it is less trouble.

I read comments here all the time. People say Linux does not work with the Wifi on their Macs. Works with mine I say. Wayland does not work and lacks this feature or this and this. What software versions are you using I wonder, it has been fixed for me for ages.

Or how about missing software. Am I downloading tarballs to compile myself? No. Am I finding some random PPA? No. Is that PPA conflicting with a PPA I installed last year? No. Am I fighting the sandboxing on Flatpak? No. M I install everything on my system through the package manager.

Am I trying to do development and discovering that I need newer libraries than my distro ships? No. Am I installing newer software and breaking my package manager? No.

Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.

When I read about new software with new features, am I trying it out on my system in a couple days. Yes.

After using Arch, everything else just seems so complicated, limited, and frankly unstable.

I have no idea why people think it is harder. To install maybe. If that is your issue, use EndeavourOS.

My main reason is, it’s not a dependengy hell. If I want to build software, I don’t have to go through 5 iterations of being told something is missing, figuring out what that is (most annoying part), installing that and retrying. On Arch-based distros, it’s 2 or less, if it even happens.

Also, AUR.

Other points include

• Small install (I use archinstall though, because more convenient.)
• rolling release.
• Arch wiki

My installs never broke either, so it doesn’t feel unstable to me.

I like it more than ther distros because

• Debian is a dependency hell, otherwise fine. Older packages. I still use raspian though.
• Fedora has too much defaults that differ from my preferences. I don’t want btrfs, I don’t want a seperate home partition, dnf is the only package manager that selects No by default. dnf is also the slowest package manager I’ve seen. Always needs several seconds between steps for seemingly no reason at all. Feels like you can watch it thinking “Okay, so I’ve downloaded all these packages, so they are on the disk. That means - let’s slow down here and get this right - that means, I should install what I downloaded, right. Okay that makes sense, so let’s do that. Here we go installing after downloading”. I also got into dependency hell when trying something once, which having to use dnf makes it even worse. - I guess you can tell I don’t like Fedora.
• Love the concept of NixOS, don’t like the lack of documentation

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.

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.

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 (albeit in a linux rather than, say, windows installation sense), and you can access preferences via the settings app.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

It works well for me.

Actually, I am a long-term Debian user (for 15 years) and use it in parallel with Arch, since about ten years, and I had less trouble with Arch: When upgrading from Debian 10 to 12, GNOME broke for me so that I could not log in any more. I spent a day or so to search for the cause - it is related to the user configuration but I could not figure out what it was and I had to time-box the effort, and switched to StumpWM (a tiling window manager, which I had been using before). I had no such problem with Arch, and on top of that I could just install GNOME’s PaperWM extension just to give it a try.

You could argue that my failure to upgrade was GNOME’s fault, not Debians, and in a way this is true. Especially, GNOME should not hide configuration in inscrutinable unreadable files, and of course it should parse for errors coming from backwards-compatible breaking changes.

But the thing is, for software making many small changes is very often much easier than a few big changes. For example because it is far easier to narrow down the source of a problem. So, it is likely that GNOME on Arch had the same problem between minor upgrades, and fixed it without much fuss.

But you also need to see that Arch is primarily a Desktop/end user system, while Debian is, for example, also a server system. Debian is designed for a far larger range of applications and purposes, and having many small breaking upgrades would likely not work well for these.

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.

It’s the IKEA effect. You tend to like something more if you built it yourself.